Jon Ward Email & Phone Number

Reno, Nv, Us

Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Us

Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Us

Incline Village, Nevada, Us

Wichita, Kansas, Us

Designed, prototyped and implemented Kafka and KSQL streams replacing event and batch oriented architecture with real time data ingestion and processing. As a result the data science and advanced analytics teams reduced the amount of custom code by 80% while improving data quality and reliability. Additionally the work had the potential to deprecate another 50-80% of the total microservices across all engineering teams, reducing runtime costs and maintenance time.Designed, built and implemented a Kubernetes admission control operator to improve the use of best practices for complex Kubernetes deployments. This not only reduced the knowledge required by an engineer to create a Kubernetes deployment by 95% but also improved the overall system reliability and security by eliminating mistakes.Designed an internal platform as a service tool chain which smoothed out the software delivery lifecycle for the engineering teams. This included: scaffolding new projects, automated testing, automated deployment and continuous monitoring and metrics.Implemented objectives and key results for delivery teams, helping them focus on the value they are creating. This allowed teams to work better together, improving overall delivery time and quality.

Wichita, Kansas, Us

Designed, built and implemented centralized AWS account management lifecycle tools, allowing us to scale production ready AWS accounts in a few minutes. This included GitOps, networking, roles, kubernetes clusters, delegated DNS, and automatic CI/CD pipeline integration.Designed, built and implemented centralized API authorization services enabling engineers to focus on building business features while benefiting from best practices for role based access control in their APIs. Designed, built and implemented code agnostic scaffolding tools, allowing an engineer to stand up an immediately deployable microservice using best practices for continuous testing, continuous deployment (CI/CD) and monitoring. Engineers previously took 1-2 days to achieve the results they now have in a few seconds.Introduced our engineering teams to the benefits of distributed tracing (telemetry), replacing log based troubleshooting. This moved the primary defect identification from production to development environments and decreased the feedback loop for finding and resolving issues by ~90%

Wichita, Kansas, Us

Architectural lead for a highly regulated software as a service IoT platform. The project included infrastructure as code deployed using a CI/CD pipeline.Co-led a project to experiment running event driven containers on Kubernetes both in GCP and AWS for the purpose of driving adoption within the Koch Businesses.Deployed and presented an IOT mobile drone experiment to replicate a human's five senses with the goal of creating a safer factory floor for our employees. Work included soldering and configuring various sensors via raspberry pi ic2, including: temperature (ambient and directional), flammable gas and Co2. The drone included machine learning image recognition (AWS Rekognition), object avoidance algorithms, voice activation via Alexa, AWS IoT pub/sub and real time graphing of sensor data. As a result a project was created to automate cooling towers using similar technologies. Proposed and implemented a containerized and automated deployment of GitLab for the purpose of creating a global open source style code sharing and re-use platform for all of Koch’s businesses. The solution is self healing and maintenance free and has been used as a reference architecture by GitLab for other businesses wishing to deploy their product.

Wichita, Kansas, Us

Designed and deployed several micro service API's for seamlessly managing automation and desired state across over 100 AWS accounts. Projects include CI/CD pipelines with over 95% code coverage, API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB. During the project I designed an in memory caching solution that takes advantage of a lambda functions reuse, increasing performance and reducing runtime (cost).To ensure continued support for a consistently increasing number of EC2 instances while keeping costs low I was able to design and deploy a fully serverless implementation of Chef. The solution leverages AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and S3. As a result the solution can scale to an infinite number of nodes and the cost per node was reduced from ~$10/node/month to $0.06/node/month.Designed and deployed a containerized Nodejs express application leveraging SAML authentication and self service API key generation. Using MongoDB, Nodejs, Express, Docker, AWS ELB, EC2, Certificate Manager, Route 53, I was able to ensure that the application auto scales to meet demand and is self-healing. The solution was subsequently put into daily use, running with 100% uptime and requiring no additional maintenance.

London, Gb

Was promoted to Team Lead, becoming responsible for architectural and design decisions in multiple data centers worldwide, while simultaneously providing training and guidance to other team members.Saved $1.94M in database licensing costs while dramatically increasing application performance by designing a consolidated virtual environment.Redesigned IGT’s SAP application stack to provide guaranteed resources, increased resiliency and simplified management. This resulted in significantly less physical hardware to maintain and a reduced total cost of ownership.Completed a 0 downtime migration from vCenter 5.0 to vCenter 5.5 in San Francisco, CA (US), Las Vegas, NV (US), Reno, NV (US), Amsterdam (NL), Johannesburg (ZA).Designed an improved business continuity plan based on Vmware Site Recovery Manager that successfully reduced our annual infrastructure recovery time from 72 hours to less than 2 hours.Assisted with a $1.8 million NetApp storage upgrade to increase overall performance, reliability and consolidate on a unified storage platform. Deployed an internal virtual cloud development environment based on Vmware vCloud Director, providing developers with a self-service server deployment model. Researched, designed and implemented a zero cost desktop operating system deployment solution that replaced older tools, reduced imaging time by 50 minutes and eliminated licensing related costs in this space by 100%. This tool is now in use globally by IGT. (C#, HTML5, Bootstrap, jQuery, CSS3, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2013)Engineered a server inventory tool that is frequently used to make business decisions, report on available hardware, trend growth, aid in daily troubleshooting tasks and rapidly locate servers for maintenance. This application was written to allow API access to other applications if requested. (C#, HTML5, Bootstrap, jQuery, CSS3, SQL Server, Visual Studio 2013)

London, Gb

Reduced the number of physical servers in IGT’s Reno data center by 25%, creating standards for virtualization that are now in use by IGT’s data centers globally. As a result IGT now has over 75% of its servers virtualized.Led a project to redesign Active Directory, designing and building IGT’s current standards. The successful completion resulted in greatly reduced complexity, increased performance and added security, all while maintaining usability. Took on several new challenges from departed employees, becoming the subject matter expert for those technologies and actively improving upon, standardizing and training other team members (Virtualization, Active Directory, and Cisco UCS).Successfully bridged the gap between silos in IGT’s IT organizations, allowing for the first time a unified direction and standards surrounding virtualization, server hardware and storage as well as cross departmental cooperation.Led a project team to successfully integrate a company acquired by IGT while also performing the work required as a project resource.Established myself as the primary point of contact for evaluating and designing new server solutions for global IT, while also taking responsibility for justifying the proposed solutions to the business.Provided infrastructure level support for 5000+ users, working in 100+ offices, in 16 countries.Increased IGTs agility by standardizing and automating the new server build process for corporate IT. Reduced time to delivery by 20 hours per build. Deployments typically take less than 1 hour. (Classic ASP.Net, CSS, HTML, JavaScript).

London, Gb

Designed a standard for engineer and artist desktops reducing the cost per desktop by approximately $450 while simultaneously increasing productivity by 23% and reducing hardware related service calls. This resulted in an annual soft savings of $19 million in productivity and a hard savings of $525,000 over 3 years.Facilitated changing the standard compression utility for IGT from WinZip to 7-zip, reducing licensing fees in this space by 100%. Participated in the creation of a global computer naming standard which resulted in several points of automation, increasing employee efficiency.Created intelligent, unattended installation scripts for a large number of software packages. These scripts are now used to efficiently deploy software throughout IGT.Participated in several software audits by providing reporting data through automation to IGT’s software and assets team.Designed and built multiple tools to increase team productivity and reduce total time to resolution for internal employees and external customers, including automated fixes for commonly reported issues and diagnostic utilities still in use by IGT today. (AutoIT, Visual Basic Script, BATCH)

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

Performed onsite business technology analysis and recommended solutions based on business requirements.Successfully deployed supportable and scalable server solutions for over 200 businesses in an emerging market for Best Buy Co, Inc.Demonstrated in-depth knowledge and troubleshooting skills surrounding business continuity, Exchange, Active Directory, DHCP, external and internal DNS, Windows SharePoint Services, VPN, Internet Information Services and firewall solutions.Evaluated unfamiliar situations and developed well suited and sustainable technical solutions based upon a broad working knowledge of available products and technology.Provided outstanding customer service and sales resulting in numerous accolades, recurring business and customer recommendations.

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

In-home computer system and home business technology repair, focused on building customer relationships and providing quality service.Clearly and effectively explained complex technology to non-technical customers through the use of analogies, diagrams and real world examples.Troubleshooting and repair of any and all home electronic devices presented to me.

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

Ground-up audio/video, networking and electrical infrastructure installation for new and remodeled Best Buy store locations.Installation and testing of new electronic concepts, prototypes and designs in test markets around the county.RG59/6, CAT 5/6 runs, termination channel modulation, satellite tuning, home theater pc integration.

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

Redesigned the layout of the store repair bench to increase employee awareness to waiting customers, increased the number of available work spaces and maximized efficiency. Provided excellent customer service while troubleshooting, repairing and upgrading customer computers.

Richfield, Minnesota, Us

Participated in the opening of the Federal Way Best Buy store.Led the team in sales and service, while proving technically competent and achieving a promotion to the In-Store Technician position.Demonstrated a passion for technology and shared that excitement with customers and employees.