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Lee Briggs

Lee Briggs

Cloud & Solutions Engineering Leader | Secure, Scalable, Multi-Cloud


Background


About

About

15+ years leading high-performing engineering teams and delivering cloud security, zero-trust networking, and infrastructure automation for Fortune 100 enterprises and hyper-growth startups.

Work Experience

Work Experience

  • Director of Solutions Engineering, Tailscale

    Feb, 2024 - Present

    Zero-trust, WireGuard-based mesh VPN platform for secure connectivity.

    • Surpassed revenue targets every quarter, exceeding commercial and enterprise goals by an average of 110%.

    • Doubled solutions engineering team in 12 months, instituting a metrics-driven onboarding and enablement program and increasing team diversity.

    • Created book-of-business framework that increased SE-sourced expansion revenue by 30%.

    • Technical escalation for Kubernetes, IaC, and cloud architecture on deals >$1 M ARR.

    • Product owner for Tailscale's Kubernetes; accelerated time-to-value for enterprise customers by 40%.

    • Drove multiple strategic partnerships, unlocking co-sell pipeline and revenue worth $5M.

  • Distinguished Field Engineer, Pulumi

    Mar, 2020 - Dec, 20233 years 9 months

    Open-source IaC platform enabling developers to program the cloud using real languages.

    • Grew ARR from $1 M to $15 M by leading technical strategy on top 50 global accounts.

    • Refactored build and release pipelines across 50+ OSS repos, cutting CI time by 60%.

    • Designed and delivered multi-day training adopted by 1,200+ engineers worldwide.

    • Championed cloud reference architectures across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes adopted by enterprise customers.

    • Partnered with Product & Marketing to launch new SaaS products, driving 40% uplift in conversions.

  • Principal Infrastructure Engineer, Apptio

    Oct, 2012 - Mar, 20207 years 4 months

    Led cloud platform engineering from pre-IPO scale-up through public company growth.

    • Architected multi-account AWS landing zone with Terraform, meeting SOC & FedRAMP controls.

    • Implemented Docker & Kubernetes PaaS, reducing deploy times from hours to <10 minutes.

    • Introduced HashiCorp Vault service; eliminated plaintext secrets.

    • Championed SRE culture—defined SLAs/SLOs and instituted ChatOps, reducing MTTR by 45%.

    • Led Kubernetes platform through CIS compliance.

    • Advisor during Apptio's IPO, and acquisition of Cloudability.

    • Re-engineered monitoring stack (Sensu, Logstash, Graphite), cutting false positives by 70%.

    • Containerized legacy services with OpenVZ, increasing server density by 70%.

    • Expanded footprint from 1 to 12 colos in 2.5 years while maintaining 99.95% uptime.

    • Built AWS prototype platform enabling self-service deployments for 50+ developers.

    • Established Git-driven Puppet workflow adopted company-wide.

  • System Administrator, GR Software & Research

    Sep, 2011 - Sep, 201211 months

    Managed Windows & VMware infrastructure for high-frequency trading firm.

    • Deployed VMware stack and storage, boosting compute capacity 3× with zero downtime.

    • Upgraded Exchange environment for 500+ users, improving mail latency by 40%.

    • Enhanced Perl-based monitoring to provide real-time trading system insights.

  • Unix Consultant, JP Morgan Chase

    Jan, 2011 - Aug, 20117 months

    Engineered automation and monitoring for distributed compute clusters.

    • Rolled out Puppet, slashing OS provisioning from days to hours across 1,200+ nodes.

    • Implemented Nagios federation, raising infrastructure coverage to 95%.

    • Developed chroot sandboxing, isolating noisy apps and improving cluster stability.

Skills

Skills

  • Leadership & Solutions Engineering

    People development

    Technical storytelling

    Executive alignment

    Revenue growth

    Strategic planning

  • Cloud & DevOps

    AWS

    Azure

    GCP

    Kubernetes

    Terraform

    Pulumi

    Docker

    Zero-Trust Security

  • Programming

    Go

    Python

    TypeScript

    Bash

    Ruby

    JavaScript

Education

Education

  • Computing, BSc (Hons), 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

    Demonstrated zero-trust privilege elevation using HashiCorp Vault.

  • Sensu Wrapper, Sensu Summit

    Published on: Aug 16, 2017

    Introduced CLI tool for streamlined alert routing into Sensu.

  • kr8: Kubernetes Configuration Management, CfgMgmtCamp

    Published on: Feb 05, 2019

    Presented GitOps-style config management for Kubernetes at scale.

  • DevOps is a Failure, Personal Blog

    Published on: Jun 21, 2022

    Viral essay on the challenges and future of DevOps culture.

  • Choosing an Infrastructure as Code Solution, CfgMgmtCamp

    Published on: Feb 08, 2023

    Guided engineers through evaluating IaC platforms for enterprise scale.

  • Authenticating to AWS the Right Way, Personal Blog

    Published on: Sep 05, 2022

    Best practices for secure, scalable AWS auth workflows.

References

References

  • Available on request