KEVIN TAYLOR

**** ****** ***** **. ******, TX ***48 214-***-**** ad2e9i@r.postjobfree.com

Technology Executive w/ DevOps, Cloud Native, FinOps, and FinTech Expertise Professional Services●FinOps●DevOps● Cloud Native Architecture ● Site Reliability Engineering ● Security ● Compliance Key Examples of Success:

Built and scaled a DevOps Services Delivery

Organization to 20x headcount growth in less than

two years, tripling revenue year-over-year

Led technical and information risk management

efforts which resulted in the very first approved use of Public Cloud to move money for a Top 5 Bank

Led a cross-functional team responsible for over a $23MM book of business in managed hosting to

repeat positive year-over-year current customer

revenue growth and consistent world-class marks

for customer experience

Experience creating and maturing technology

organizations for early-stage companies, having

carried multiple companies from formative stages to key milestones like an exit event or capital raise

Expertise leading technology organizations that

must meet l requirements and controls for multiple compliance standards, including PCI DSS, HIPAA,

HiTrust, SOC 2, Sarbanes-Oxley, and SEC

Broker/Dealer Rules for Electronic Records

Built a FinOps service offering and delivery

organization that optimized Cloud spend for our

SaaS and FinTech clients, saving millions of dollars CORE COMPETENCIES

Business Technical Leadership

● Managing services delivery ● Kubernetes and Cloud Native ● Customer Service Excellence

● Scaling a high-growth tech org ● DevOps & SRE Best Practices ● Coaching and Mentoring

● Compliance Management ● AWS/Cloud Infrastructure ● DevOps methodology

● Risk Management/Mitigation ● Advanced Networking ● Talent Eval & Development

● FinOps and Cloud Cost Mgmt ● Linux and Unix ● Organizational Development CREDENTIALS

Background and Experience

· 27 years of experience in Information Technology

· 19 years management experience

· 10 years working in Consulting/Professional Services

· 23 years of experience with Unix/Linux Platforms

· 12 years of experience with Microsoft Platforms

· 14 years of experience with Networking Hardware

Industry Certification

· FinOps Certified Practitioner, FinOps Foundation

· AWS Certified Solution Architect (Associate), Amazon Web Services

· CISSP, Certified Information Systems Security Professional – ISC2

· RHCE, Redhat Certified Engineer – AS/ES3, RH9

· LPIC, Linux Professional Institute Certified (SuSE track)

· CCNA, Cisco Certified Network Associate - Routing and Switching Have also completed the CCNP Routing exam, 2014.

· MCSE, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer – NT4

· SCSA, Sun Certified Systems Administrator - Solaris

· MCNE, Novell Master CNE - Netware 4.x track

Education and Training

· 1998-2003 - Columbia Southern University, Major: Computer Science

· 1996-1997 - Richland College, Major: Computer Information Systems

· 2015 - Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) Training, ISC2

· 2014 - CCNP Route and Switch, Cisco Networking Academy

· 2005 - R.E.A.L. Leadership, IPG

· 2004 - MySQL CORE and PRO DBA training for MySQL 4.x, MySQL AB

· 2003 - RedHat RHCE training,, RedHat, Inc.

· 1998 - Microsoft MCSE training, NT4, IIS, Azilan Solutions, Inc.

· 1996 – Novell CNE/Master CNE training, Netware 4.x, New Horizons PROFESSIONAL NARRATIVE

Exstratus 3800 N Lamar Blvd #200 Austin, TX 78756 1/2022 to present Head of Cloud Services

Job Responsibilities – Overall leadership of the services delivery organization and ownership of practice and offering development for our service portfolio. Our flagship service is delivering a full-scope FinOps Program, including the staff, tools, and proven best practices that combine to make that program successful. This makes both an immediate impact by identifying and taking action on cloud cost optimization opportunities, but also builds the tools, staff/leadership visibility, and cultural change to make long-term improvements in decision–making around Cloud spending and value creation. Role Highlights:

FinOps Practice Development – Led a pivot and offering expansion from our legacy work doing cloud cost optimization for AWS, GCP, and Azure to one where we delivered full-scope FinOps services which combined certified FinOps Practitioners, Cloud Architects, and Cloud Analysts together to drive usage, rate, and architectural optimizations for clients. Built structured processes and procedures to support delivery consistency utilizing Coda. Our FinOps Programs saved our clients millions in AWS, GCP, Azure, and SaaS tool spend (e.g. DataDog, Splunk.) Pre-Sales and Speaking – Work with our Marketing and Sales teams to develop offering collateral and speak directly with customers as part of our pre-sales engineering and assessment efforts. Participated in development and delivery of webinar talks with industry partners on FinOps thought leadership. Platform and Tools Development – Led efforts to select and build new platform and tools capabilities to support our expanded FinOps offering, including cloud cost and usage data loading into Google BigQuery and development of visualization capabilities using GoodData as a business intelligence and visualizations tool. Built numerous automations against GoodData APIs to facilitate GitHub-based and CLI-based interactions to manage client data and dashboards. Caylent 500 N Central Expy, Suite 500-188 Plano, TX 75074 4/2019 to 12/2021 Chief Technology Officer (7/21-12/21)

Job Responsibilities – Focused on the technical direction and external-facing technical work of the company, including our technical marketing efforts, driving new offering development, partnerships/alliances enablement, M&A due diligence, and thought leadership advocacy. Work with software ISVs in the Cloud Native ecosystem to establish partner program relationships around key capabilities like Security, Observability, Compliance, Disaster Recovery, and Risk Management. Role Highlights:

New Offer Development – Work with our Marketing and Pre-Sales staff to bring to market new offers around Cloud cost optimization, Compliance Readiness Gap Assessment for SOC 2, and getting our AWS Control Tower offer in place for us to be a launch partner for the “Built on Control Tower” program for Re:Invent 2021. Caylent University – With our rapid growth, a key to scaling our business was tied to our ability to increase the talent pipeline and have more capable Engineers capable of working with cutting edge technologies like Kubernetes, GitOps, Terraform, Data Engineering, Cloud Native Application development, and AI/ML. As part of our mid-term and long-term plans, we wanted to develop a world-class learning & development function focused on these areas of specialty to allow us to hire more people based upon their aptitude and potential and train them in the hard-to-find skills we specialize in. Vice President, Engineering (4/19-7/21)

Job Responsibilities – Building the DevOps Organization and the Delivery Model for the leading specialist in Acceleration of DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure managed for businesses looking to adopt Cloud Native Architecture and Best Practices. This includes helping accelerate adoption of key technologies like Kubernetes, ECS, Serverless, GitOps, Infrastructure-as-Code, and Cloud Engineering on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Caylent Services are delivered primarily via an agile co-delivery model where Pods of Caylent DevOps Engineers and Architects embed directly into our customer’s engineering organizations to design, deliver, and operate the technologies needed to support their Cloud Native journey. We helped dozens of customers adopt these Best Practices and Patterns while leveraging cutting-edge implementation of technologies like Kubernetes and related technologies like AWS, Terraform, AWS CDK, CI/CD and GitOps using tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI, ArgoCD / Argo Rollouts, Weave Flux / Flagger, and Infrastructure GitOps with tools like Terraform Cloud and Atlantis.

Role Highlights:

Driving Sales Success – Worked as the main partner of our early Sales organization to close all of our early business wins and contributed to the creation of our SOW process and delivery transition and planning. Brought my perspective of running a SaaS Software business with unique compliance requirements to our many customer prospects who are trying to tackle similar challenges while also trying to find a path to adopting Cloud platforms and Cloud Native architectures for their organizations.

Developed a Successful DevOps-as-a-Service Offering – Successfully created and refined an offering for DevOps Service Delivery which successfully targeted needs of technology and software organizations spanning early stage companies to business units from the Fortune 500 who desire to accelerate their adoption of Cloud Native or Serverless technologies and tools. This service offering drove the majority of our growth, growing over 20x within 2 years and enabling us to triple revenue for two straight years, generating strong monthly recurring revenue and long-term customer relationships backed by consistently high customer satisfaction results.

Developed a new Security & Compliance Governance Offering – Successfully created and launched a new service offering helping our customers achieve SOC2 compliance through a combination of compliance readiness assessment, address gaps in compliance through DevSecOps implementation, and handle all aspects of the ongoing compliance governance and evidence collection heavy lifting using our Security and Compliance team. Successfully captured new revenue streams from existing customers to complement our flagship DevOps service. Developed a new Alert Response and On-Call Service Offering – To help customers with after-hours site reliability requirements, create a new offering providing an opinionated Alert Response service which helps customers adopt Monitoring/Alerting/Observability best practices to make an effective approach to platform Availability which is sustainable for both early-stage and established software organizations. We backed this up with a dedicated technical team staffed around the clock in a follow-the-sun staffing model. ModoPayments, LLC 204 S. Cottonwood Dr. Richardson, TX 75080 7/2016 to 4/2019 CIO and Chief Cloud Architect (12/16-4/19)

Job Responsibilities – Leadership of the Technology Operations organization, with specific ownership of Cloud Architecture and Operations, Information Security, Software Build/Release, and PCI Compliance. As a FinTech company focused on payments, ModoPayments created a unique challenge of not only needing an advanced and maintainable Cloud Architecture but also one which met the stringent expectations of banking clients from a controls, processes/procedures, and information risk perspective.

Role Highlights:

Cloud Transformation – As Chief Architect of our AWS Cloud Architecture, I did a ground-up Cloud Infrastructure design utilizing AWS native services and full automation of infrastructure using Cloud Formation, custom automation using lambda functions, and native AWS coding using the boto3 python library. At the conclusion of this effort, new AWS environments capable of running our software platform of 8 codebases, 4 queues, 3 databases, KMS / HSM encryption, fully integrated security groups and IAM policies, with complete web/e-mail filtering could be provisioned in 19 minutes using only the contents of a git repository. This effort leveraged many technologies including EC2, ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, RDS, Amazon Aurora, KMS, CloudHSM, VPCs with VPC peering, Route 53, IAM, Lambda, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, API Gateway, SNS, SQS, Kinesis, and ElasticSearch. This transformation also extensively involved the integration of tools like Threat Stack, Automox, and Pagerduty to create the controls and governance our clients demanded of us, while still having a solution that supported a vision of immutable deployments. IAM Integration Project – To meet some of our controls objectives without burying ourselves in duplication of effort, we created a consolidated approach to authentication, authorization, and identity which significantly improved the quality of our security controls and reduced duplication of effort while virtually eliminating all risk of manual change omission in secondary systems. This end-to-end effort allowed us to store user ssh public keys with IAM users in a central AWS account, and dynamically authorize user access to any AWS account under our control, access any authorized instance deployed using our automated templates, or to pull code using git from codecommit according to the access granted them in IAM policies. On the instance, we even had account-by-account, environment-by-environment control of the privileged commands granted to that group based upon their role and type of environment it housed (such as allowing developers to restart services only in sandbox or integration environments, but not staging or production). All of this leveraged AWS APIs, policies, and customization at the EC2 Metadata and Elastic Beanstalk .ebextensions layers, without relying on a outside configuration management tool like puppet or ansible to manage the access. It also enabled easy enforcement of MFA in AWS, as we could make AWS Console login, IP-level access to Bastion servers, and authorization to do git pulls and pushes all tie back to the same Virtual MFA device for a single user. Bank of America Digital Disbursements Project – Led the Cloud Architecture efforts to support a digital disbursements project for Bank of America, enabling them to deliver contracted payments to end beneficiaries using digital payments methods such as PayPal or AliPay. This required our Cloud Infrastructure to be extended in several ways to meet the unique Information Security and Risk requirements of the bank. We had to introduce support for HSMs (using SafeNet-based CloudHSM) to house sensitive key material, implement TLS mutual authentication to protect sensitive API interactions, and introduce queuing and asynchronous processing into our solution to facilitate increased availability and new options for achieving greater scale. A highlight of this effort was taking our organization and architecture through Bank of America’s vendor assessment and due diligence process which resulted in zero findings. Build/Release Tooling Overhaul – In concert with our Cloud Transformation, I moved all software build/release from a traditional Jenkins build server to a cloud utility approach using Amazon CodeBuild and TeamCity for software builds, and combinations of Docker/ECS, Lambda, and CodePipeline for automated deployments and deploy-time data migrations. Kubernetes/EKS Infrastructure PoC – In preparation for efforts to move our deployment model to containerization, built a fully-automated provision template which incorporated all of our information security controls from current Cloud Architecture which met the security expectations of large banking and payments industry clients and partners, while providing an EKS Kubernetes-based compute layer.

Healthmine, Inc. 2911 Turtle Creek Blvd #1010 Dallas, TX 75219 7/2016 to 12/2016 Director, Technical Operations (7/16-12/16)

Job Responsibilities – Responsible for all Server, Network, and Cloud Infrastructure for the company and provided leadership to all associated personnel, while ensuring we meet HIPAA standards for handling of PHI and similar sensitive data. Oversaw the Application Support organization who worked directly with client staff on platform issues, and ensured the delivery of accurate and responsive service to our clients and their staff. Handled client due-diligence for information risk, and managed the IT needs of staff spread across multiple offices across the country. Worked heavily to improve the velocity and transparency of our DevOps and Configuration Management efforts which had become an organizational roadblock, and worked to remove unnecessary silos to bring key DevOps staff closer to the Systems Engineering team to tighten their integration and spread the workload across all parties more effectively. Fujitsu America, Inc. 2821 Telecom Parkway Richardson, TX 75082 4/2016 to 7/2016 Offering Manager (4/16-7/16)

Job Responsibilities – Primary responsibilities focused on bringing both the Openstack-based K5 Cloud platform to North America along with our Hybrid IT Offerings for helping Enterprise organizations leverage the best mix of Cloud, Managed, and traditional Data Center IT throughout their environment to maximize their IT ROI. Worked on the business investment case for K5, specifically around both the cloud architecture itself, the implementation project plan and staff resource plan to deploy it, and ensuring a complete and suitable bill of materials is finalized to complete the cost side of the case. In addition, worked on initial plans for our Implementation Team which will handle customer onboarding and PoC engagements related to the K5 platform.

Envestnet Placemark 16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 700 Addison, TX 75048 10/2014 to

12/2015

Vice President, Technology Operations (10/14-12/15) Job Responsibilities – Following an acquisition by Envestnet Asset Management, in addition to overall IT responsibility for the Envestnet Placemark business unit listed under prior roles below, took on increasing IT Project workload for the larger, multinational organization of over 1,100 employees and 14 offices. Our Systems Engineering team was tasked with several strategic, cross-departmental projects which had previously been mired in execution stagnation and put them on a path to realizing their ultimate business value.

Role Highlights:

Cloud Infrastructure and Automation – Spearheaded a research effort to evaluate feasibility to move from traditional separate hardware and virtualization platforms and onto a more dynamic private cloud model built upon Openstack, and leveraging our earlier work on DevOps to marry the configuration management and automation capabilities from Ansible and our earlier work in DevOps with new Openstack Cloud capabilities. Built out a Lab POC and architectural model to leverage a shift to 10g ethernet everywhere to underpin the infrastructure and how to establish best mix of traditional hardware network functions alongside cloud-native NFV capabilities within the Openstack ecosystem. Post-Acquisition Integrations – While being a company that builds their platform and capabilities through acquisition, the organization had struggled to integrate those acquisitions effectively. We took over responsibility for putting the two most recent acquisitions on the path to integration success, including connecting new offices, deploying enterprise server infrastructure, leading office and phone system migrations/consolidations, migrating critical data as required, and putting acquired firms on the path to policy adherence and regulatory compliance. Help Desk Ticketing System – Migrated a help desk organization servicing over 1,100 seats from doing support out of a shared Exchange mailbox and moved them into a SAManage ticketing system, implementing email-based ticketing, a web-based ticket portal, integrated change workflow, help desk asset tracking, and a self-service system for common requests. After over two years of failed efforts to migrate to such a system, our Systems Engineering team facilitated the migration with just a two-month project effort.

Placemark Investments 16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 700 Addison, TX 75048 10/2005 to

10/2014

Vice President, Technology Operations (6/10-10/14) Director, Technology Operations (10/05-6/10)

Job Responsibilities – Leadership of the Department responsible for all IT Operations for the firm, including all server, network, and storage resources and supporting personnel. Managed a team of Systems Engineers, Systems Administrators, Oracle DBAs, and Helpdesk staff. Led all Corporate IT initiatives, and worked with C-level leadership to align technology efforts around key business and security needs of the organization. Worked tightly with Software Development and Application/Data Support Teams to manage production releases for both application releases and data model updates. Role Highlights:

DevOps Initiative – Led a department-wide effort to modernize our approach to software release and infrastructure management to adopt modern DevOps practices. Building upon our Agile Development practices, we adopted Continuous Integration concepts of having several environments: a dev environment, an integration environment for story/branch merge testing and internal QA, a staging environment for production release dress-rehearsal and external UAT, in addition to production. We moved code releases from being checked-out from git by hand by developers to utilizing an automated build system based upon Jenkins; from manual provisioning and configuration to utilizing software configuration management/infrastructure as code tools. After a proof of concept using several tools like puppet, chef, and saltstack we arrived at using a combination of Vagrant and Ansible, version-controlled with git. To round-out the solution, we had to build an integration mechanism to give us an environment-friendly approach to data management. This was built leveraging capabilities within the EMC VNX to instantiate new Oracle DB instances from point-in-time snapshots and rolling those forward per-environment based upon the current set of stories and related data model changes for the active iteration (for integration), and only for those expected to be on the approved release list following UAT (for staging). High-Potential Talent Development Program – Spearheaded an initiative to seek high-potential, “best and brightest” talent with a high degree of career potential. The tight market for SysAdmin talent at the time was providing very poor quality candidates for the dollar, so instead we took a different approach – evaluate them on purely potential-based criteria regardless of their prior skill sets or background. The best of these were put through an accelerated “bootcamp” program. This approach was wildly successful, yielding us outstanding candidates who went on to be high performing Engineers and take on greater responsibilities over time.

Corporate Relocation - Planned and managed a very successful move of our corporate headquarters to new offices, including all users and mission-critical system and network resources, resulting in minimal business disruption. Deeply involved in workspace design and handled vendor relationships for the build-out of IT infrastructure at our new corporate headquarters, including industrial-grade UPS power, new data/telecom cabling plant, redundant HVAC systems for on-site server and telecommunications, and two-factor access control systems for all entry points and at locations housing sensitive information within our offices.

Project Management – Introduced a new project management system and reporting approach inspired by Agile methodologies most commonly used in software development environments, but applied uniquely to meet the challenges of General IT Project management. Results of the internal initiative improved productivity over 30% at same head-count without significant up-take in after-hours work on a monthly basis. This improved departmental transparency into IT operations, and enabled us to deliver projects of most value to the business with greater timeliness and effectiveness. Budget/Vendor Management – Managed the IT Systems and Services Budget for the company totaling over $1M USD per annum. I oversaw all key vendor relationships for server, storage, networking equipment, as well as telecom/internet connectivity, production co-location, and general IT/telecommunications contractor services. Disaster Recovery – Oversaw the development of a new Disaster Recovery Capability and the architecture and deployment of a suite of new technology tools, processes, and controls to enable them. This initiative also delivered the ability to test and do proof of concepts against full-capability replicas of our entire environment which are wholly contained within a simulated environment. This shifted our approach to disaster recovery from being highly dependent on hands-on intervention, and moved it to a more automated process involving offsite replicas of our production environment, including networking, SAN Storage, Oracle RAC databases, VDI, server virtualization, and network security all within a small time window.

Rackspace Managed Hosting 9725 Datapoint Dr. #100 San Antonio, TX 78229 8/2002 to 7/2005 Professional Services Manager – Rackspace Solutions Linux/Unix Team Manager – SMB Segment

Role Highlights – Launched the company's first professional services unit, Rackspace Solutions, and managed day-to-day operations and strategic direction for our billable and contract technical services team (both linux and microsoft), as well as mentoring and acting as a technical resource for junior linux team members. While directing Rackspace Solutions, we expanded the reach of the company into new areas, adding new offerings around data migration services, database administration services, custom scripting services, and custom disaster recovery solutions. Also during my time at Rackspace, I held the role of Linux Team Manager for the SMB segment, where I ran a $23m/yr business servicing the full internet hosting needs of over 1400 customers while leading a team of 35 people comprised of linux/unix system administrators, account managers, billing specialists, network security specialists, and customer service reps. Working directly for the visionary behind the “Fanatical Support” concept, where I was part of the management team which reinvented a company’s approach to service, talent management, performance management, and its impact on the bottom line. My team was a part of a service organization which started out with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of -11

(typical for the hosting industry at that time), and by my final scorecard as team manager, had our group delivering a NPS of

+64.4. That is a world-class score for any B2B organization, and head and shoulders above all competition in the industry at the time. This translated into a low-turnover, energized customer base which allowed our teams’ revenue to grow month-over-month from current clients before calculating in even a single new client coming in from the sales organization. SELECT PRIOR EXPERIENCE:

Compaq Global Services Technology Consultant (Linux) 2001-2002 As a member of the Compaq Global Services team, handled technical engagements with corporate clients delivering Consulting, deployment, training, and technical analysis services for key business clients with projects utilizing Linux platforms. Worked on High Performance Computing Engagements involving Linux, including a Proof-of-Concept Beowulf cluster on Myrinet fabric and DEC Alpha hardware running RedHat for the U.S. Army Research Labs at Aberdeen. SuSE Linux, Inc. Professional Services Consultant, (Linux and Systems Integration) 2000-2001 Worked for one of the Linux Industry Leaders in SuSE, and was hired as one of the first Professional Services personnel for SuSE Linux in North America, helping build and launch the consulting practice. Worked on customer technical engagements, did Linux solution implementations, as well as functioning as a customer-facing member of the trade show team.

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