Caskey L. Dickson Bellevue, WA ***** • ad4t12@r.postjobfree.com • 213-***-****

www.linkedin.com/in/caskeydickson

Targeting Engineering Leadership

Product Development Distributed Systems Site Reliability Engineering C-Level Engagement Project Management EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Senior technology director, visionary, and product developer who successfully propels engineering effectiveness in the high-tech sector. Exceptional leadership ability and technical depth to transform large organizations and startups while building online services from the ground up. Analytical problem solver who understands the impact of technological change on business activity. Globally-recognized expert in large-scale system administration with broad experience in designing distributed systems, analyzing incidents, forecasting trends, and developing plans that harden products in a cost-effective way. Delivers vision and operationalizes / creates plans to empower business strategy.

Inspirational leader and motivator who delivers customer value by designing reliable systems from inherently unreliable components. Relationship builder who engages with all functions, understands needs of all stakeholders, and builds trust at all levels. Respected industry leader for vast knowledge of technology, marketplace, and risk factors and larger focus on the big picture. Impressive Achievements

● Product Innovation & Profitability: Built a division for Microsoft of 1,500 people. Identified long-standing product life cycle problems, transforming an underperforming product that was losing money at $2B annually to $5B+ per year, making the product profitable.

● Growth Strategy: Uncovered millions of dollars in lost revenue due to depreciation of undeployed equipment by utilizing metrics, machine learning, and analytics. Applied lean strategies to the datacenter buildout process, eliminating waste and speeding time to market.

● IT Automation: Developed an automated system that analyzed millions of lines of Microsoft product source code looking for date / time handling bugs.

● Cross-Functional Leadership: Executed a distributed global system for a SaaS-based monitoring system used inside Google

(patent granted) and operated it globally in 140+ sites worldwide.

● Technical Advising: Led consulting company with major projects including rescuing an overdue product designed to launch concurrently with Super Bowl XLII and consulting with Sony Pictures Blu-ray development group on ways to improve quality and cost savings by reforming engineering processes.

Leadership Competencies

Distributed Systems IoT Online Services Product Strategy Software Engineering Project Management Information Systems Strategic Planning & Analysis Technology Optimization Fault Tolerant System Design Team Building & Leadership Organizational Transformation Stakeholder Relations Complex Computing Infrastructure SaaS Cloud Solutions Agile/LEAN CAREER PROGRESSION

Consultant 2020-Present

Freelance

Acting Director – Azure Division 2015–2020

Microsoft Corporation Redmond, WA

Hired to reinvent operations. Met with product teams to review, advise, and approve short- and long-term development objectives. Mentored individual engineers and managers in site reliability engineering (SRE) principles. Met with senior executive staff to review product utilization and revenue targets. Participated in incident response for issues at the regional level and above. Performed review and approval of incident postmortems identifying missing changes that needed to be made to prevent future recurrence. Processed close to 20 individual queries daily about aspects of SRE. Performed quarterly mandatory new employee orientation for all engineers and managers in the Azure organization. Met with major customer CxO teams such as Citibank in the Executive Briefing Center. Participated in performance reviews and budgeting processes.

● Turned around failing product operating at a loss to $5.5B and a stock price of $210, a 5x increase, and growing by eliminating reliance on outside vendors for operations, reorganizing existing operations groups, creating standardized best practices for SRE teams, and instituting a culture of customer-oriented metrics. CASKEY L. DICKSON PAGE 2 OF 2 ad4t12@r.postjobfree.com 213-***-****

● Established Microsoft as a major player in the SRE community by negotiating to secure a keynote at one of the two largest conferences in the world. Assisted in writing and reviewing the keynote. Shepherded talks through the process to attain acceptance at conferences; advocated for Azure SRE within the community.

● Eliminated millions of dollars in vendor spend, improved customer satisfaction, and overhauled internal operations team by transitioning away vendors, reorganizing existing operations teams, and guiding experienced SREs in training and development.

● Saved millions in capital losses due to hardware deployment inefficiencies by applying SRE principles to core products utilizing best practices as well as designing a high-capacity hiring pipeline and streamlining data center buildout procedures.

● Named as One of the Top 100 SRE / DevOps people to follow on Twitter by news website. Featured as special guest on video podcasts on DevOps practices. Solicited by multiple publishers to write books on SRE. Interviewed for online SRE publications. Senior Principal SRE/SWE 2010–2015

Google Inc. Los Angeles, CA

Wrote and maintained a global, distributed, fault-tolerant black-box monitoring system that operated at Google scale as well as business intelligence pipelines. Conducted on-call work for legacy shared systems as well as software engineering, team interaction, and staff development. Traveled regularly to other SRE offices to present the system and its design to peers.

● Global expert in monitoring systems and visualization through presentations, global speaking engagements, and conferences.

● Sole inventor in a patent on a unique method for distributed, large-scale information gathering and real-time analysis. Principal Software Engineer 2008–2010

Symantec Culver City, CA

Served as lead engineer and principal architect on two internet products: Norton Family Safety, a dedicated child firewall product, and a patented system for defending against malware on Facebook feeds. Other Leadership Roles:

● Lecturer & Manager – College of Science & Engineering, Loyola Marymount University. Developed and taught graduate and undergraduate computer science courses, networking, operating systems, and SDLC. Administered National Science Foundation grants ($100k). Automated lab operations.

● Co-Founder, CTO & Director of Programming for multiple Internet startups, including Citysearch and Cars Direct.

● See LinkedIn for the remaining 18 year history.

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION

Master’s Degree Strategy and Innovation (MDI), Oxford Said Business School, London, UK Postgraduate Diploma in Business Analytics, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA Certificate in Applied Business Analytics, MIT Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, MA Master of Business Administration (MBA), Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA (Beta Gamma Sigma) Master of Science (MSc) in Systems Engineering, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA (Graduated at top of class) Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Computer Science, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification, Project Management Institute TECHNOLOGY

Expert in G Suite, Jupyter, Linux OS, Jenkins CI/CD, Hadoop, IPv4, DNS, HTTP/S, Golang, C/C++, Java, R, Python, SQL, Microsoft Office MEMBERSHIPS & AFFILIATIONS

ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) ASQ (American Society of Quality) IEEE Computer Society SWE Society of WomenEngineers USENIX CSTA (Computer Science Teachers Association) PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

LISA (2013–2019, 2021) SREcon Europe-Middle East-Africa / Asia Pacific (2018–2019) SREcon Americas (2017–2020) Computer Science Teachers Association Annual Conference 2021 OSCON (2014-2018) Velocity (2016) MISCELLANEOUS

US Citizen Up to 100% travel Open to worldwide relocation Salary expectations are market competitive for the role

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