Contact information

Profile

I am a lead systems engineer and architect with extensive experience in large-scale deployment, migration, administration, monitoring and support. My focus is procedural efficiency and security. I have experience and personal interest in team leadership, advanced monitoring and awareness, CI/CD/CM, analysis, communications solutions, project leadership, RCA, troubleshooting, open source solutions and the use of technologies to advance the process of business.

Skills

  • Linux, Solaris and AIX
  • Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, CentOS and SUSE
  • Python, BASH, APIs and Frameworks
  • Zabbix, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Syslog, Grafana and Kibana
  • CI/CD/CM, Ansible, AWX, Chef, Salt, Drone, Jenkins
  • Containers, k8s, docker, containerd
  • Technical writing and documentation
  • Networking and hardware
  • MySQL, Postgres, SQLite and InfluxDB
  • Team management and Agile
  • Procedure development
  • Project leadership

Employment

These roles have provided experience in the administration of globally distributed data centers and cloud products. I have experience with various programming languages, frameworks, and databases. I have a strong understanding of their use in heterogeneous environments for automation, deployment, migration, and administrative tasks. I have experience with project architecture, management methodologies and systems analysis.

Jun 2019 - Present Target Corporation Brooklyn Park, MN
Lead Engineer
  • Private Cloud

Nov 2016 - May 2019 Bitwise IO, Inc. Minneapolis, MN
Senior Systems Engineer
  • Test-bed deployment and evaluation of OpenHPC
  • Full CI pipeline design and implementation
  • Docker image optimization & Kubernetes deployments
  • Distributed supply chain system design and POC
  • CentOS, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Git, Docker, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes

Bitwise is a small consultancy and software development company with a large impact. Projects varied from individual to large teams, all coordinated with Agile. End to end development from project planning to production deployment.

Jul 2013 - Oct 2016 Code 42 software Minneapolis, MN
Senior Cloud Engineer, Operations
  • The care and feeding of enterprise storage and compute clouds
  • Monitoring, Awareness, Reporting, Tools and Analysis.
  • Architecture and Direction
  • Monitoring of more than 120,000 hard drives and the systems that spin them
  • Processing and dissemination of monitoring data as layered, targeted awareness
  • Tech: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Gentoo, Zabbix, MySQL, JVM

Operations at Code42 is a small, tight-knit group of experts in every segment of cloud administration from RAID hardware to global-scale configuration management. Working with, and for, this team is the highest level of creative solution design and implementation I have seen, and on a massive scale. My primary duties include holistic management of monitoring, data collection, analysis, issue detection, alerting, remediation procedures, active and passive awareness, reporting, RCA and documentation.

Jul 2010 - Jun 2013 Thomson Reuters Eagan, MN
Senior UNIX Systems EngineerContracted by Talent Software ServicesJan 2011 - Jun 2013
  • Large Network and Domain Migrations
  • Physical and network migrations from 1 to 250 servers. Storage migrations for up to 1000 servers. Thousands of servers in all.
  • Migration scripting for Multiple OSs
  • Tech: SUSE, Red Hat, Solaris & AIX.

This role included all prep and migration tasks for the UNIX platform. This includes allocation and verification of all network resources, strict migration windows, verification of all OS-level functionality, and OOB functionality. OS reconfigurations were entirely scripted as part of the position. This included TCP/IP, domain, NFS, TSM, VMware, and postfix reconfiguration.

Systems Engineer, AnalystContracted by Talent Software ServicesJul 2010 - Dec 2010
  • Solution analysis and forecasting. Internal customer reporting and analysis of trends and opportunities.
  • Strategic technology research. Software platform and hardware research to forecast use cases and suitability within environments.
  • Management of hardware solution implementation, storage growth and migration projects.
  • Tech: SQL, VBA, Excel, Access, Visio, Hadoop, iSCSI, Fusion IO, Sharepoint

Primary focus was strategic team operations related to capital expenditures for infrastructure and application technology. I was tasked with developing and publishing reports and presentations to analyze trends and opportunities for the team. At the same time, I worked with my teammates administering solutions to distribute workload and gain an understanding of the environment.

Feb 2006 - Jul 2010 IBM Global Services Minneapolis, MN
L4 Systems Management Specialist/SMEContracted by Pomeroy IT Solutions & CDI Corporation
  • Administration of Unix and Windows systems in an enterprise datacenter of over 2000 servers
  • Linux and Windows implementation and support for web, application and infrastructure.
  • VMWare deployment and template creation.
  • Management of multi-team, interdependent procedures
  • Managed the configuration and security requirements for all server installations
  • Coordinating infrastructure, software and procedural changes throughout the environment
  • Tech: Red Hat, Windows Server 2k-2k8, Veritas, IIS, Scripting, Ghost, HTML tools, Dell PowerEdge, HP/Compaq Prolient, IBM xSeries, Data remanence, NAS and SAN storage

I provided support for several IBM customers ranging from OS and application support to L4 management of procedures and training. I managed the implementation of project solutions ensuring that business needs were met from a technical standpoint. I provided tools and training to deployment and support teams as well as troubleshooting HW, application and OS issues.

Education

2003 - 2006 University of Phoenix BS IT

ITIL focus with emphasis on management and devops.

1993 - 1997 Harding University Undergrad

Anthropology and computer science. Development focus.