M. Adam Kendall
Engineering Leadership
About
I've been an engineering leader and manager focusing on software development, infrastructure, and continuous delivery, or as they say, "DevOps", for over 20 years. I've been a remote worker for just as long and understand the high levels of communication and self discipline required. I'm a huge supporter of open source software and have contributed to many projects over the years on both github and SourceForge.
Work Experience
Technical Manager of InfraSec
Senior engineering leader of both cloud infrastructure and security concerns
Highlights
- Provide career mentorship and career development to our most senior engineers specializing in infrastructure and security
- Wrote several articles for the company blog around engineering career development
- Involved in cross-functional team working on SITH, the insider threat case management system used by DCSA, coordinating and tracking issues of both obtaining an ATO within an DoD IL5 environment and working with outside parties for security bug bounty research
Senior Manager of Engineering
Leader of multiple teams within the Developer Services division providing a secure infrastructure platform for our SaaS applications, and highly scaled CI/CD services
Highlights
- Provide career mentorship to 12 engineers at multiple levels, from junior to principal, spread across two teams
- Successfully guided the elimination of a data center, migrating workloads to the cloud
- Built the platform services team from the ground up, hiring key personnel, developing the roadmap, leading user research, and training developer teams on highly available application best practices
- Able to coach the CI services team toward increased velocity and more prioritized backlog, which lead to more stable environment for the rest of our R&D engineering organization
Managing Consulting Engineer
Provide cloud infrastructure and security engineering consulting services and management of larger teams for both government and commercial clients
Highlights
- Managed team of engineers providing security scanning and build automation tooling for CHIP and Medicaid Services (CMS) inside HHS
- Provided cohesive DevOps strategy for CMS Medicaid and CHIP Business Information Systems (MACBIS) application teams
- Developed DevOps community of practice so that application teams could share experiences and learn from each other
Staff Infrastructure Engineer
Managed team of infrastructure and security engineers in providing secure, PCI-DSS compliant platform for regulated financial technology company
Highlights
- Wrote strategy for migration from custom AWS EC2 delivery architecture to serverless platform as a service to increase resiliency in operations
- Managed and mentored platform services team consisting of both infrastructure and security engineers
- Designed architecture and strategy to provide more opinionated self-service components, like databases, for the rest of engineering org
- Lead effort to eliminate bespoke services for highly available third party services with larger community and/or company support
- Lead effort to provide better monitoring of core services and forecast alerting so team could be more proactive
- Wrote and designed contingency plan and procedures in case of catastrophic failure or compromise of infrastructure components
- Participate in on-call rotation to address immediate issues in infrastructure services
18F/General Services Administration
Washington, DC/Remote
November 2015 – October 2018
DevOps Lead/Senior Platform Engineer
Provide general guidance on DevOps best practices for the organization, reporting to the Director of Engineering. Serve as one of the lead engineers for cloud.gov, a platform as a service for government teams, much like Heroku.
Highlights
- Held bi-weekly 'office hours' to provide other engineers peer feedback on their DevOps strategy and implementation
- Lead professional development community of practice composed of DevOps experts and those interested in increasing their DevOps skills within GSA
- Provided project review for DevOps best practices and posture across the organization
- Implemented organizational approach and automation for keeping sensitive data out of published source code
- Initiated and developed plan for full automation pipeline of the cloud.gov platform, including infrastructure as code, automated testing, and continuous delivery
- Regularly investigated and resolved cloud.gov platform issues and participated in on-call rotation
- Perform compliance related functions, such as documentation and audit interviews, to maintain FedRAMP JAB provisional ATO for cloud.gov
- Provide both pre and post-sales engineering and cloud transition consulting for cloud.gov customers
Principal Software Architect
Worked directly with Director of Development Services setting policy for application development, component and service architecture, software quality, and security strategy. Regularly lead small teams of 2 to 5 developers within an agile environment to produce applications for federal government clients.
Software Engineer
Developed full-stack, data driven web applications for federal government clients, using monolith and microservices models, including single page application frameworks
Network Operations Manager
Responsible for data center operations, cost management, and management and mentorship of multiple experience levels of network and security engineers
Network and Security Engineer
Responsible for all system administration, network connectivity, and security operations for government websites in data center environment
Senior Developer
Worked within the Intranet/Internet Systems Group specializing in security and system administration on Sun Solaris and Windows NT servers.
LAN Analyst
Responsible for building Internet presence from ground up. Included evaluation and determination of needs, selection of appropriate server hardware and software, and training end users and support personnel. Expanded existing Intranet services beyond filesharing and backup systems.
Bank One Financial Card Services
Columbus, OH
August 1995 – September 1996
System and Network Administrator
Responsible for system and network administration in the check clearing division. Managed both Unix based servers and desktop systems, optical storage silos, and industry specific hardware, like check transport image scanners.
Education
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2002 2004
American InterContinental University
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Magna Cum Laude
Major: Visual Communication, Digital Design
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1993 1995
Ohio University
Did not complete degree
Major: Computer Science, Major: Electrical Engineering, Minor: History
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1992 1993
University of Toledo
Did not complete degree
Major: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Skills
Programming Languages
shell
Groovy
Golang
JavaScript
Python
PHP
Backend
Flask
Wordpress
ExpressJS
Frontend
HTML
CSS
Sass
JQuery
Bootstrap
Testing
JUnit
PyUnit
PHPUnit
mocha
karma
Agile Project Management
Scrum
Kanban
Jira
Storage
Postgres
MySQL
MongoDB
ElasticSearch
Operating Systems
Mac OSX
Linux
Unix
BSD
DevOps and Cloud
AWS
GCP
Docker
Kubernetes
terraform
Ansible
CloudFoundry
CI/CD
Version Control
Git
Subversion
Publications
Python and Zope in the EZRO CMS
Interests
Hardware
3D printing
Arduino
RaspberryPi
Hobbies
Quadcopters
Homebrewing
BBQ