Recent Work Experience
H-E-B
As Head of Cloud Engineering, I was responsible for steering the AWS/GCP/Azure teams’ trajectories towards a future where development teams could build for the cloud platform their work necessitated, and have the tooling we provide either enhance their experience, or not negatively impact it.
We were building towards a model of two cloud providers, and a physical datacenter as deployment targets. The goal was to provide dev teams with their choice of a box-of-legos ‘diy’ set of components, and a fully managed platform composed of those lego pieces. Engineering teams retained the flexibility of selecting their own components and tooling if necessary, or could leverage the managed tooling to expedite their delivery cadence.
Additional responsibilities were to liaise with engineering leads across the organization to prioritize functionalities needed, and reduce unnecessary developer pain and toil without compromising on security or observability.
As Manager of the AWS Cloud Engineering Team, I was responsible for:
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Improving observability within the dev pipeline and establishing the baseline capabilities for HEB’s AWS Platform.
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Coordinating with the GCP platform manager to ensure that we were building towards a future where developers could build for AWS or GCP with as little pain as possible.
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Working with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks within the deployment/production lifecycle, and determining what efforts would relieve the most developer pain.
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Helping existing engineering teams learn concepts and patterns crucial to operating cloud infrastructure.
(…as it’s quite different than traditional Datacenter architecture) -
Prioritizing functionality improvements collaboratively with peers and engineering leaders as organizational priorities evolve.
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Demonstrating the practice of sustainably managing a production environment through transparent incident management, and empowering engineering teams to own their infrastructure.
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Nurturing engineering teams to encourage a mindset of ownership, and accountability.
Moving the default engineering mindset from:‘The code works on my laptop, so clearly this problem is not my fault.’
To one more along the lines of:
‘You build it, You run it…. Do you need a hand?’ -
Maintaining the services provided to engineering once live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency and overall system health.
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Growing the cloud engineering team, providing guidance, mentorship, and allowing engineers to make small mistakes and learn from them.
Atlassian
- DevOps Team Lead - HipChat:
Maintain team morale as HipChat divided to create on Stride.
Refocus the HipChat DevOps team to own and run components as developers transitioned off HipChat
Re-automate the infra, thoroughly documenting the processes, procedures, and expectations
Transfer all relevant knowledge of maintaining HipChat to a team of contract engineers
Ensure HipChat’s performance and availability met or exceeded all SLAs
Plan to migrate HipChat Devops engineers to Stride DevOps as the Ukraine team takes up the reigns - DevOps Team Lead - Stride
Integrate the 4 HipChat DevOps engineers with the existing Stride DevOps team
Adapt team processes to accommodate the growth.
Identify bottlenecks and developer pain points in the dev pipeline.
Identify performance issues.
Work with engineering leads to assess and implement necessary adjustments to process, tooling, and performance. - HipChat Engineering Steward
Provide guidance and direction for the day-to-day operations of HipChat performed by contract engineers in the Ukraine
Simplify focus of HipChat Development to ensure that a remote team of contractors could:
๏ Optimize all production, and non production infrastructure.
๏ Build all necessary clients across all supported platforms.
๏ Interact with the rest of atlassian to ensure any business needs could be serviced appropriately.
๏ Feel encouraged and empowered to explore new ways to evolve the process of rightsizing and scaling the HipChat infrastructure to reduce waste, while growing their skillsets.
๏ Grow the Engineers on the DevOps team.
๏ Help identify their unique genius
๏ Help shape a career path for them in the direction they felt they wanted to go.
๏ Help define the yin/yang distinction between the SRE and DevOps teams within Atlassian to ensure everyone’s path aligns closest with their desires
๏ Maintain and participate in oncall rotation for infrastructure performance and availability.
๏ Assess the cost and performance of all HC AWS Infra.
๏ Optimize where possible
๏ Help assess and improve CI and Deployment pipelines.
๏ Help assess and improve the consistency of environmental changes
๏ Maintain and Improve the relationships and contracts with 3rd party vendors:
(AWS, Elastic, HostedGraphite, RedisLabs)
๏ Coordinate requested changes from disparate product teams within Atlassian to ensure the team’s workload is consistent and the needful is done.
Help take HipChat to the next level
RetailMeNot
Improve existing open-source Puppet AWS infrastructure and modules. Help engineer the next generation of RetailMeNots automation infrastructure, utilizing emerging AWS technologies to reduce complexity and further automate the development pipeline