Oct 2024 – Mar 2025 · 5 mos

• Worked on the Observability product space owning product direction for AI capabilities, data ingest from cloud providers, and application/infrastructure profiling.

Sep 2021 – Oct 2024 · 3 yrs 1 mo

• I am the senior most technical touch point for AWS's Startup customers helping with technical escalations and overall strategy for the business segment. In this role I work along side our global Startups Sales, Business Development, and Solution Architecture teams, aligning go to market strategy to technology and startup trends as well as AWS's products. In this role I also provide peer mentorship and overall "bar raising" to internal processes. I also drive cross business escalations to AWS's product teams, Support, and other functions.

Feb 2017 – Oct 2021 · 4 yrs 8 mos

• I built and led the Developer Advocacy team focused on the Serverless ecosystem of AWS services, tools, and 3rd parties that are building the next generation of Web, API, and Big Data applications. This includes AWS Services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Step Functions, EventBridge, and the tools to build and deploy applications using these services.
• I owned:
• content strategy for Serverless
• planning of both 1st and 3rd party events, content tracks, general strategy
• worked alongside of product managers, development leads, product marketing, and business development peers

Jul 2015 – Feb 2017 · 1 yr 7 mos

• At AWS I was global lead on DevOps culture, practices and technology interfacing between AWS product teams, our field teams including Sales and Solutions Architects, and our partners and customers. My activities have involved everything from product positioning, go-to-market strategy and public messaging, to acting as an advisor and influencer to senior management at Fortune 500 customers on how to transform their companies engineering and IT teams into a DevOps model. I am regularly diving deep with customers on continuous integration and delivery strategy, infrastructure as code practices, microservices, and emerging technology spaces such as containers and serverless applications.
• Responsibilities & Projects :
• Provide deep technical expertise on various DevOps topics: continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure as code, microservices, metrics/monitoring/logging/performance, APIs and more.
• Set AWS’s definition of DevOps as well as provided the overall direction for public messaging across several AWS products in the DevOps space, found at http://aws.amazon.com/devops
• Act as the public thought leader and speaker for AWS on the topic of DevOps, speaking at both internal and 3rd party events. Talks can be found here: http://chrismunns.com/talks.html
• Lead internal subject matter expert community on content creation, webinars, public speaking sessions, building demos for our products, and customer engagement strategy.
• Lead partner related activities such as the AWS Partner Competency for DevOps working closely with our partners on integration with AWS’s services, joint customer facing strategies, and mutual customer engagement.

Mar 2021 – Present · 5 yrs 2 mos · New York City Metropolitan Area

• Underscore Core Community member serving as a valued advisor to Underscore portfolio companies.

Jan 2015 – Jul 2015 · 6 mos · New York, New York

• At Hinge I managed all of the infrastructure for serving the needs of a global user base for the very rapidly growing mobile dating app. I worked on making the infrastructure scalable, reliable, performant, and secure, as well as providing the Development and Marketing teams with the tools they need to be able to rapidly deploy our applications, understand our data, and plan for the future of the app and company’s technological needs.
• Responsibilities & Projects :
• Built out infrastructure provisioning and management tools and patterns making use of AWS services such as CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, and Lambda, as well as 3rd party tools such as Chef.
• Implemented a continuous integration pipeline with tools such as Github, Travis-CI, Hockeyapp, VersionEye, and other tools to help reduce application defects and speed up the both the speed and confidence in the development cycle.
• Built out monitoring, metrics, and log collection systems using open source systems such as the “ELK” Stack, Graphite, Collectd, and Icinga.
• Kickstarted the process of moving the company from using primarily 3rd party PaaS based hosting to IaaS hosting on AWS to provide better control and ownership of our infrastructure.

Nov 2011 – Dec 2014 · 3 yrs 1 mo · Manhattan

• Working with Amazon Web Services customers, from startups to large enterprises, to best understand and utilize the cloud platform. This includes all of the services ( EC2, S3, RDS, EMR, ELB, etc ), and involves everything from deep infrastructure architecture advice to helping customers design applications using AWS in their own products.
• Day to day:
• Work with customers of all sizes and shapes using an extremely wide range of technologies.
• Develop internal and external technical collateral.
• Dive deep on large scale infrastructures.
• Imparting best practices and tools
• Examples of what I work with customers on:
• Scaling websites to handle large amounts of traffic using services such as EC2, Autoscaling, Cloudwatch, and Elastic Load Balancers.
• Building a backup/DR solution.
• Migrating from on premise infrastructure to the AWS platform.
• Understanding how they can use services like Elastic MapReduce to analyze large data sets.
• Understanding best practices and design patterns for cloud/IaaS based infrastructure.
• Understanding the benefits of automation tools such as AWS Cloudformation, Opscode Chef, Puppet Lab's Puppet, as well as a myriad of metrics and monitoring tools.
• Understanding how to scale large datasets/workloads with MySQL, MongoDB, Oracle, HBase, Hive, DynamoDB, Redshift, and other databases.
• Learn how to secure their infrastructure, data, and users on AWS's platform.
• Tuning their applications and infrastructure for best performance. This includes both web and non-web environments.
• Public Speaking:
• AWS Re:Invent 2012 - Infrastructure Automation
• AWS Summit 2013 NYC & SF - Continuous Integration and Deployment on AWS
• Philly Tech Week 2013 - Scaling on AWS for the First 10 Million Users
• AWS Re:Invent 2013 - They Don't Hug Back! Or Why You Need to Stop Worrying about Prodweb001 and Start Loving i-98fb9856
• AWS Re:Invent 2013 - Cache is King

Aug 2011 – Oct 2011 · 2 mos · Manhattan, NYC

• Administered an all AWS based web environment, helping to smooth out management and monitoring of hosts, as well as provide greater reliability of these systems.
• Worked to add more security and access accounting ability to hosts via LDAP, centralized logging, PAM controls and EC2 Security Groups.
• Implemented Opscode Chef to drastically simplify the configuration management of hosts, leading to greater flexibility and a much quicker ability to perform change operations.
• Implemented Nagios to better monitor the availability of hosts and services across various different pools of hosts, including web servers, databases ( MySQL, MongoDB, Postgres ), caching servers, and infrastructure management hosts.
• Implemented Ganglia to monitor trends of various system and service metrics.
• Worked with all major services across the entire environment, including Apache, HAProxy, MongoDB, Postgres, DNS(BIND), MySQL, Membase, NTP.

Nov 2009 – Aug 2011 · 1 yr 9 mos

• Senior Systems Administrator for Etsy.com. Helping the site to grow/scale.
• Administered several hundred servers in an intense highly trafficked ecommerce environment. Systems were mostly RHEL/CentOS, on standard X86_64 hardware.
• Oversaw migration of legacy hosts from Ubuntu or Fedora Core linux to RHEL/CentOS, this involved migrating core infrastructure services while the site was live with zero impact to traffic.
• Restructured and reorganized the system build and configuration management systems greatly simplifying and tying together all of our hosts. This brought new host build time, from bare metal to production ready down greatly and increased the flexibility to provision systems as parts of different clusters. This was done using software such as Cobbler and Chef as well extensive scripting.
• Built out a log analysis platform using the commercial software Splunk, analyzing over 150GB daily of log data. Allowed people from all over the company access to logging information and trends.
• Simplified and restructured the internal DNS, central syslogging, NTP, LDAP, and package management services.
• Handled racking of servers, cabling, and various other tasks in our data center spaces. Spec’d out server hardware used throughout the entire infrastructure.
• Performed DBA like duties such as overseeing setup and configuration of new MySQL systems, weekly schema changes, writing all backup/restore scripts, grant setting scripts, and other tools to help manage MySQL.
• Built the company’s first internal Hadoop infrastructure to lighten dependence on more costly 3rd-party external solutions. This included Cloudera Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Zookeeper, Hue.
• Handled the server side components/requirements for a PCI certified environment, including all internal services, locking down the systems, and providing levels of security for user and employee access.

Jul 2007 – Nov 2009 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• Administered servers in a high traffic, high availability web environment. Production environment grew roughly 200% in 2 years, requiring re-architecting and rethinking to enable the most uptime, fastest site response, best data integrity, and continued scalability.
• Provided on-call support 24x7 to all systems and networks, responding to incidents at the datacenter, office, or remotely as needed.
• Administered office servers, workstations, desktops, and network including separate environments for developers, QA, and general office use.
• Made extensive use of virtualization in the office to save money and still provide needed resources.
• Managed desktop support engineer and oversaw new employee setups.
• Handled 3rd party technical relationships, contracts, and implementations with providers ranging from CDNs, DNS providers, the colocation facility, hardware venders, 3rd party monitoring services, and more.
• Oversaw company blogging platform, Twitter access, and frequently assisted answering technical questions for the site’s users either via the support team, or directly on the sitewide message boards.
• Worked on making the security infrastructure stronger, backups more thorough, server installations quicker, page loads faster, and network infrastructure more scalable.

Apr 2006 – Jul 2007 · 1 yr 3 mos

• A Manhattan based startup who deals with marketting and promotional programs revolving around the use of music downloads. Customers who work with us get a custom music store that their customers can then download music from using the same 99cents model as iTunes. What sets us apart for iTunes is that every store is customized for the look and feel of the customer organization themselves. They initially targeted radio stations (now over 150+ around the country), but now work with larger corporations as well. Check it out www.tunegenie.com.

Oct 2005 – Apr 2006 · 6 mos

• Junior Sysadmin at a major Hedgefund in Manhattan.

Jun 2005 – Oct 2005 · 4 mos

• Part of a small consulting team from Ciber managing a Xerox operated datacenter in the Rochester area. Was tasked with administering ~ 90 Linux/Solaris servers and assisting the Windows/Network/Backup administrators with their tasks as well.