Introduction

I am a site reliability engineer with a strong background in Kubernetes, network engineering and Unix administration. I bring 20 years of industry experience to the table, along with a passion for technology.

My latest work centers on developing processes that address systemic and cultural challenges within organizations to enhance reliability, foster alignment and ensure compliance. I approach technical leadership with a warm affirming communication style, firmly believing that individuals thrive in an atmosphere where their contributions are appreciated, and where mutual respect among peers is upheld.

Employment History

CircleCI

Senior Site Reliability Engineer
June 2017 – Present
Toronto, ON (remote)
  • Established a project to implement Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets and a comprehensive review process across key feature teams. This project measurably improved system reliability, provided quality metrics to guide project planning, and improved our developers' sense of alignment with customer needs
  • Day to day operations of production Kubernetes clusters, databases, caches, and other platform resources
  • Cross-team collaboration to help our internal customers instrument their services for observability and reliability
  • Lead Incident Commander (IC) overseeing production incident response. Developed guidelines and mentored other ICs in effective incident response
  • Organized and facilitated a network engineering steering group to facilitate communication and coordination between internal stakeholders
  • Co-hosted live diagramming sessions to capture and share in-depth details of our microservice architecture across the engineering organization. These sessions produced the most detailed and valuable map of our services and their critical functions
  • Architected network for a lift-and-shift upgrade of a critical VM cluster. This project addressed substantial security, performance and reliability deficits of the original system, while preserving compatibility with our orchestration tooling
  • Automated integration and compliance testing of VM images
  • Developed tooling to distribute VM images from a centralized file store, eliminating manual rsync process. This tooling improved our deployment time by a factor of 10, and eliminated many opportunities for operator error
  • Mentored teammates to effectively utilize NOC support staff
  • Kubernetes (EKS), AWS, Google Cloud, Terraform, Packer, Ansible, Molecule, Inspec, Datadog, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry, Refinery, Graylog, Elasticsearch, Go, Python

OANDA Canada

Network Engineer
Jan 2012 – May 2017
Toronto, ON
  • Principal architect of network for high-volume low-latency currency trading platform
  • Managed network infrastructure for 5 offices and 4 production sites on 3 continents
  • Developed process for efficiently allocating network number resources for new production sites
  • Implemented BGP multi-homing with 3 transit providers, 47 peers. Designed processes for managing life cycle of new peering relationships
  • Developed rigid specifications for network device configuration to facilitate configuration management
  • Automated provisioning of Linux and Solaris systems for private cloud infrastructure
  • Cisco, Juniper ScreenOS/Junos, F5, Mellanox, Solaris 10, Ubuntu 12.04, Apache, Bind, Sendmail, Postfix, FreeRADIUS, Ansible, Python

The Jonah Group Ltd

Systems and Networks Administrator
Dec 2007 – Jan 2012
Toronto, ON
  • Managed general IT infrastructure and desktop support for a company of 80 employees, in a mixed OS environment
  • Developed security controls to fulfill compliance obligations to client base
  • Deployed Active Directory domain to support single sign-on for Windows, Mac and Linux users
  • Implemented centralized logging with Splunk
  • Migrated Sendmail/IMAP mail server to Zimbra Collaboration Suite
  • Technical lead for project to relocate all systems to new office space
  • Windows Server 2003/2008, Samba, Zimbra Collaboration Suite, Cisco ASA, Aironet, FreeRADIUS, Xen, Nagios, Asterisk PBX, Splunk

Maptuit Corporation / Torque.net

Systems Administrator
Aug 2004 – Dec 2007
Toronto, ON
  • Sysadmin supporting development and production environments
  • 7x24 support of critical systems
  • Technical Lead for Systems and Networks for project to move production environment between data centres
  • Support for small dial-up ISP and hosting environment
  • Migrated telephone system from legacy Option 11 to Asterisk PBX
  • Desktop support
  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 4, Sendmail, Postfix, Apache, Bind, FreeRADIUS, Asterisk PBX

Other Interests

  • Semi-professional circus performer
  • Building and designing embedded electronics

Education

Seneca College of Arts and Technology

Computer Systems Technology (CTY)
Sep 2000 - Dec 2002
  • Program focused on x86 hardware, basic software development, UNIX and Windows administration and network design