Director, Site Reliability Engineering

Rick Rader

Angleton, TX***** 832-***-**** **********@*******.***

Professional Summary

Proactive, highly analytical and experienced transformational leader who thrives in a fast-paced environment, is agile to evolving business and technology challenges, and passionate in exceeding expectations and guiding the team to make an overall impact. It is rewarding to be a hands-on leader at any level that is required for the overall solution to be successful.

I have in-depth understanding and experience designing and supporting large and complex distributed systems, improving application performance, stability, security, scalability, and high velocity code delivery. Always taking pride in delivering and supporting business critical applications, I have become an expert in managing relationships with internal and external stakeholders to deliver solutions that add value and offer maximum return on investments. My experience and ability to motivate and manage a global team enables me to be an effective resource for any organization.

Skills

SCM Tools: Github, Azure repos, AWS CodeCommit

CI CD Tools: Rundeck, Github Actions, Docker, Terraform

GitOps Tools: Keptn, Checkov, Terraform, Litmus, ArgoCD

Programming/Scripting Languages: C, C#, Python, shell, batch

Incident Management & Backlog tools: Jira,Pivotal Tracker, AWS backlog, PagerDuty, Rundeck

Operating Systems: Windows Server, Linux

Cloud Technologies: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure

Databases & Storage: DynamoDB, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, Prometheus,S3, Kafka

Monitoring and Log Analytics: Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Distro

Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services,Microsoft Azure

OpenSource: OpenTelemetry, OpenGitOps, OpenAPI, OpenAI (ChatGPT, AgentGPT, AutoGPT, …)

Core Skills:

●DevOps, GitOps, AIOps, DataOps Engineering

●Site Reliability, Observability, and Platform Engineering

●Change Management and Incident Management

●AWS Solutions Architect

●Kubernetes, Docker, GitHub, Terraform,ArgoCD, Datadog

●IT Strategy and Budget Planning

●Solutions Development

●Service Delivery Management

●Technical Program Management

●Leadership with a passion for coaching, mentoring, and accountability

●Deep understanding of the value of both Exploitation and Exploration

●Digital Transformation

Certifications:

●ITIL V3

●Digital Transformation

●Agile PM Foundation

●GitOps (ArgoCD)

●DataOps Methodology

●VMware Certified Associate

Work History

Director, Site Reliability Engineering, 03/2022 - Current

Prime Trust – Las Vegas, NV (Remote)

●Recruit and retain high-caliber talent to deliver the best SRE and Platform engineering practices that align with the well-architected framework for operational excellence

●Work closely in a collaborative and collective effort with other engineering leaders and stakeholders to align our roadmap goals with the overall technical strategy and vision of the company

●Conduct post-mortems with the object of learning and improving RCA, blast radius, duration, and correction of errors (CoE)

●Leading, mentoring and coaching a remotely distributed team in accordance with SRE practices and principles with an agile mindset. This includes focusing on creating highly reliable, observable, and scalable systems, while maximizing engineering team delivery velocity.

●Lead the creation of a strategic vision for modern DevOps, DevSecOps & GitOps automation, focusing on quality gates in the CI/CD pipeline, Incident Management, and Operations problem remediation

●Lead the multiphase approach of defining and adopting SLOs, around a single agreed-to-objective with development and operations

●Work closely with engineering in the “Shift Left” approach to make sure resilience, security, and observability is baked into the initial phase of architecture and design of a service in the AWS public cloud

●Lead the team to modernize tooling around monitoring, reliability, scalability, developer experience, and CI/CD pipelines integration for Terraform code for provisioning of the Infrastructure

●Added openTelemetry to our end-to-end distributed tracing and observability services. This has provided more insight in to performance and behavior of our distributed systems

●Managed on-call incident management using Jira, PagerDuty-Rundeck automation, and AWS Systems Manager to ensure that our incidents are managed in a timely and efficient manner

●Lead as the moderator in the post mortems

●Experience in building data strategy pipelines using DataOps best practices to effectively manage, optimize, and maximize the value our data assets

●Work collaboratively to reduce costs within capacity planning by utilizing auto scaling methods, spot instances, and S3 Intelligence tiering

Director of Application Development, 10/2020 - 03/2022

Skyward Specialty Insurance – Houston, TX

Skyward Specialty Insurance - Oct 2020 – Mar 2022

●Managed a “follow the sun” Global Devops team, of talented engineers whose focus is to keep agility and stability in balance

●Developed and implemented a strategic plan for the adoption of Agile, DevOps, and SRE capabilities.

●A relentless pursuit of understanding the customer's needs and providing innovative and intuitive solutions to meet them

●Hands - on experience in Azure and AWS Cloud Services and continuous integration and deployment pipeline automation

●Created an online digital billing and payment system for brokers and agents that relied on tokenization and security best practices, with Azure Policy, API Management, PCI-Compliance, hosted on Azure using microservices

●Manage the SRE and NOC teams in implementing incident management and response playbooks processes for support issues

●Work with the DataOps engineering team to create data standards, following best practices and domain-driven design principles to create a self-server data platform

●Automaton of internal and external processes using Azure Pipelines, IoT, Functions and RPA services

●Led the team in the creation of an AI-powered telematics application for the transportation department to help find anomalies and predictive analytics to drive improved insured loss ratios

Director of Technology, 05/2019 - 10/2020

Martin Preferred Foods – Houston, TX

●Manage the continuous availability and evolution of MPF internal and customer facing applications and underlying infrastructure

●Provide career development, coaching and performance management for all team members

●Lead overseeing technical discovery and delivery from strategy and roadmap planning to project mobilization to implementation

●Added two site reliability engineers to our team in order to identify areas of our operations where resilience and reliability can be improved, who work closely with engineering, operations and our customer success team

●Worked with the Infrastructure team to move to a SD-WAN network design to create failover circuits at each branch office location

●Launched the company's first e-commerce platform on Azure for B2B and B2C in the food M&D industry

●Implemented a billing and payment module within the public cloud, leveraging security measures like tokenization to ensure PCI compliance

●Implemented EDW, RPA, and IOT in the M&D industry to streamline processes and improve visibility on the factory floor, provide huge savings in multiple areas within the organization

●Migration of ASP.NET customer portal, using a modular monolith architecture, to an Azure EKS managed service

●Implementation of Power BI as the company's business analytics service to replace a legacy reporting platform

Director of Software Engineering, 01/2014 - 03/2019

Myron Steves Insurance (Promoted) – Houston, TX

●Performed staff management activities, including interviewing, hiring, mentoring, and performance evaluations

●Managed complex technical projects, including changes and improvements to enable Myron Steves to continue the move to a PaaS cloud solution

●Hands-on development, management, and mentoring of high-performing engineering teams

●Developed a world-class cross-functional software development team capable of delivering complex software platforms of varying sizes and scopes

●Support process improvements that guide the development, sustaining and supporting activities following ITIL’s best practices

●Led the Infrastructure and supporting help desk team in improving our network design, high availability, and redundant backup strategy

●Led the prioritization of the product backlogs, using Pivotal Tracker

●Directed all stages from the initial selection of the move to the SaaS platform, architecture development, and verification to final product release

●Developed a commercial lines comparative rater, hosted in Azure and integrated with multiple carrier APIs

●Redesigned the companies Personal Lines policy issuance system into a modular architecture design

●Provided our custer base access to our API's for billing and claims data, using Swagger Open API

●Guided data analysts, and solutions engineers to produce dashboards the met the marketing needs for internal and our customers on a global scale

Application Developer Manager, 01/2010 - 01/2014

Myron Steves Insurance (Promoted) – Houston, TX

●Lead developer and solutions architect on many projects from planning, design, development, testing, and deployment of SDLC

●Agency dashboard for policies online access, integrated with the company's ERP system

●Designed and developed an authentication layer on MS SQL database fully integrated with other systems, Concept One and Image Right

●The total cost savings for this system exceeds $250,000 per year in printing, printing supplies, and mailing costs

●Agency & internal staff online bill pay system

●Integrated with bank web services and Concept One.

●Cuts down on steps internally saving the cost of one full-time staff

●Created billing and payments processed online system that integrated with internal and banking systems

●Uses Authentication token and SAML technologies, allowing multiple systems for customer ease of one login

●Online claims system that provided real-time data for our customers and business partners

●Integration with multiple carrier web services and Concept One to show real-time claims data

●Allows for Agents to submit a loss notice that is integrated with Concept One and Image Right

●iPad marketing solution

●Application integrated with Concept One, for real-time agency info and updates.

●HTML5 graphical interface of real-time YTD production data

●Certificate application

●Redesign of agency management functionality that had limitations

●Automated 7 steps into 1, saving internal staff 30 minutes per certificate

●Over 4000 certificates process yearly with the tool

●Built company and affiliate websites, as well as designed an in-house CMS tool that allows for 100% updating without code recompile

Senior Software Engineer, 01/2005 - 01/2010

Myron Steves Insurance – Houston, TX

●Developed a help desk ticketing system, used company wide

●Built numerous sub-company websites using .NET 2.0 - 3.0 technology

●Built secure environment for online rating systems using the new security & the membership framework in .NET 2.0

●Developed online applications that integrated with multiple back end systems

●Automated user process using .NET Window services

●Built extracting systems to export data in XML format to import into client systems.

Education

Bachelor of Science: Computer Science, 05/2001

Sam Houston State University - Huntsville, TX

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