Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Automation Engineer and Architect with a passion for automation, test driven development, and continuous deployment. Also, awesome at convincing coworkers to bring baked goods to the office. Things I can do: • Implement a continuous deployment pipeline, moving your ideas to production after every commit • Unit test those things you don't think you can really unit test • Apply design and development patterns effectively (and dodge those nasty anti-patterns) • Build an internal development platform so that your product engineers don't even need to know how to pronounce kubernetes. • Devops devops devops. If you say it out loud enough times, it starts to sound like the name of a Transformer. • Lead a meeting; lead a team; lead a group to happy hour • Mentoring individuals, infecting them with my subversive ideas like "test first" and "version everything" • Quickly understand and leverage new technologies • Implement agile processes, in a way that only someone with a scrum master certification and 10+ years of saying "I'm not sure this is fits into our daily status agenda; let's have this conversation after the scrum meeting" can. • Excellent written communication skills (despite questionably excessive use of semicolons) • Administer and troubleshoot multiple version control solutions (git, CodeCommit, Mercurial, Subversion, that shared folder on your network I'm going to migrate day one, etc) • Administer and troubleshoot continuous integration systems (Jenkins, CodePipeline, Concourse, watch + bash script, etc.) • Automate a build with a wide variety of tools (Rake, Gradle, bash, two large rocks and a water wheel, etc.) Specialties: • Continuous Deployment/Delivery/Integration/Improvement/80s Movies References • Test Driven Everything • Cloud Architecture • CLI Development • Remembering holidays that are celebrated by bringing treats to the office
• Developed and productionized GenAI tools for assisting frontline support staff’s information retrieval, with a focus on figuring out how to test a non-deterministic product, as well as developing a platform to accelerate future agentic tools. • Migrated several hundred legacy servers hosted in VMWare to EC2, building bespoke migration tooling on top of AWS services, as well as automation for network rule detection. • Implemented container signing and validation in application deployment pipelines. • Inventorying all cryptographic certifications in use, and alerting on vulnerable certificates. • Modernized CICD pipeline implementations, including static and dynamic scans. • Automated secret rotation across an entire portfolio of applications. • Mentored individuals throughout the organization at various levels of their career. • Addressed critical gaps in Slack custom emoji selection.
• Implemented repeatable and reliable Terraform processes, resulting in a dramatic reduction of engineering time spent investigating unexpected infrastructure changes. • Facilitated incident postmortem processes, then documented and shared results, increasing both customer trust and resilience of our products. • Lead the initiative to upgrade our aging Kubernetes clusters: figured out what the upgrade process would be, improved automation and documentation around the process, and then instructed the rest of the team on how to update our two dozen Kubernetes clusters without incident.
• Developed Python CLI tooling to automate common-yet-annoying parts of product engineers’ workflows. • Built and maintained Kubernetes clusters in a downtime-less fashion. • Mentored engineers at various points in their careers, in both technical and communication strategies & techniques. • Resolved dozens of after hours issues, and refined the incident response and review process so that we no longer had dozens of after hours issues. • Helped non-technical teams with their automation needs, including the customer support and human resources teams. • Introduced the concept of “meeting playlists.”
Lead the team in charge of provisioning enterprise-compliant AWS accounts for use by development teams. I rehabilitated the internal processes for creating accounts, bringing the process down from eight weeks to four days (which made managers happy) and reduced manual steps and need for rework to almost zero (which made the engineers happy). Part of this work was designing and developing a Golang CLI to provide a single interface to the multiple independent systems involved in account creation, reducing the time spent on each task, but also greatly reducing the chance for human error. There also was some development of Terraform modules along the way, for handling various infrastructure needs: from provisioning raw AWS resources to configuring specific applications using Terraform Providers. Focused on creating a culture of automation and testing on the team, introducing concepts like code coverage, infrastructure testing, and build scripts, as well as developing infrastructure solutions to solve issues that made testing more difficult. I also introduced and facilitated a "Seniors Forum" across my larger organization, providing opportunities for the various tech leads to have a sounding board for the work they were doing, as well as align on approaches and standards across the larger team. In addition, this meeting allowed the senior engineers to identify issues impacting multiple teams and escalate them to management. And probably most importantly, translated UK slang for the US folks, and US slang for the UK folks.
Building continuous delivery pipelines in Amazon Web Services for commercial and government clients. Building scalable and reliable solutions, usually with CloudFormation (whether they liked it or not), and leveraging various other AWS technologies because they're awesome (and because I like situations where people have to say "SQS queue" out loud.) Developed a deep skill set in all AWS technologies, and am one of few people around that has enough free time to bother getting more than two of the AWS Certifications. Contributed to several Stelligent open-source initiatives, wrote a bunch of blog posts about how to make using AWS easier and less likely to shoot yourself in the foot, and presented at various meetups around the United States about how to configure your AWS account and how it gets less embarrassing to commit your AWS API keys to github after the sixth time. Also filled the role of "blog coordinator", organizing all the developers to post technical content and constantly berate them for not using enough semicolons.