Executive responsible for DO’s global Datacenter Footprint (12 Datacenters) and Infrastructure Engineering / Operational teams comprising DCOps, HW Systems Engineering, Tools & Platforms Engineering, Technical Program Management, CloudOps (Tier1), Shared Data Services Backend, and Corporate IT. Reported to the CTO/CEO/COO.* Executive sponsor of DigitalOcean’s first mentor program, a cross-company initiative pairing mentors and mentees from different disciplines which lead to increased cross-functional collaboration and team mobility.* Oversaw planning and successful execution of the infrastructure CapEx and COGS budget process in excess of $120M annually. Regularly met with vendors and component makers to ensure best pricing.*Lead design/development of multiple generations of purpose-built compute SKUs aimed at maximizing Price:Performance, and increased margins on plan types by up to 20% ($30M).* Introduced a mature production incident management/problem management process and program. * Lead the formalization of key SLM/SLO metrics and reviews aimed at lowering Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Achieved average NPS scores of 65 or better over 3 years.* Oversaw engineering teams responsible for redevelopment of critical infrastructure systems including: development of a customized CMDB, hardware provisioning, shared platform data systems (MySQL, Kafka, Elastic Search), as well as core observability and staging platforms.Responsible for the introduction of the Site Reliability Engineering program, supporting the development of runbooks, best practices for development, deployment and escalations.

Managed global Infrastructure (6 datacenters, 60+ offices) and Production Operations teams comprising Security, Database Engineering, Systems Engineering, Network Engineering, Service Operations Center (Tier1), Technical Duty Officers, Email Operations, and Capacity Management. Oversaw Global Corporate IT operations including IT Systems Engineering, Networking, and Helpdesk/Support Services. Reported to SVP of Engineering/CTO.* Oversaw redesign/consolidation of Groupon’s global datacenter footprint. Opened new 1.5MW datacenters (Sacramento, Dublin) utilizing the latest methods linear programming, server density, and Juniper QFX in L3 pod topology. Doubled Groupon’s server footprint utilizing ½ the space previously required.* Implemented Sev scale and SLAs for production problem management, further tied to JIRA ticket queues for incident point of record and Sev action item follow-up.* Partnered with Development and infrastructure special teams on scoping, build-out, and implementation of Mesosphere DCOS, in an effort to move applications and build process to containerization.* Worked in close coordination with Engineering teams on Groupon Geo-Redundancy plan to be able to drive user traffic at several datacenters in active-active mode.Participated heavily as an operational sponsor in global effort to consolidate to a single platform design / architecture (Unity).* Launched and shepherded the Operational Readiness Review program, reviewing all 350+ services which comprise Groupon’s platform. Forced standard use of metrics, rollback procedures, and runbooks resulting in improved uptime and MTTR.

Hired as first operational team member at Flipboard, the all cloud backed mobile news/magazine application. Managed infrastructure and Ops team through hyper growth of user acquisition and several successful backend and Mobile app generational leaps.* Lead efforts on AWS cost optimizations around reserved and on-demand capacity. Managed scale up to 80M active monthly users.* Scoped, vetted contractor resources, and managed implementation of Puppet as standard for low-level operations automation.* Redeveloped metrics and monitoring infrastructure to scale, utilizing Icinga, Graphite, Logwatch and Cloudwatch.* Instantiated SRE/Dev-Ops team tasked with developing higher-level operational dashboards, and definition of SLA and uptime criteria.

Assumed VP of TechOps role, managing the team (Systems, Network, Database, Analytics) responsible for maintaining all Glam and Ning-owned platform properties including Ning.com, Mogwee.com, Glam.com, Foodie.com, and Tend.com.- Introduced a formal incident management process to Glam TechOps and Engineering. Organized operations, engineering, advocacy, and incident manager on-call role requirements. - Implemented use of JIRA ticketing for issue tracking and escalations, and ran weekly team handoff reviews.- Worked with operations architects hands-on to integrate Glam advertising systems into existing Ning colocation facilities. This included the physical and logical tuning of systems for a new environment, allowing for Ning’s quick scaling and disaster recovery methodology. Results saved the company $250K in Opex expense per month.- Lead TechOps team in coordination with infrastructure development on 400TB content/blob store redesign project breaking dependence on NetApp Filers and moving to a series of standalone Solaris/ZFS based systems, which reduced yearly storage support costs by $400K.- Began redevelopment of Glam’s critical monitoring systems to bring Ning and Glam systems closer to “Single Pane of Glass” using Nagios, Zenoss, Splunk, Pingdom, and Pager-Duty.

Assumed responsibility for all Operations teams(18 ppl) including IT, Network Engineering, Architecture, Database Administration, Systems Administration, and Systems Engineering(tools).- Responsible for Quarterly/Annual Operations Capex planning and modeling, working closely with vendors and internal finance/analyst teams.- Lead the team through company product and infrastructure re-focus in support of all-pay model. - Collaborate tightly with all engineering managers on short-mid-long term joint project planning and execution tasks. Allowed Ning to seamlessly switch out large portions of platform infrastructure while maintaining near perfect uptime in 2011.- Oversaw and participated in systems automation framework design and implementation effort involving use of OpsCode Chef- Drove multiple systems technology revamps including; Migration of application service platform from Solaris 10 with containers to Ubuntu with LXC, Migration from SAN DB storageto local SSD, Conversion from Oracle 10/11g to MySQL Master + Slave, further isolation of most faults to a single cluster, and build out of disaster recovery infrastructure outside California.- Worked closely with engineering teams to create a continual deployment method, divesting of deployment responsibilities to the engineering teams creating the code. Allowed Operations to focus on infrastructure scaling and automation tasks.- Managed focused architecture teams tackling problems such as DoS mitigation strategy, Public DNS infrastructure revamp, Multi-datacenter storage replication, Data backup and restoration SLAs

Directed team of 5 production systems administrators tasked with day-to-day operations of Ning’s production and QA platforms including: machine provisioning, break/fix, systems scaling, application deployment, and monitoring/remediation of 3000+ logical systems.- Lead Ning’s front-line incident management team; Operations On Call (OOC). Responsible for Tier1 direct paging support as well as all code deployments into production.-Reduced off-hours paging noise, and distilled down alerts issues that need immediate attention. Tracked metrics for regular review with team and exec staff.- Managed the timely scale build out of new application clusters approximately every 6-8Weeks- Participated in oncall incident team as Incident Manager Oncall (IMOC), and occasionally as Operations on Call (OOC).- Coordinated heavily with engineering peers on the phased removal of Oracle’s problematic database caching product Coherence in favor of Memcache. Resulting in a far more stable production platform and thus far less Sev1 / Sev2 incidents.

Worked with a team to design, deploy and manage high volume targeted advertising web services in both the US and UK. Responsible for day-to-day operations of the production environments including system security, monitoring/response, and source code deployment and patch management.• Deployed ad system based on CentOS/RHEL 4+5, Jboss, Tomcat, Xen virtualization, Fedora LDAP Directory Server, MySQL and Oracle.• Managed network topology consisting of Cisco routers and switches, Juniper firewalls and Foundry load balancers.• Setup, maintained EMC CX SAN + PowerPath, Solaris ZFS NAS, and Oracle 10g RAC infrastructure supporting the primary data warehouse systems.• Designed and managed bare metal server configuration/installation management system using Cobbler. Automated Java server deployment and host OS configurations with Puppet, Perl and Bash shell.• Utilized Munin, Cacti, OpenNMS and Hyperic HQ, JMX and SNMP counters as the bases of the NOC monitoring/alerting system.

Directed a team responsible for deployment and management of Internet video on demand Pay-per-view systems serving over 50 channels of international TV and professional sporting events.• Responsible for overseeing day-to-day operations, budgeting, and strategy for 4 colocated media service farms and corporate IT in the US, UK, and China.• Oversaw P2P video content streaming platform hardware budgeting, capacity planning, and implementation. • Worked closely with Shanghai China based team providing both network and hardware support to popular sites such Chinese.aol.com, chinaportal.com, and Dusee.cn.• Oversaw design & deployment of enterprise log mining/aggregation tools comprising MySQL/MSSQL, syslog-ng, and Splunk. Implementation allowed NetOps to quickly diagnose problems as well as gather detailed statistics for later use by the business.

Oversaw network operations / IT / DBA team charged with managing production, staging, qa, and corporate network/system environments for one of the leaders in digital magazines. Responsible for IT budgeting and day-to-day communications with Zinio executives and departmental leads. • Deployed and managed NOC monitoring and alerting systems using Nagios, Cacti, and OpenNMS. Resulted in drastically reduced false alerts. • Responsible for database administration and analytics teams and systems. Built out data warehouse infrastructure utilizing Cognos, Databeacon, and SAP business one.• Created and enforced operational policies on code deployment standards, data retention and disaster recovery, network, and system security.

• Worked extensively with Development, QA, Production artists to insure proper deployment of Java web application code and magazine content. Managed internal tools systems SVN/CVS, Bugzilla, and Wiki, and content backup/archival.• Managed and deployed LAN/WAN infrastructure including multi-tier Netscreen firewalls and F5 Load-balancers, as well as core Cisco 7204 series routers and Catalyst 3560/4500/5500 MPLS switches. • Designed and deployed high volume SMTP mailer cluster (Fedora Linux, Qmail, MySQL, F5 BigIP ) for magazine delivery and marketing campaigns.• Worked extensively with EMC Clariion SAN solutions, Brocade fiber switches, Veritas volume and cluster management in support of the Microsoft SQL server and data warehousing systems.

• Responsible for all internal & external web services - Jobs portal, Corp Websites comprised of both Java web services, Microsoft IIS, and MSSQL 2000• Support of Finance/Accounting: insure integrity of financial data to/from banking institutions, Peoplesoft ERP support, provide tools to improve process flow, manage credit card authentication / and invoicing systems.• Implemented and maintained key IT systems; document management, national sales accounts portal, public facing career website application upgrades, high availability content clustering with Redhat virtual servers and EMC Clariion SANs, network systems/security monitoring and dispatch using Nagios.• Successfully replaced antiquated proprietary web serving, database engines, and source code repositories with more modern open source offerings (Apache, Tomcat, Postgresql, CVS). Resulted on dramatically lower support costs and higher service availability.

Technical project manager overseeing front-end development of Collabnet’s Tigris developer platform for clients such as Sun, HP, Palm, and Oracle. • Managed third-party provider to develop initial corporate website roll-out, resulting in one of the key factors in successfully attracting second round venture capital financing.• Worked extensively with the marketing team to build out the initial phase of the Collab.net corporate brand and website. • Collaborated with engineers to develop HTML / Java Servlet template scheme utilizing Apache + mod_jk, WebMacro, and Tomcat, successfully employed as a standard throughout client demonstration sites.