Will Sheldon

Personal Profile

A meticulous, motivated and highly competent professional with considerable experience realising corporate mission and vision through a process of developing and implementing enterprise strategy.

An innovative and resourceful IT professional with extensive technical experience, strong business analysis, software development and automation skills and a proven track record of meeting tight deadlines under pressure.

Summary of Qualifications

More than 20 years of multi-disciplinary enterprise operational IT experience.

11 years of management and full lifecycle project management experience in IT & Operations.

8 years of cloud, DevOps and automation experience with multiple fortune500 clients.

MBA (computing), PMI PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, SA Certified Scrum Master, CCNP, LFCE, MCSE, ITIL OSA, ISO 20000, [CompTIA A+; Network+; Security+] exp., NSTISSI-4011.

Career History

Infrastructure platform manager

Best Buy Canada Ltd., Burnaby, BC, Canada.

December 2015

To January 2017

Filling a senior manager role, reporting in to the director of infrastructure and managing a team of onshore and offshore staff I was on the hook for all physical & virtual servers, hardware, storage, backup, cloud and virtualization functions including strategy, new initiatives and operational support as well as budgeting and resourcing. It was our job to get infrastructure into the hands of the application support and development teams as quickly and painlessly as possible, I lead several hands-on automation projects to improve our service offerings. My team and I covered everything from the data centre M&E to the OS including timely patching, capacity planning and architecture. I supported core services like LDAP, clustering, cloud mgmt. & automation. I was also heavily involved in the architecture, SDLC definition and recruitment of a new CI/CD solution and DevOps team as e-commerce transitioned to agile (scrum) and adopted a more current operational toolchain.

Tools & Environment:

Infrastructure platform team of ~40 FTE 50/50% onshore/offshore; ~4000 servers across 6 DC’s.

Highly regulated PCI & SOX compliant ITIL managed environment.

70/10/20% Linux (RHEL), Solaris & Windows running over VMware, Xen, Hyper-v, KVM, zones, citrix and App-V

Puppet, Ansible, Jenkins, ELK, SCCM, SCOM, Satellite, Solarwinds, Zabbix, HP management tools, Service Now.

AWS Azure and google cloud; HP, Supermicro servers; EMC VMAX, HP 3par, Coho & Netapp; Cisco & brocade.

Projects of note:

Pioneered NoOPs stack offering developers direct infrastructure (git, jenkins, openshift, etcd, opennebula).

Lead infrastructure in the e-commerce team’s transition to agile project methodology (scrum).

Lead e-commerce infrastructure team in preparations & analysis for black Friday (peak load event for website).

Product owner role for continuous integration and deployment. IaaS, CaaS & PaaS solution implementation.

Implemented new hardware platform for VDI realizing 60% cost savings & 30% performance increase.

Brought responsibility for operational support back onsite, forecast cost reduction of $2m per annum, ROI in 10 months. Recruited (formed), stormed and normed new team of 22 onshore staff over an 8-month period.

Global IT Manager

Appnovation Technologies.

July 2013

To December 2015

Appnovation creates cloud based web solutions; clients include Google, Pfizer, Time Inc., Samsung, Disney & Intel. In this hands-on role with extensive cloud infrastructure architecture and automation (AWS, Azure, google, IBM, rackspace and more) I reported to the SVP of global operations and with the exec teams support I shepherded our systems, teams and budget through several iterations as the business rapidly expanded through Dunbar’s number and international deployment. Working directly with fortune500 clients, I founded the MS and product verticals, formalized our SDLC and defined and accelerated companywide global operational strategy, processes and infrastructure. My team and I, spread over 4 continents, leveraged agile and DevOps tools and process to take on client work, release management, security, support, site reliability and other functions. I also worked with clients in an architectural role collaborating to provide CI/CD/CO, SSO and cloud solutions as well as being a general cloud infrastructure, networking, security and IAM architect and consultant for the business.

Tools & Environment:

90% OS X, 5% windows, 5% Linux workstations. Linux (RHEL, debian; 95%) and windows (5%) servers.

Heterogeneous cloud environment, public and private with significant automation (Ansible, python, docker).

Google Apps, BlueJeans, Slack, Netsuite, OpenLDAP, Kerberos, Jenkins, git, Ansible, Asterisk, python, PHP.

Project based matrix organisational structure with the majority of projects following agile/scrum methodology.

Projects of note:

Built our internal private cloud, reduced IT operating costs by 80%. We achieved ROI in less than 6 months.

Growth & development of the IT function and team with a focus on building scalable highly reliable systems.

ISO27001 & ITIL service desk for MS and IT teams, bringing order to the chaos of ad-hoc requests and support.

Deployed and implemented 5 global physical sites from meeting rooms to microwaves and chairs to computers.

Lead low cost centre initiative to plan a MS engineering office in central / south America and developed offshore MS strategy, which included spending lots of time speaking Spanish poorly in Airbnb shared accommodation.

Information Technology & Infrastructure Manager

TEC The Education Company, BC, Canada.

February 2011

To July 2013

TEC (through its subsidiaries) offers post-secondary education across a wide range of subjects including electronic art, IT and healthcare. Filling a hands-on technical role reporting to the president we planned and implemented a variety of projects that continue to deliver significant, quantifiable value to the business including a custom distance education solution, a new LMS, network upgrade, SCCM deployment, VoIP project, new site rollout and more.

Tools & Environment:

Circa 2000 users and 10 physical sites spanning 4 time zones.

Windows 7 & 8, 2008R2 & 2012, Hyper-V, VMware; Mac OSX L, ML & server; Exchange 2007&10, Linux, HP, Dell & Supermicro; HP & Cisco network; Asterisk; PHP, RoR, jQuery.

Custom ERP, Moodle, Instructure canvas, Adobe connect, iOS & Android educational delivery.

Contract Technology Services Manager

Slant Six Games, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

October 2010

To January 2011

A 3-month contract. 20+ servers & 100+ staff to support along with several concurrent projects including Resident Evil, Racoon City in association with Capcom. This presented a fascinating insight into the gaming industry. My main responsibilities included maintaining operation of the IT estate, I also had the chance assist in defining enterprise IT policy as well as lead several infrastructure projects including a new end user compute platform rollout (win7), exchange cloud migration, render farm configuration and build pipeline design and deployment.

Tools & Environment:

Windows 2003 & 2008R2, Exchange 2003,7&10, BES, Centos 5.2, Vmware ESX3.5, Dell Servers & workstations, Dell Powervault, Openfiler, Brocade SAN, Linksys network, Sonicwall, Hansoft, perforce, incredibuild, Netvault backup.

Senior Systems Engineer / Technical Project Manager:

King’s College School Group, London, UK.

October 2005

To July 2010

KCS is a world-renowned school. KCSIT provide infrastructure, support & development services for five sites in a campus area network. Working in a team of 7 - 11 staff I successfully lead a wide range of projects for our 2000+ users. Primarily a Wintel environment for end users and 50/50 wintel/linux on the server side. With over 80 applications available to every workstation and a vast array of peripheral devices, maintaining a high level of security over a diverse array of mixed platform services was a rewarding challenge.

Tools & Environment:

Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, 2008(R2), Active directory, Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu, Asterisk, Philips Telecoms, Cisco, HP, 3com, ZyXel networking, HP, IBM, Supermicro servers, Netapp storage, vSphere 4, LAMP, PostgreSQL, LigHTTP, postfix, spam assassin, squid, snort, Samba, ISA 2004-6, Websense 6-7, MSSQL 2000,5 & 8, Exchange 2003, BES, Backup exec 9-2010, PHP, JS, Perl, TCL, AutoIT, Install shield, ORCA.

Interests

I like being outside. I enjoy hiking, I mountain bike from time to time and I recently started CrossFit (it’s OK, I’m not one of the ones that go on and on about it all the time). I love good cinema, especially northern European stuff. I contribute in a minor way to one or two open source software projects (or I used to.. 2009 is a long time ago). I like to keep abreast of current scientific achievements, my feedly is full of science and tech news as well as a lot of security stuff. I read books, mostly sci-fi for fun. Recently I subscribed to a mooc, a Stanford course about algorithm design and since my Central American adventure I’ve been trying to learn Spanish (It’s not going so well). Oh, I guess I should also mention that I’m both a British and Canadian citizen so I can work almost anywhere in the world without any issues.

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