Stealth Mode Media Startup

Co-Founder (Vancouver, British Columbia) 

July 2021 – Present

Startup media partnership focused on the automotive world. Main accountabilities:

  • Website creation and hosting, domain and SSL management in GCP and AWS
  • Content production, creation, and editing using a variety of video editing software
  • Co-hosting videos with guests and company co-founder
  • Research content for videos, and co-write scripts for videos, generate blog and social media content

Rivian Automotive Inc. 

Staff DevOps Engineer (Vancouver, British Columbia)

December 2020 – February 2021

Working with Rivian’s Engineering Productivity Team, within a dedicated DevOps department, on bringing maturity and performance optimizations to their DevOps tooling with a goal of making deployments and day-to-day life easier for Software Engineers (mobile, frontend, and backend). Built automated, redundant, fault tolerant solutions using CICD best practices, blue-green deployments, canary testing, and traffic management. Main accountabilities:

  • Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines using Bitbucket and Gitlab, contributing to a 30% reduction in time to deploy
  • Built and deployed Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, and evangelized this practice across all infrastructure under my team’s purview and beyond (successfully onboarded some Software Engineers to contribute to IaC wherever appropriate)
  • Worked with mobile engineering teams to design robust cloud-based deployment architecture (GitLab CI with Linux or macOS runners, as required) to replace a poorly scaling on-premise Jenkins solution; iOS builds must be run on Apple hardware, and this was done on a mix of AWS Mac EC2 instances and MacStadium dedicated machines
  • Built automation with the aim of reducing tedious and repetitive work for other DevOps Engineers; for example, an AWS Lambda Python function that updated WAF IPSet rules, triggered via Simple Notification Service whenever new IP addresses were added to our infrastructure
  • Member of an on-call rotation to support production services across the entire DevOps landscape at the company
  • Advocated for, ensured, and oversaw the application of: site reliability engineering principles, gitflow, and agile development processes to my team’s services
  • Ensured that architecture was fully compliant with security and safety prescriptions

Rakuten, Inc.

DevOps Engineer (San Mateo, California)

September 2019 – December 2020

Worked with Rakuten’s Catalog Platform Department on mature, mission-critical, cloud-first big-data workloads hosted in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The Catalog Platform contains item and product data from all Rakuten properties, as well as Rakuten partners. Main accountabilities:

  • Reduced deployment time by 60% by reimagining Continuous Delivery (CD) in Jenkins and Spinnaker for 3 dev teams
  • DevOps subject matter expert for logging and BI Elastic (ELK) Stacks; included infrastructure, configuration, pipelines, dashboards, and performance optimization/tuning (Filebeat, fluentd, Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kibana)
  • Led a project to move appropriate workloads to Kubernetes which resulted in operational efficiencies and introduced autoscaling, while achieving a cost reduction of 10-50% depending on time of year/shopping seasons; started with APIs as PoC before moving other workloads
  • Built deployment tooling and automation for Apache Beam and Spark jobs that ran in GCP Dataproc and Dataflow
  • Worked with Ansible for configuration management and Terraform for compute and network infrastructure as code (IaC)
  • Ran a POC to move application logging to Google Cloud Platform’s BigQuery solution, via fluentd and Stackdriver Logs
  • Supported Software Engineering with datastore, caching, and queue administration, including: Kafka, Redis, Cassandra, Google Pub/Sub, Google Memorystore, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Firestore
  • Developed monitoring and alerting with: Elastalert, Sensu, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, Pagerduty and Site24x7
  • Worked collaboratively across sites and teams to introduce better configuration and secrets management (HashiCorp Vault or Google Cloud Secret Manager), in order to halt leakage while maintaining easy rotation of secrets
  • Managed multiple environments per team, including Production/Disaster Recovery (DR) before eventually moving Production to a pure multi-region active-active design throughout the platform
  • Member of “Knightswatch”; community of security-minded professionals at Rakuten with a mandate to evangelize security

DevOps Engineer (San Mateo, California)

November 2017 – September 2019

Responsible for supporting a scrappy, creative, and agile upstart team of twelve people that developed a mobile in-app messaging suite hosted in Microsoft Azure. Main accountabilities:

  • Translated architectural requirements from the Product Owners and Dev Manager into running infrastructure
  • Built automated, capacity-optimized, cloud-agnostic (portable), and highly available cloud app/microservice infrastructure using Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, and Ansible.
  • Leveraged mostly Azure technologies, with light use of Google Cloud Platform technologies where necessary
  • Monitored and maintained SaaS, PaaS, and IasS resources
  • Owned containerized microservice deployments with Kubernetes, including: DNS, TLS termination, reverse proxy, ingress, config maps, stateful sets, and more
  • Set up and maintained a multi-node containerized Jenkins cluster for CI/CD
  • Self-started and completed a large cloud computing governance project for the Americas region; reduced cloud spend by 50% by identifying unused and improperly-scoped resources; worked with global teams to replicate this success throughout Rakuten
  • Conducted light QA work as necessary; mostly regression testing when QA staff was too thinly provisioned

Technical Lead (Americas), Information Systems (San Mateo, California)

October 2015 – October 2017

Responsible for the technical design, implementation, and operation of the Corporate IT systems in the Americas region, concurrent with IT Solutions Architect responsibilities (see next section). Main accountabilities:

  • Led technical discussion and architecture design for regional projects, with a focus on IT solutions for new office builds and refurbishments across the country (including offices in Seattle, New York, Chicago, and Salt Lake City)
  • Drove and accelerated an initiative to improve IT integration for group companies that had been acquired through M&A
  • • Solely administered a public website running on Microsoft Azure App Service 
  • One of two regional leads for JAMF Pro for Mac management, which necessitated a fair amount of Bash scripting to satisfy the company’s Mac management demands
  • Owned the America’s region Unified Communications (UC) efforts using Cisco technologies; CUCM, TMS, VCS
  • Supervised administration and directly administered IT systems for the San Mateo US headquarters, and acted as a subject matter expert and third level escalation point for the team (mainly unified communications, mobility, Macintosh & Windows issues)
  • Suggested personal and technical development for the each of the engineers on the team to the Head of IT
  • Led Americas-specific IT roadmap planning, policy/procedure development, and consensus building with IT executives at each business unit and group company
  • Led knowledge sharing and training as a major conduit of information from the global HQ in Japan to staff in the Americas
  • Liaised with business stakeholders to architect systems that efficiently and reliably solve overarching IT issues that staff face

IT Solutions Architect (Mobile Device Management) (Remote: Tokyo, Japan)             

September 2013 – March 2017

One of two members of a virtual team whose sole mandate was to promote and architect secure mobile device management (MDM) / enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions for Rakuten group companies around the world, while working with business and technical stakeholders to incorporate requirements into corporate mobile strategies. Main accountabilities:

  • Conceived, architected, and led deployment of a successful and well-received global deployment of AirWatch EMM (SaaS model) to all global offices (25,000 users), leading to a 40% reduction in manual day-to-day EMM-related work for administrators and 70% quicker enrollment of devices for end-users
  • Led a mass unification and simplification of mobile phone terms of use across group companies
  • Constantly improved mobile synergies among group companies by merging ongoing business requirements into the existing EMM deployment
  • Continually assessed the health and relevance of the existing deployment with the goal of promoting and continuing the development of mobile strategies that aligned with what our users needed to achieve maximum productivity
  • Articulated business cases to senior management to secure appropriate sponsorship for projects and changes
  • Introduced responsible and secure support for previously unsupported mobile operating systems
  • Hosted a monthly virtual conference with global IT staff, which enhanced support and promoted collaboration

Kobo Inc.

IT Team Lead (Toronto, Ontario)                                        

June 2014- September 2015

Managed a team of seven systems administrators, whose duties ranged from help desk to project-based planning and implementation. The distribution of desktop OS in this environment was about 65% Macintosh and 35% Windows, and an exceptional level of support is provided for our 600 staff worldwide on either platform. Main accountabilities:

  • Extensive experience managing and working with a wide variety of vendors for hardware and software procurement
  • Trusted escalation point for immediate team members and members of other departments and organizations
  • Conducted one on one meetings with immediate team members to maintain constant bidirectional flow of information
  • Helped create and realize an aggressive cost reduction plan for IT services (hardware, mobility, software, etc.), resulting in a 25% reduction in department costs with no perceptible impact to users and their experience
  • Worked with teammates to develop their career goals and aspirations while inspiring them to accomplish in-progress tasks
  • Produced weekly management reports
  • Overhauled project planning and management, which led to greatly improved operational efficiencies
  • Championed the introduction of more realistic and enforceable IT policies to improve efficiency and productivity, while making security technology more transparent to staff
  • Oversaw a project plan to migrate the office and data centre network infrastructure to Cisco technologies end-to-end

IT Systems Administrator, Telecom and Connected Device Specialist (Toronto, Ontario

June 2011 – May 2014

Part of a four-person Information Technology team; a diverse role which included a wide-range of responsibilities. This was an extremely fast-paced and high-stress environment, as it was a relatively young and dynamic startup tech company at the time. 

  • Routine maintenance of existing servers and creation of new servers (physical and virtual) running Windows Server on VMWare vSphere and Hyper-V
  • Administered separate instances of Active Directory on two domains that spanned 3 continents
  • Managed the company’s mobile device and MDM solutions
  • Provided remote support to around 50 employees who worked in offices or home offices worldwide
  • Comfortably supported every level of user at the company (including C-suite), on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS