Riley Belgrave

Software Engineer

Maple Grove, Minnesota, United States11 yrs 3 mos experience
Highly Stable

Key Highlights

  • Led migration of platforms saving millions monthly.
  • Developed Kubernetes Operators for automation.
  • Created CLaaS platform managing 4 Petabytes of data.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer specializing in DevOps and large-scale data management.

Contact

LinkedIn

Skills

Core Skills

Cloud ComputingDevops

Other Skills

GitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Go (Programming Language)GithubApache KafkaDockerSoftware DevelopmentConsulPrometheus.ioTerraformLinuxKubernetesPythonElasticsearchGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)

About

I specialize in Cloud and Automation systems or more commonly known as the field of DevOps. While my job titles sometime include the words "Software Engineer" this is just a formality. I am at heart a Platform Engineer. Through-out my carrier I have personally built from scratch and lead platform teams. As a Platform Engineer my goal is to provide easy "push-button" (or API/terraform drive) solutions for other teams to use. Platforms should be flexible enough to provide teams with the means to get to a solution as quickly as possible while at the same time being rigid enough to prevent common mistakes. We no longer live in a world dominated by mainframes and specialty server systems. We now live in a world where servers cannot be pets, we cannot name them and we cannot customize them. Your pet server can't handle the instant demand of millions of people accessing your services during the super bowl. This is the age of on demand servers and services and if someone doesn't have instant access to a service they will go some place else. Developers prefer an agile like development system which needs consistency between development, testing and production environments. Unlike the past where everyone had their own customized development system and testing system that was completely different than production, everything is now created and automated to match production. What is there left to do when a developer can click one button to test their application and have it instantly deployed to production, or when your cloud can react and deploy more servers and services to handle incoming load? Well like the business they work in, Engineers must be able to always improve on existing technologies and react to the changing tides of computing systems.

Experience

11 yrs 3 mos
Total Experience
2 yrs
Average Tenure
1 yr 7 mos
Current Experience

Confluent

Staff Software Engineer I

Nov 2024 – Present · 1 yr 7 mos · Maple Grove, Minnesota, United States · Remote

Unitedhealth group

4 roles

Senior Principal Software Engineer

Promoted

Nov 2021 – Nov 2024 · 3 yrs

  • Continue to Lead all of the "Data Platforms" teams (~12 engineers)
  • Leading and Facilitating efforts across multiple teams in the organization to adopt Kubernetes Operators for deploying and managing our various platforms.
  • Continue to drive the direction of expanding CLaaS offerings in the cloud.
  • CLaaS cloud footprint is estimated to 2x on-prem by end of 2022.
  • Am the "go-to" person for anything weird, complex, and out of the box. I have solved 3 major company wide impacting events in the last 2 years that dozens of other top engineers at the company struggled to solve.
  • Migrated multiple platforms between various cloud providers and datacenters saving the company millions of dollars per month.
Cloud ComputingGitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Go (Programming Language)GithubApache Kafka+15

Principal Software Engineer

Aug 2020 – Nov 2021 · 1 yr 3 mos

  • Lead all of the "Data Platforms" teams (~12 engineers) including CLaaS (Cluster as a Service) and KaaS (Kafka as a Service) Platforms.
  • These Platforms combined now service 4 Petabytes of Data spread between hundreds of Cassandra, Elastic and Kafka Clusters.
  • Lead efforts to convert all CLaaS automation to Kubernetes Operators, CLaaS is now fully managed by Operators with little human intervention in day to day tasks. This includes automatic node failure detection and healing of Kubernetes Clusters including the Database Clusters running inside.
  • Due to all these Operators the CLaaS team can seemlessly manage hundreds of clusters with little effort and an engineering team size of 4.
  • Lead the effort to provide CLaaS Kafka clusters in Azure.
  • Lead the effort to provide CLaaS Kafka clusters in GCP and migrating Azure clusters to GCP.
Cloud ComputingGitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Go (Programming Language)GithubApache Kafka+15

Lead Software Engineer

Promoted

Oct 2019 – Aug 2020 · 10 mos

  • Lead a team of 4 engineers running the CLaaS (Cluster as a Service) Platform.
  • Lead efforts to create our initial Kubernetes Operator to manage the Platform.
  • Continued to improve automation of bare metal Kubernetes nodes including fully automating upgrades and patching.
  • Continued to improve High Availability solutions for the platform including automatic certificate rotations, configuration updates and more with zero downtime.
Cloud ComputingGitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Go (Programming Language)GithubApache Kafka+15

Senior Software Engineer

Oct 2018 – Oct 2019 · 1 yr

  • Created a new Platform Offering called CLaaS (Cluster as a Service)
  • This platform provides fully managed Cassandra, Elastic and Kafka clusters for various use-cases throughout the organization.
  • This platform is built on-top of Kubernetes running on bare metal using Terraform, Helm Charts, and more for automation.
  • Created a custom Kubernetes CSI Provider for local storage
Cloud ComputingGitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Go (Programming Language)GithubApache Kafka+15

Target

Senior Engineer

Jun 2016 – Sep 2018 · 2 yrs 3 mos · Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

  • Maintained and Managed the Public Cloud Platform for Target Digital Applications.
  • Took part in multiple efforts to migration applications from one Cloud Provider to another as well as on-prem environments to the cloud.
  • Lead the initial effort to create a Function as a Service environment.
  • Maintained a working relationship with hundreds of application teams helping them maintain their cloud based application and debugging any problem.
  • Updated and maintained an internal URL shortener that every team across Target used.
  • Become the "go-to" person that other engineers call for help for solving complex problems across the organization, this reputation has followed me for the rest of my carrier.
Cloud ComputingGitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)Go (Programming Language)GithubDocker+13

Covermymeds

Infrastructure Engineer - Co-Op

Jan 2015 – Aug 2015 · 7 mos · Columbus, Ohio Area

  • Created an Automation tool to help with Application development.
  • Used tools like Puppet, Fabric, Python, RabbitMQ, and more to deploy and maintain an application hosting platform for the organization.
GitContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)GithubDockerSoftware DevelopmentDevOps+6

Magnatag visible systems

Information Technology Intern

May 2014 – Aug 2014 · 3 mos · Macedon, New York

GitLinuxSystem Administration

Wynncraft

Network Developer

Apr 2014 – Feb 2015 · 10 mos

  • Maintainer and Developer of Network Systems
GitGithubDockerSoftware DevelopmentLinuxPython+1

Havox hosting

System Admin

Jul 2011 – Sep 2011 · 2 mos

  • Technical Support for Customers
  • Set up new customers on the platform
  • Maintain and monitor server hardware and software
GitLinuxSystem Administration

Education

Rochester Institute of Technology

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) — Information Technology

Jan 2011 – Jan 2016

Newburgh Free Academy

New York State High School Degree — Engineering

Jan 2008 – Jan 2011

Riley Belgrave - Software Engineer | Stackforce