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I am an experienced Cloud Engineer, Architect, People Manager, and Director with a positive outlook and people-focused personality. I strongly believe in using the right tool for the job regardless of the domain, I have strong opinions but hold them weakly, and I am convinced that most problems arise because of a breakdown in communication rather than technical reasons. I focus on my people and view the role of a Manager as giving their team every possible opportunity to succeed without getting in their way. I believe that a person who is tired of learning is tired of life, and I never want to be that person.
Director, Cloud Architecture and Engineering | Caylent | December 2022 - Present | Costa Mesa, CA
- Manage up to 6 Technical Delivery Managers, each leading their own teams of Architects and Engineers across multiple customer engagements and overseeing successful delivery of up to 18 customer engagements simultaneously.
- Handle internal and external escalations and resolve issues on customer engagements to ensure positive outcomes.
- Identify internal initiatives or standardization needed across the Caylent organization.
- Staff upcoming customer engagements with appropriate Engineers and Architects based on available resourcing, skill sets, and personal growth paths.
- Work closely with Sales teams, Project Management teams, and Marketing to ensure consistency of promised work with realistic deliverability of our Service Delivery teams, both in the form of potential product offerings and more directly in individual engagement proposals and statements of work ranging from small projects to multi-million-dollar contracts.
- Support Sales and Pre-sales teams with technical expertise on customer meetings for both new and existing customers to ensure successful statements of work and customer expectations of technical delivery capabilities.
- Develop operational standards, templates, and process guidelines for management and delivery teams to follow to ensure successful project delivery and effective onboarding of new employees.
- Oversee Performance Management and career growth strategies for my extended team, as well as direct planning and strategy for my direct reports, while ensuring that compensation changes related to performance align to organizational budgetary constraints.
Technical Delivery Manager | Caylent | July 2021 - December 2022 | Costa Mesa, CA
- Lead multiple technical delivery teams (Pods) of Engineers and Solutions Architects to deliver ongoing technical support and development for customers over long-term lifecycles (6 months - 1 year starting).
- Lead project-based teams in short-term (months-long) engagement lifecycles to provide technical oversight, shape long-range planning, and identify customer business needs.
- Develop business accelerator products, combining both go-to-market strategy and supporting development artifacts (Terraform, Python, etc.) to enable new and prospective customers to leverage public cloud technologies quickly.
- Develop internal accelerator products to enable delivery teams and ensure reasonable standardization of technical design and delivery across all projects and teams.
- Develop a centralized knowledge base for all Caylent delivery resources to share and collaborate on standards and best practices ("The Caylent Way"), with structure to support organic scalable growth by technology "communities", and low barrier to entry to ensure simpler sharing of pre-existing reusable artifacts by both technical and non-technical teams
- Interview candidates and help improve the interview process for Engineering, Architecting, and Manager roles within Service Delivery.
- Execute Performance Management, career growth planning, goal setting, and personal development for my team.
Director / Senior Manager, Product Delivery Integration | Onica, a Rackspace Technology Company | September 2019 - July 2021 | Irvine, CA
Note: role of Director at Onica was re-aligned to Senior Manager after Onica's acquisition by Rackspace Technology in January 2020
- Develop and enhance the methods, processes, and technical assets that represent "the Onica Way".
- Oversee ongoing efforts around training and evangelization.
- Ensure quality through consistency of delivery across all technical teams.
- Mediate between needs from delivery teams, and documentation of delivery strategy for marketing and sales teams.
Practice Director, Architecture and Engineering | Onica | February 2019 - September 2019 | Irvine, CA
- Manage a team of Lead Solutions Architects and Engineers (each with their own direct reports), supporting hiring efforts and performance reviews.
- Develop curriculum and set standards of excellence for Architecture and Engineering practice.
- Foster a culture within the department of transparency, personal and professional growth, and determine proper courses of action for the business to enhance this culture.
- Identify and plan for the future of Onica's Architecture and Engineering teams and develop new business initiatives for continued success.
- Engage with customers, including hands on collaboration with client Engineering teams and Architectural reviews, acting as the Cloud Services, DevOps and Technology evangelist.
- Support Sales and Pre-sales teams with technical expertise on customer meetings for both new and existing customers to ensure successful statements of work and customer expectations of technical delivery capabilities.
- Plan against delivery risks and potential issues to mitigate with forward planning.
Lead DevOps Architect | Onica | May 2017 - February 2019 | Irvine, CA
- Actively engineer across multiple teams, establishing and ensuring architectural direction by example.
- Design systems, architectural environments, integration and deployment pipelines, and define process to streamline and accelerate development and ensure alignment with best practices.
- Interact with clients to set expectations for technical delivery.
- Mentor other engineers and architects within my team, supporting hiring efforts and performance reviews.
- Participate in the research and development of proofs of concept for both internal and external, client-facing initiatives.
- Engage with customers, including hands on collaboration with client Engineering teams and Architectural reviews, acting as the Cloud Services, DevOps and Technology evangelist.
- Plan against delivery risks and potential issues to mitigate with forward planning. And of course, automate all the things.
Cloud Engineer | Onica | Feb 2016 - May 2017 | Irvine, CA
- Architect and build complex systems for high-availability, fault-tolerance, scalability, and durability.
- Leverage the full range of Amazon Web Services offerings for deployment, configuration, data warehousing, security, and testing, with focus on AWS CloudFormation and its integration with other AWS services like RDS, Route53, and compute offerings.
- Streamline development workflows by automating deployment of separate environments.
- Creatively solve technical and logistical problems to resolve infrastructure durability issues and data reliability.
Jr. DevOps Engineer | Quadrant 4 System Corporation | Sep 2014 - Feb 2016 | Santa Ana, CA
- Automate and oversee multiple HA environments for hundreds of major websites including motortrend.com (CentOS Linux, Rightscale/Chef, Ruby, Git, Atlassian Stash/Confluence, HAProxy/F5, Elasticsearch, Varnish, Apache, Cloudstack)
- Continue administration of legacy environments (Windows Server, IIS, Postgres)
- Manage centralized logging systems (Elasticsearch / Kibana)
- Administrate separate environments for development, testing, staging and production to facilitate agile developer workflow and continuous deployment (Atlassian Jira)
- Configure and respond to urgent alerts (Nagios, Rigor, Dotcom-monitor)
- Research and implement infrastructure solutions (Docker, Rancher, Consul)
- Diagnose existing and potential problems and find resolutions for them
SysAdmin / I.T. Support | Trinet Internet Solutions | Jun 2013 - Sep 2014 | Irvine, CA
- Manage several Linux servers (CentOS, Ubuntu)
- Find sustainable and money-saving solutions to problems (migrate from AWS to self-hosted VMWare)
- Respond to emergency alerts regarding internal and client-facing tools and sites (Bash, Perl, sendmail)
- Maintain network infrastructure (Cisco Security Appliance, small-office network)
- Troubleshoot server and workstation technical issues (Microsoft Outlook, Windows XP/Vista/7, Microsoft Office, dmesg, syslogs)
- Parse Akamai generated logs and generate reports consolidating metrics for streaming video stats (Akamai, Sawmill, custom Bash scripts)
- Improve tools, systems and processes to promote productivity office-wide
Delivery Manager | Blackstar Marketing | Jul 2012 - Jun 2013 | Aliso Viejo, CA
- Independently find creative, reactive methods for delivering campaign emails
- Manage resources required (IP addresses, domains, landing pages, creative content for campaigns)
- Analyze individual campaign performance (A/B testing, etc) to improve revenue
- Work closely with sysadmins and developers to find and resolve issues with delivery and test new methods (delivery testing tools, IP range route management)
Sign Artist | Trader Joe's | Mar 2006 - Jul 2012 | Costa Mesa, CA
- Design and deliver a constant workstream of artwork and store signage in a timely manner
- Self-manage priorities of new signage requirements
- Develop automated processes to keep monotonous tasks from overwhelming larger, more interesting projects (leveraging open source software like Ubuntu, GIMP, and FontForge)
- Continue to provide top-tier customer service and product knowledge, carry the torch for brand values because EVERYONE loves Trader Joe's!
I am exceptionally proud of my career beginnings in retail, the lessons learned there about customer obsession, and my pivot into the Technology space. I always hope to continue that journey by learning new concepts, staying at the bleeding edge of technology, and radically changing how people think of and interact with technological systems, all while enabling the people who work with me to grow their personal and professional skillsets. As people and industries change their thought processes around the internet, cloud computing, and software, I want to continue to be a guide and trusted expert to ensure that the next generation of technologists are thinking comprehensively about how to define best practices, come up with new ideas, and use critical thinking.
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (Validation Number 2NDZ24BCJEQEQ795)
- AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional (Validation Number S55BCMMK2FVEQY5T)
- AWS Certified Developer - Associate (Validation Number XH0LYBB2DBR4Q6SZ)
- AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate (Validation Number 1SRKCZK1CN1QQL3S)
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Validation Number B56JHJ2222VQQVK7)