Architect of platforms and teams that have proven key to the success of Symplicity, delivering a competitive advantage through streamlined deployment of global cloud infrastructure. Instrumental in sustaining industry-leading growth and profitability, while relentlessly supporting our mission of empowering higher education institutions and enabling the best possible outcomes for students.

Developed Systems Engineering organization, consistently delivering on our team mission (improving availability, durability, scalability, and security) supporting global expansion strategy (new HQ locations in Canada, Europe, Australia, and Brazil).Delivered production cloud infrastructure to serve new international markets, utilizing Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, expanding our capabilities beyond AWS.Modernized observability platforms for our distributed systems topologies, from Zabbix to TICK/Prometheus for production infra, and deployed MDM resource management systems to secure our corporate device footprint.Implemented corporate security initiatives such as interactive phishing training, and Okta Identity Engine rollout across the company to centralize logins with SSO and enforce MFA, in collaboration with our new Information Security Officer (ISO).

Promoted to engineering manager, leading personnel at US HQ, and building out dedicated corporate IT team while transforming Symplicity into a fully cloud-based SaaS provider.Full responsibility for the planning, deployment, and operations of production data centers in US and Canada. Managed relationships with hardware vendors, keeping cost structure intact while delivering production infra that exceeded SLAs. Deployed and managed highly available compute and networking clusters, enterprise routing/switching (Cisco, Force10, Dell), SAN and NAS storage (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, GPFS, EMC, EqualLogic, NetApp, NFS), with containerized production environments based on LXC and Docker.Performed as central cybersecurity point of contact, streamlined processes for security certification programs (SSAE-SOC, ISO, and US government accreditation), and directed datacenter certification visits for high-profile federal government clients.Directed and executed the full migration of all ~2,200 client systems (which serve millions of daily active users in higher education, federal government, and private sectors) from on-prem data centers to AWS cloud infrastructure in 2017. Automated, optimized, and monitored to minimize end-user impact with no negative effect on client retention rates. Completed this multi-disciplinary effort, transforming Symplicity into a 100% cloud-backed SaaS provider and lowering recurring costs by a large margin. Held engineering meetup for the DC area tech community, presenting on our novel approach to cloud migrations, and promoting Symplicity’s thought leadership in the region.Guided development of productized SSO solution with Ruby and Shibboleth, improving our customer offerings.Deployed open-source VOIP solution using Freeswitch and PostgreSQL, with custom IVR menus and support queues. My team developed an internal-facing web-based phone queues dashboard using WebSockets, saving on large enterprise phone system costs.

Worked under CTO and closely with software engineering teams to support accelerating product development, while supporting the rest of the org for all corporate IT needs, developing internal tools and integrations still in use today that automate daily processes for engineering, sales, and support, increasing productivity and ultimately replacing 100+ human hours per week.Vertically and horizontally scaled our physical infra in US and Canada datacenters to keep up with exponential sales growth, racking servers, switches, routers, SANs, and performed continuous on-site upgrades.Developed backend integration tooling against internal APIs to automate all SysAdmin/Ops steps of new customer instance provisioning, removing us from the critical path and allowing our Sales/Support staff to create and modify customer instances.Wrote a cli-based tool in Perl, providing a self-service production debugging platform for development and support teams, allowing developers to quickly clone a customer instance, with no SysAdmin/Ops needed, with all customizations, into a fully isolated environment to quickly debug production bugs, test customer integrations, and fulfill other urgent production debugging needs (still in use in production today).Developed solution for production scaling issue with scheduled and async tasks (system imports, email notifications, long-running reports). Forked php-resque (chrisboulton/php-resque) to move from static crons and hardcoded app runners to a horizontally scalable cluster with queuing handled by Redis. Contributed PHP code in our fork to add global per-queue concurrency limits, giving us the ability to put the power back in the hands of dev tech leads (still in use in production today). (https://github.com/Symplicity/php-resque/commits/master/?author=wcombs)

Public school teacher at James Rumsey Technical Institute, guiding high school students from 3 counties in preparing for the Cisco CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) industry certification, with many students starting professional IT careers directly after graduation. Taught evening Cisco CCNA classes for adults.Took on leadership roles, directing the school IT department (200+ users), administering the Cisco networking academy program and the MSDN software licensing program, served on school leadership team, and elected as chairman of the IT committee.Spoke at area schools to educate prospective students about tech career paths and grew the enrollment of my program 200%+ in my first 2 years.My program voted “#1 Best Computer Training Program” by The Martinsburg Journal newspaper in the 2006 Reader’s Choice Awards.Coached students in the annual state SkillsUSA competition for Internetworking, placing as high as top 3.Obtained CCNA and CCAI (Cisco Certified Academy Instructor) (2005 – 2011)