About

Work Experience

• Solutions Engineering Manager, Tailscale

  Feb, 2024 - Present

  Enterprise Zero Trust Wireguard based mesh VPN

  • Doubled size of team in 12 months, implementing enablement and onboarding process

  • Servant leadership to a team of 10 solutions engineers

  • Escalation point for all Infrastructure as code, cloud and Kubernetes accounts

  • 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

Education

Publications

References