Director, DevOps at General Electric

March 2019 - Present

Responsible for leading a cross-functional team of people working around the globe to develop, host, manage, and maintain the public-facing and internal web presence for one of the most well-known companies in the world. My team consists of the following:

As the sole team in charge of architecture, development, infrastructure, operations, security, and innovation - collectively "DevOps" - I've successfully led the team through several projects that have improved process, improved time to market, implemented much needed automation, drastically cut costs, and broke down barriers to create an innovative work culture. Some of my accomplishments include:

• Successfully led the migration effort between WAF and CDN vendors and handled the decision-making process to bring some of the security and content delivery back in-house - ultimately improving our position in automation, bringing control and expertise back into our team, drastically improving our security posture across many public-facing websites, and reducing operational spend by $.5M/year.
• Bringing a much needed focus and fostering a culture of innovation and automation to the team, we created and implemented an AI chat bot to automate several repeatable processes needed by developers - reducing waste, eliminating hand off, and speeding up the development process, effectively saving the company $.25M/year.
• Completely rebuilt infrastructure and application monitoring and reporting. This project was long overdue but drastically helped to improve application SLA's, availability, and user experience. In addition, this has overhauled the method of working for the operations and infrastructure teams away from a reactive state by enabling the team to proactively see issues before they occur.
• Created a scripted template to almost fully automate the tasks of onboarding and offboarding new web properties into the environment. This has saved the team from repeating past disasters that resulted from human error in the process and saved countless man hours that were spent building the environments and coordinating the many tasks needed to fully complete onboarding and offboarding.
• Led the effort to centralize documentation and organize IT assets into ServiceNow. A herculean effort, we managed to fully document and import over 80+ web applications spanning Dev, Stg, and Prd into the ITSM database.
• Actively participated in knowledge and best practice sharing across all Global Functions DevOps Teams through a monthly DevOps review meeting.
• Volunteered to lead the Corporate Global Functions Team in an effort to promote personal and professional learning. These efforts have resulted in a 28% participation rate across GE Global Functions and included thousands of hours of additional learnings that applied directly to the roles of those that participated.

Manager, System Services at AAA Life

November 2016 - Present

Responsible for leading a team of fluid and highly skilled DBA's, Windows Systems Engineers, Linux Systems Engineers, IBM iSeries Engineers, SAN Engineers, VMware Engineers and Middleware/DevOps Engineers to implement and support the mission-critical and highly-available internal and external enterprise applications of AAA Life.

Some of my responsibilities and accomplishments in this role include:

• Led the team, created and assigned tasks, monitored budget expenditures and provided project planning for a full-scale remote Disaster Recovery datacenter site, reducing the RTO for Tier0/Tier1 applications and systems from 48 hours down to 3 hours.
• Worked as leader in the Architect Team to design and review all Enterprise Architecture decisions.
• Personally developed, architected and implemented the Enterprise Cloud Strategy document to oversee all enterprise projects using cloud technologies.
• Work cohesively with AppDev leadership to implement rolling blue/green deployments to drastically reduce downtime and human error during deployments and speed up application time to market.
• Provided budgeting and monitored expenditures against budget for all enterprise hardware and software.
• Using Agile and DevOps methodologies and principles, pushed our team to work cohesively with App Dev, PM, BA and QA teams to support continuous software delivery and project excellence.
• Taking advantage of my knowledge and certifications in ITIL, I led my team to better align our IT service portfolio with the needs of the business through the proper use of ServiceNow.
• Creation, assignment and prioritization of tasks for each of the teams through the use of the Agile-inspired Visual Task Board and daily stand-ups/ceremonies.
• Recruited, hired, reviewed (compensated and disciplined) and coached direct reports to provide and keep the best talent in the IT Network Services field.
• Provided project planning for all Network Services projects to include: security compliance (PCI and MAR), server and hardware refreshes, business continuity and DR, SQL database migrations to always-on clusters, network segregation, Sharepoint migrations, SCCM implementation, etc.
• Managed all vendor relations to maintain the best possible cost savings available for all services, hardware and software used.
• Provided leadership and directed the allocation and utilization of time, money and staffing resources.

North American IT Manager at Pcubed

April 2014 - November 2016

Systems Engineer at Pcubed

April 2012 - April 2014

Managed support operations, recruited, hired, disciplined and directed daily activities to ensure timely customer service and service delivery. Provided leadership and established priorities, including training and coaching to provide direction, assigning projects, reviewing progress and deliverables, evaluating performance and technical capabilities, and maintaining high end-user service and satisfaction levels.

• Provided leadership and directed the allocation and utilization of time, money and staffing resources.
• Prepared budget, developed and maintained an enterprise-wide business continuity plan, and ensured the regular testing of contingency planning processes and procedures.
• Developed and enforced IT policy and procedures to ensure the protection of enterprise IT assets and the integrity, security, and privacy of information entrusted to or maintained by the enterprise.
• Determined fiscal requirements, monitored expenditures of budgeted funds, reduced operating costs and aligned resources with business strategies. Identified opportunities for improvement and made suggestions for change.
• Recommended new applications and technology as appropriate. Observed and measured organizational performance against customer requirements and recommended modifications to existing systems or processes. Created processes and procedures for routine requests, problems, and customer needs.
• Administered, installed, optimized and designed a server environment for a variety of business applications including databases, e-mail, domain controllers, and various application servers.
• Acted as technical lead and spearheaded several large and complex projects to include full SCCM design and implementation, full migration to Office 365, physical move of entire headquarters datacenter, complete reconfiguration of LAN/VLAN infrastructure and security systems/firewall overhaul.

Owner at ProWeb Technology Solutions

April 2012 - January 2018

Leading our staff of talented web and graphic designers, systems and network engineers and helpdesk support, my accomplishments include:

• Designed and maintained all aspects of internal and client networks to include servers, workstations, backups, security, monitoring and reporting, etc.
• Handled research and purchasing of all new equipment for client networks as well as the installation, configuration and implementation of those systems into their production environments.
• Built, developed, hosted and supported websites based on Drupal or WordPress CMS systems and web applications based on Apache, Nginx, PHP, Ruby and MySQL on cloud servers in Amazon AWS based on Red Hat/CentOS Operating Systems.
• Developed brand design and recognition by creating high-end web graphics, logos and marketing collateral.
• Performed remote and on-site client IT support.
• Designed, planned, and deployed/delivered cloud solutions to our clients - including Office 365, Azure, AWS, etc.
• Negotiated successful sale of the business January, 2018.

Systems Engineer at Prestige Technologies

March 2009 - April 2012

Acted as lead consultant, engineer and primary support, my responsibilites and accomplishments included:

• Designed and maintained all aspects of internal and client networks to include servers, workstations, backups, security, monitoring and reporting, etc.
• Provided support remotely and telephonically to our clients to include general maintenance and on an as-needed basis as problems arise. Made annual on-site visits to several clients across the Unites States.
• Developed and managed all aspects of equipment and software purchase orders for clients and internally.
• Maintained knowledge of current technologies through weekly research and beta testing, and wrote tech articles and white papers about my conclusions and findings. Installed, managed and maintained new technologies and as the RTM`s were released for software; Examples include Windows Server 2008 R2, Virtualization, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010, CentOS 6, etc.
• Built, developed and maintained a CentOS 5.x Linux-based enterprise automated web/email hosting server. Implemented new software and security technologies as they are released. Provided usage summaries, automated billing and support as needed.
• Implemented Nagios for internal use, live monitoring of all internal hardware systems and service monitoring (SQL, Exchange, etc.)

Systems Administrator at BalesTek

June 2007 - March 2009

Primary administrator on staff and SMB IT Consultant for this small web hosting company, my responsibilities and accomplishments included:

• Maintained four Web/Email/DNS/File/FTP servers built on CentOS 4.x including daily maintenance, usage summaries, implementing new technologies, etc.
• Design/Install/Maintain/Troubleshoot small business networks, Windows Domains, servers and workstations.
• Handled troubleshooting, repaired, and upgraded computer issues, hardware and software related, for customers both onsite and remotely.

Brighton High School

Qualifications/Accomplishments

Diploma

Microsoft MCSE Training Academy

Qualifications

MCP, MCTS and MCSA certifications

ITIL

Business Certification

Click here to download my ITIL Certificate. ITIL advocates that IT services are aligned to the needs of the business and support its core processes. It provides guidance to organizations and individuals on how to use IT as a tool to facilitate business change, transformation and growth. ITIL Certifications earned:

• ITIL - Foundation
• ITIL - Practitioner (in progress)

Microsoft

Certifications

Click here to download my official Microsoft training transcript. Certifications earned:

• MCP
• MCTS
• MCSA