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Lee Briggs

Lee Briggs

Multi discipline engineer with extensive cloud engineering, sales engineering and infrastructure engineering background.


Background


About

About

Cloud engineering expertise across a wide range of disciplines including global production organisations, marketing, developer advocacy and sales engineering.

Work Experience

Work Experience

  • Solutions Engineer, Tailscale

    Feb, 2024 - Present

    Enterprise Zero Trust Wireguard based mesh VPN

    • Kubernetes subject matter expert for customer engagements

    • Kubernetes operator implementation and product owner

    • Amazon Web Services subject matter expert for strategic accounts

  • Distinguished Field Engineer, Pulumi

    Mar, 2020 - Dec, 20233 years 9 months

    Open-source Infrastructure as Code startup focused on changing the way engineers program the cloud

    • Refactored build process for over 50 OSS GitHub repos

    • Supported multiple customers with their transition to Infrastructure as Code with Pulumi SDKs

    • Built a comprehensive training and workshop plan for Pulumi's top of funnel efforts

    • Worked with partner organizations to evangelize Pulumi's unique infrastructure as software offering

    • Principal solutions engineer growing ARR from $1m to $15m

    • Working alongside AEs and product marketing to build effective content and messaging for Pulumi

    • Integration expert and point of escalation for Amazon Web Services, Kubernetes and Microsoft Azure

    • Built examples and reference architecture across Pulumi's multi language, multi cloud product line

    • Strategic account holder for Pulumi's largest ARR customers

  • Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Apptio

    Oct, 2015 - Mar, 20204 years 5 months

    Working from Seattle office taking Apptio from startup to IPO and beyond.

    • Designed compliant multi-account infrastructure platform for AWS application and workflow using Terraform

    • Design of service discovery platform using Consul for loose coupling of micro service applications & distributed, secure key/value store

    • Implementation of Docker based infrastructure for CI/CD requirements

    • Tech & Project lead for build and deployment of Kubernetes PaaS infrastructure. Wrote various integration tools such as secure auth provider, operators and configuration management tool for Kubernetes.

    • Tech lead for deployment and rollout of Hashicorp Vault for security & secret management. Developed several open source tools to ease management and operations.

    • Implementation and architecture of secure AWS infrastructure using AWS best practices

    • Culture champion, driving implementation of company wide chat platform/chatops (Slack) and SRE model implementating SLAs/SLOs

    • Tech lead for CIS compliance & audit of secure Kubernetes based platform for AWS GovCloud

    • Lead implementation of encryption key storage service for PaaS platform (KTS)

    • Tech lead for implementation of certificate management and credential storage service

  • Senior System Administrator, Apptio

    Oct, 2012 - Jul, 20152 years 8 months

    Late stage startup SaaS provider based in Seattle. Working from the London office, senior member of the team that managed a large and ever growing Java/Tomcat/MySQL application stack. Involved in a period of huge growth for both the team and the company.

    • Redefined monitoring systems from ground up using open source technologies such as Sensu, Logstash and Graphite - reducing MTTR and vastly improving application availability

    • Involved in redefining operations platform, including containerization using OpenVZ based virtualisation technology - increasing performance and density by 70%

    • Involved in metrics and trending data architecture deployment using Graphite, StatsD and Diamond enabling developers to get true visibility on application and operational performance

    • Helped grow operations platform from 1 managed datacenter to 12 colo datacenters in 2.5 years

    • Integral in deploying new application platform to AWS building a platform for developers to deploy directly into production

    • EMEA point of contact involved in scrums and triage with developers in remote locations to define points of escalation and urgent issues

    • Defined configuration management strategy for Puppet and version control workflow from the ground up

  • System Administrator, GR Software & Research

    Sep, 2011 - Sep, 201211 months

    High frequency trading firm based in London. Administration of multi-site Windows architecture and user support using proven Windows technologies such as Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange as well as support for trading data feeds and trading applications. Use of perl, powershell and some python to aid in the automation and systems management

    • Deployment of VMware virtualization platform and related storage architecture to increase density and reduce costs

    • Deployment, upgrade and management of Microsoft Exchange email platform

    • Monitoring and architecture improvements to in house Perl based monitoring and system management stack

  • Unix Consultant, JP Morgan Chase

    Jan, 2011 - Aug, 20117 months

    Large financial institution. Administration and configuration of distributed financial compute cluster using recognised tools such as Puppet, Nagios and Cobbler.

    • Deployment of Puppet configuration management tool to increase deployment times and improve management of large scale OS fleet

    • Deployment of Nagios monitoring architecture to increase monitoring visibility

    • Deployment of custom chroot application sandboxing to reduce effects of application performance issues

Skills

Skills

  • Solutions Engineering

    Problem solving

    Story telling

    Evangelism

    Presentation skills

  • DevOps

    Containers

    AWS

    Docker

    Azure

    Google Cloud

    Pulumi

    Terraform

    Kubernetes

  • Programming Languages

    Go

    Ruby

    Bash

    Python

    JavaScript

    TypeScript

Education

Education

  • Computing, Bachelor, De Montfort University

    Sep, 2006 - May, 2010

    First Class Honours
Publications

Publications

  • Building a Privileged Account Management System with Vault, Hashiconf

    Published on: Sep 20, 2017

    A talk about how I built an account management system which allows human users to elevate their privileges temporarily using HashiCorp Vault

  • Sensu Wrapper, Sensu Summit

    Published on: Aug 16, 2017

    A talk about building a tool which allows developers and operators to easily send alert messages to the sensu monitoring system using a command line tool I developed.

  • kr8: Kubernetes Configuration Management, CfgMgmtCamp

    Published on: Feb 05, 2019

    A talk about the configuration management tool built for Kubernetes, and the inspiration/drivers behind it

  • DevOps is a failure, Personal Blog

    Published on: Jun 21, 2022

    Viral article discussing problems and potential solutions with DevOps culture

  • Choosing an Infrastructure as Code Solution, CfgMgmtCamp

    Published on: Feb 08, 2023

    Talk focused on helping engineers decide how to best support developers when choosing an infrastructure as code solution

  • Authenticating to AWS the right way, Personal Blog

    Published on: Sep 05, 2022

    Article discussing the correct way to authenticate to AWS

References

References

  • Available on request