JP Toto

Engineering Manager @ GitLab

Berwyn, Pennsylvania, United States

About

Engineering leader, mentor, and infrastructure aficionado. Passionate about continuous delivery, agile infrastructure, and platform engineering.

Experience

  • Engineering Manager, Infrustructure & Platforms, Runway at GitLab
    Jan 2025 - Present · 1 yr 6 mos

  • HashiCorp (6 yrs 5 mos)
    • Sr. Manager, Internal Platform & Services
      Nov 2022 - Dec 2024 · 2 yrs 2 mos

      Recruited the Infrastructure Platform team of six engineers to develop a unified platform for hosted secure services in the HashiCorp Cloud, reducing toil and heterogeneous infrastructure sprawl. Successfully deployed new HashiCorp Nomad clusters and an onboarding mechanism using HashiCorp Waypoint for hosted internal services and applications. Resulted in dramatically faster deployments and hosting for teams who build internal tooling, sites, and services. Designed and implemented best practices for operational and on-call aspects of the team including hosting Artifactory, GitHub Actions private services, and release engineering components. Managed the design and expansion of the team’s Artifactory surface area to match the internal SLA for production HashiCorp services. Partnered with the HashiCorp security team to develop, implement, and host internal machine and service authentication mechanisms using OIDC and term-limited credentials to guarantee validated connections to HashiCorp resources, reducing the risk surface area for unauthorized resource usage. Managed vendor relationships and contract negotiations, department budgeting, and purchase ordering. Lead a cost reduction effort to lower AWS and vendor expenses by taking advantage of spot instances and vendor service overlap.

    • Platform & Systems Engineering Manager
      Jul 2020 - Nov 2022 · 2 yrs 5 mos

      Recruited the Engineering Systems team to who then designed and deployed the internal release platform with hosted CI and artifact services to reduce software package time to release from several days to just minutes. Created and managed roadmaps for deploying production Nomad clusters to host services for internal and external customers, increasing availability by leveraging HashiCorp products.

    • Sr. Infrastructure Engineer
      Aug 2018 - Jul 2020 · 2 yrs

      Designed and deployed a secure AWS hosted instance of CircleCI to the entire Engineering organization using Packer and Terraform. Deployed and maintained an internal Artifactory implementation using Terraform, Packer, and Docker to host engineering repositories for Docker caching, RPM, APT, Node, Python, and Git. Partnered with the Identity & Security team to design and deploy a custom-developed portal for secure access to cloud services. Portal is written in Python, authenticates to Okta, and provides temporary role-based access to AWS and Azure consoles.

  • Sr. DevOps Systems Engineer at Wawa, Inc.
    Jun 2017 - Aug 2018 · 1 yr 3 mos

    Designed and developed automated Linux machine image builds using Packer, Ansible, and Chef to reduce virtual machine deployment time from several days to 15 minutes. Initiated a blue/green model for production service deployments using Terraform, Ansible, and AWS auto-scaling groups to reduce change management risk and enable safe and frequent deployments. Mentored junior team members with modern DevOps security practices and techniques.

  • Infrastructure Developer at eMoney Advisor
    Nov 2015 - May 2017 · 1 yr 7 mos

    Launched an “infrastructure as code” build process to deploy Windows-based application environments to cloud and local VMWare platforms using Ansible, Packer, Terraform, and PowerShell, reducing new environment creation from 1 week to approximately 2 hours. Developed an automated code-based build process for Windows hosts, guaranteeing properly-configured machine images for all environments.

  • Software Developer at Wildbit
    Jan 2012 - Oct 2015 · 3 yrs 10 mos

    Increased the capabilities of the Postmark product API through the addition of new endpoints and features using C#, Python, PowerShell, and Ruby. Migrated the primary data store from CouchDB to Elasticsearch with a new Chef-automated and redundant Elasticsearch cluster. Provided on-call and ticketed support for external customers. Designed a logging and alerting system based on Elasticsearch giving engineers a real-time view into error rates, email sending frequency, and performance trends. This system helped target our deployments and service expansions where they were needed most and reduced cost on “over deployed” services.