Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Mar 2018 - Present

Working on infrastructure mgmt software, cost savings, service hardening, vulnerability resolutions and more as a member of the SRE team at McGraw Hill Education in support of the massive AWS cloud footprint for their online learning and teaching suite of sites. Specifically focused on maintaining and enhancing our kubernetes infrastructure as well as 2000+ AWS nodes controlled by Puppet.

Accomplishments in this role:

• Implemented Autoscaling : Saved $170k/year in AWS Costs at initial inception.  
  
• New Relic reporting adjustments : Saved $40k/year in New Relice licensing fees
  
• ZDT upgrades:  Updated infra. code to ensure all infrastructure upgrades were ZDT
  
• Service Hardening:  Worked with service developers throughout the org to make their apps more resilient, highly available, self healing, and stable.
  
• CI/CD:  Developed CI/CD pipeline in jenkins for Docker images
  

Principal DevOps/Automation Engineer for the SDN/VNF Innovation group

Aug 2016 - Jan 2018

Lead the DevOps efforts (Openstack/VMWare ESXi), infrastructure deployment, upgrade, maintenance, cloud architecture, network architecture, and storage architecture (iSCSI SAN with HP MSA) for the Verizon Enterprise Solutions Innovation Lab in Lowell, Massachusetts.  Built this lab from scratch. 70+ servers, 15+ switches, routers, gateways, HP MSA Storage, Terminal Consoles, Terminal servers, VPN endpoints, White box hardware, Jump Hosts, and more.  Automated Openstack installations with Ansible, Moved the lab from Boston to Lowell, and worked on an equipment reservation system and GUI based openstack deployment initiator.

QA Manager on a Public/Private Compute Cloud Platform - IaaS/PaaS

Nov 2013 - Aug 2016

Manager of all manual testing and automated test executions for the Verizon Enterprise Compute Cloud.  Peer managed the test automation team.  Team consisted of 11 direct reports, and 20 non-direct in 2 countries.  Created the QA process, Test Plan Management system, Hardware Resource allocation system, and Knowledge repository. Agile shop. Managed some dev projects too.  Was responsible for designing and writing tooling code for seamless upgrade of the cloud.  Supported GE healthcare and GE lighting on the platform including direct correspondence with their senior executives.  Became familiar with how a cloud IaaS/PaaS solution is designed from the inside out.  We designed and implemented a proprietary cloud, and my team took care of testing that everything worked, was scalable, performed well, and there were no issues with the UI/UX.

Principal Test Engineering Lead for IoT smart grid device  (VC funded startup)

Aug 2011 - Nov 2013

QA lead of the testing of an embedded linux smart grid node for use along the electrical grid networks to monitor sensors, collect data, and roll it up to the NMS.  Essentially this node was an IoT device that was placed on telephone poles to monitor the electrical grid and electric usage of customers.  I Was in charge of all testing of this device, it's retrieval of data from sensors and communication of that data between a mesh of cellular nodes and back to the central NMS.  Lead a 5+ person QA team (including automation).  Responsible for all test procedure/plan writing, product requirements reviews, technology selections, cost analysis and more. Technologies involved were Cellular, Wi-fi & RF communications, IPsec, SSH/SSL/TLS, Embedded Linux, Embedded system design, Sensor devices, SNMP MIBs and more.  Automation was done in TCL/Expect.

Senior Test Engineer

Nov 2009 - Sept 2011

Short term contract as a Lead Test Engineer for the ARX product line of F5 Networks which is now EOL.  The ARX product managed storage infrastructures behind the scenes so that changes to the storage design in a data center did not disrupt or change use cases of the users.  Technologies included Active Directory, Virtual Appliance Licensing, and validating the implementation of a SOAP API.  Was responsible for writing test plans, and then automating them in full in Perl.  

Test Engineering Architect & Technical Lead

Oct 2003 - Nov 2009

Lead all software and firmware testing efforts on a blade enclosure system and all blades offered.  AdvancedTCA was the largest spec effort in the history of the PICMG.  Blade types included switch, router, storage, and compute (x86, x86_64, PrPMC, PPC, Arm).  Wrote all test procedures for all parts of the system.  Interop as well at UNH.  Built a local and remote team with the QA Director from scratch.  Lead local and remote teams.  Designed a test case/plan management infrastructure using Rational Clearquest and implemented it across the organization.  Responsible for reviewing all technical specifications and requirements documentation.  Even wrote a few myself.  Was occasionally deployed out to customer sites to debug issues as necessary as a Field Application engineer.

3com, Fujitsu Nexion, DEC, Netplane Systems (startup later acquired by Motorola), Invensys, Motorola  

1998 - 2003

"Hey There" dating app / social network

Founder, Backend Developer, DevOps, BizDev, Advertising, Marketing, Financials, Legal

Part time side project that was started to enable me to have real world experience in building a SaaS solution from scratch.  This has given me direct experience in Docker Containers, Kubernetes, Python, Pyramid, Postman, Newman, CI/CD pipelining, AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, ELB, Route53), SaaS development, RESTful API development, Xcode iOS, Android Java, Wordpress, PHP, HTML, CSS and more. Also acting lead on business operations, new business development, partnerships, investor relations, marketing, advertising, legal and financial/tax matters. It has been a crash course in entrepreneurialism that has helped me understand more about the business side of running a technology company.

for more information please visit: http://heythere.us