Feb 2018 – Nov 2019 · 1 yr 9 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• I led the Data Engineering organization through a period of high (100%+) growth in the org, up-leveling both engineers and managers. We established a Data Modeling and Architecture group to develop Slack's vision for data architecture, and improved the architecture of our systems and software. While doing this, Data Engineering also played a critical role in Slack's IPO, and overhauled Product's ability to make data-informed decisions by investing in experimentation and logging.

Mar 2015 – Jun 2016 · 1 yr 3 mos

• As of March 2015, and concurrent with managing Insight Engineering, I am now also responsible for the Product Network Engineering (PNE) organization. PNE is responsible for all aspects of network engineering needed to support the hugely diverse product activities at Netflix from on-campus specialized wireless networking solutions to product testing lab networking requirements, to supporting and advancing our cloud-based networking efforts and leveraging our world-class CDN (OpenConnect) network to support product delivery needs.
• And I'm very, very excited.

Jan 2013 – Feb 2018 · 5 yrs 1 mo

• I manage the Insight Engineering (IE) team at Netflix, where we are responsible for building real-time operational insight systems to provide visibility into the production environments at Netflix at ridiculous scale (1B+ metrics per minute). Our platform engineers build telemetry platforms capable of ingesting hundreds of thousands of metrics from each of 50,000+ instances; our UI engineers help our customers make sense of the data; and our Real-Time Analytics (RTA) group builds machine learning-based systems which provide recommendations and take decisive, autonomous, action to remediate production issues so our engineers won't have to.
• During my time managing Insight Engineering, I
• Drove completion of a complete rewrite of our primary telemetry platform; this project was significantly late when I became responsible for the team and we delivered it within my first quarter of managing the team;
• Migrated the Central Alert Gateway (CAG) from another team to IE, rewriting from scratch and significantly increasing its relevance to our customers, ease of use, and power, delighting all our customers;
• Increased focus on customer relevance and increased engagement with our customers so we can understand how to be relevant to them;
• Effectively managed employee morale to deliver 100% voluntary retention;
• Effectively recruited and hired to increase team size by approximately 100%;
• Delivered many external presentations and talks to promote Netflix's technical brand and improve recruiting across the organization;
• Effectively managed the scaling of our systems through an order of magnitude's increase in metrics, managing to prevent another order of magnitude's increase through tight customer relationships;
• Developed the vision, strategy, and roadmap for Insight Engineering as not just a platform development group, but as an insight and intelligence group, focusing on insight and intelligence rather than big data pipelines.

Jun 2011 – Jan 2013 · 1 yr 7 mos

• Solver of difficult problems. I had the great joy of having my job defined anew every quarter, as I'd find new and interesting significant issues to work on.
• Drove the complete revamp of Netflix's production alerting and notification environment, including the adoption of a new notification SaaS and writing much of the glue linking this SaaS with our own alerting systems;
• Built the system which conclusively solved our problem around lack of awareness of production SSL certificates and upcoming certificate expirations. This system later became the basis for Security Monkey;
• Built the system which allowed us to track our usage of AWS resources and warned us as we got close to our limits, largely eliminating resource exhaustion alerts which previously had happened on at least a weekly basis and would stop our operations in their tracks;
• Drove the adoption of Python as a first-class language in Netflix's production ecosystem and wrote the vast majority of the Netflix Python infrastructure libraries;
• Built Netflix's first internal inter-service SLA framework;
• Managed the program to increase adoption of latency testing within Netflix, including outreach to development teams, advocacy, adoption tracking, and coding of support tools;
• Argued against short-sighted reactive measures in favor of longer-term, more Netflix-culture-appropriate, ways of solving problems (and usually won);
• Engaged closely with my group's customers to understand their needs and pain points, and help them use our systems better, more easily, and with less frustration (including outreach, conversations, negotiations, and tool building)

Jun 2009 – Jun 2011 · 2 yrs

• Responsible for relationship management, project delivery, and architecture deliverables for IT/Operations and its customers.
• Restarted previously-moribund tier-2 task transitions to the NOC, increasing value of both Systems Engineering and NOC organizations;
• Spearheaded the creation of the Service Delivery organization focusing on internal customer experience and effective solution delivery, with resulting improvement in service consistency, deployment speed, and customer satisfaction;
• Researched, proposed, and implemented strategic x86 vendor shift, improving ROI and vendor relations;
• Developed and deployed on-call contact management, inventory-management and configuration correctness monitoring systems;
• Designed next-generation video encoding environment resulting in a 150x throughput improvement while removing End-of-Life systems and lowering datacenter power and cooling footprint;
• Drove configuration management and cloud deployment architecture efforts to deliver customer-centric, cost-effective cloud-based IT/Operations systems;
• Spearheaded cross-functional efforts to design Netflix’s PCI environment including storage, systems, network, and security components

Nov 2006 – Feb 2009 · 2 yrs 3 mos

• Responsible for UNIX and Storage provisioning, maintenance, design, architecture, and vision for 15,000 employee company, focusing on enterprise SAN (and NAS including iSCSI/NFS/CIFS) storage and backups and high-end Sun systems. Manage a 15-person group split between UNIX engineering, Storage and Data Availability technologies, and Solution Architecture.

May 2004 – Nov 2006 · 2 yrs 6 mos

• Established Nominum's first continuous build system; wrote a CLI automation tool to satisfy DoD testing requirements; wrote Caffeinator, a coffee-ordering and debt management system

Jul 2003 – May 2004 · 10 mos

• Developed limited-use URLs and high-performance email authoring tools, in addition to developing myriad intranet applications for account management and shipping personnel.

Mar 2001 – Jul 2003 · 2 yrs 4 mos

• Developed customer engagements, designed nascent company intranet and extranet strategies, and then built infrastructure for both company and customer use.

Oct 1997 – Mar 2001 · 3 yrs 5 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• Managed a ~20 person organization responsible for network, storage, Windows and UNIX (Solaris) server engineering. Implemented a global WAN using Frame Relay and a redundant hub and spoke design which greatly improved WAN reliability and uptime. Was responsible for uptime of a top-20 website (shockwave.com), and the systems engineering of Macromedia's industry-leading dynamic website. Successfully retired obsolete technologies with minimum customer impact and delivered Y2K and Disaster Recovery programs. During initial work as a senior Systems Engineer implemented a self-service system for FTP account management which increased customer satisfaction and overhauled anonymous FTP security.

Oct 1995 – Oct 1997 · 2 yrs

• Built a team of five engineers to support all computing needs from those of sales and marketing to engineering groups working on every commercial version of UNIX available at the time. Also did other interesting technical things, but it was 15 years ago, and my resume is probably more likely to be accurate in depicting my accomplishments.