Engineer, Uber Technologies, Inc.

January 2012-Present — San Francisco, CA

Worked on improving overall system reliablity and performance by examining and rearchitecting various components. Developed and implemented new processes for server lifecycle management and code deployment.

Engineer, SimpleGeo (acquired by Urban Airship)

September 2010-December 2011 — San Francisco, CA

Focused on building a variety of tools and services to provide scalable infrastructure for storing and querying geo-location data. Acquired by Urban Airship.

• EC2 provisioning - Wrote a RESTful service that wrapped the EC2 API with fine-grained access control and enforced configuration policies (before Amazon released IAM and CloudFormation).
• Dynamic load balancer - Built a custom load balancer on EC2 using nginx for SSL, HAProxy for health/failover, and dynamic DNS between multiple availability zones. Wrote a RESTful service for monitoring and managing the state of HAProxy.
• Metrics aggregation - Wrote a system for collecting arbitrary metrics from hosts and applications, storing them in RRDs, and a jquery-based interface for browsing generated graphs.

Systems Engineer, Digg, Inc.

December 2008-September 2010 — San Francisco, CA

Worked with a team of systems engineers to maintain, upgrade, and improve the infrastructure behind digg.com by building servers, writing tools, automating tasks, and maintaining sitewide configuration.

• Deployment process - Refactored and re-engineered the process for keeping code builds consistent throughout the development, testing, and release cycle. Worked with several teams to get input and requirements for the new process.
• Packages - Backported, created, and otherwise maintained a large number of Debian packages in our internal repository.
• Package management - Wrote tools for building and maintaining a Debian package repository via a RESTful API.
• Cluster management - Integrated and developed Clusto, an open source project for managing large server environments.
• Ongoing maintenance - Handled day-to-day requests for code deployment, server allocation, writing Puppet manifests, monitoring cluster health, and responding to nagios alerts.

Systems Administrator, Meraki, Inc.

April 2008-October 2008 — San Francisco, CA

Worked to maintain and scale web and network infrastructure for a growing startup company while also handling day-to-day operations of the production server environment and office IT needs using Debian Linux, OpenBSD, and Windows Server 2008.

• San Francisco Office - Worked with contractors and vendors to design and build the IT infrastructure required to move into a new office. Saw to the successful delivery of six separate telecom and data circuits, configured Juniper and Cisco network devices and built redundant DNS/DHCP servers using OpenBSD.
• NIS to LDAP migration - Moved users from a mixed NIS and htpasswd based authentication scheme to a redundant OpenLDAP directory by writing various scripts and utilities in bash and Python. These scripts were also used to synchronize accounts with Google Apps for your domain's provisioning API.
• File server migration - Completed an effort to understand user requirements and migrate from a Windows 2003 file server with no backup strategy to a highly redundant and encrypted file server built with Debian Linux and Samba. This service is integrated with the aforementioned LDAP directory to provide a single sign on environment.
• Cisco SSL VPN implementation - Researched, designed, and built a VPN solution for corporate users on Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux platforms. This service was also integrated with the LDAP directory for AAA.
• Ticket tracking - Configured a Bugzilla instance for the purpose of handling IT problem tickets and resolutions. Customized the interface to suit our needs and provide a consistent look and feel to the rest of the intranet services.
• Server maintenance - Helped to create and follow through with a plan for keeping servers up to date without risking service stability. Helped to improve service uptime by implementing hot and cold spares for a number of critical services.
• Server builds - Used debian-installer scripts to engineer a solution for building standard automated server installs using custom Debian packages. This effort allows faster and more efficient deployment of new servers.
• Server shards - Worked on an ongoing effort to split our production environment into geographically distributed shards, each requiring site-specific planning and configuration of new servers as well as coordination with a number of hardware and colocation vendors.

Web Engineer, Paychex, Inc.

June 2007-April 2008 — Rochester, NY

Worked with a small team to design, implement, and maintain a large cross-platform web server environment consisting of Sun One Web Server, BEA Weblogic, Sun One Directory Server, JBoss, Apache, and IIS on a variety of operating systems including Solaris, HP-UX, and Windows Server platforms running a number of internal and vendor supplied applications. Participated in an on call rotation.

• 401k/FSA Web Services - Configured a Cisco ACE/Reactivity SOA environment for an in-house web service
• WebTrends Upgrade - Performed upgrade of a production WebTrends Analytics 7.0 installation
• Secure Email - Provided assistance to a project team working to integrate a vendor supported IIS application into our web environment
• WebORS Deployment - Performed regular deployment of in-house code to Sun One web servers
• Webmkt Decomission - Coordinated and performed the decomission of an unsupported HP-UX server and worked with a project team to move applications and script to the current Solaris and Windows based environment.
• RightAnswers Integration - Worked with a vendor and project team to integrate their application into our existing environment

Summer of Code Student, Google, Inc.

May 2006-September 2006

One of 630 student participants selected out of over 3000 applicants to Google's Summer of Code program. Worked with a mentor from the IETF Tools group to develop an open source service allowing users to configure and receive notifications about IETF documents of interest. The IETF Notifier daemon was written in Python and used a MySQL database for storing subscriptions.