Software Quality Assurance, system administration, SRE, QA

Thomas Sasser

*** ******* **** ***** *** Francisco, CA 94132

571-***-**** **********@*****.***

Engineer

Linux and cloud problem solver. Experienced in system administration, quality assurance, and operations support.

Intellectually curious technical troubleshooter ensuring reliability, availability and performance of systems.

Streamlines testing, deployment and monitoring of systems by creating automation tools.

Team player who works closely with development teams to identify and resolve problems.

Technical:

Agile, Analytics, Ansible, API, Application Deployments, Application Performance Monitoring, Automations, CI/CD, Configuration Management, Confluence, CRUD, DevOps, Development Tooling, Diagnostic Tooling, Documentation, Golang, Incident Resolution, Installations, Internal Stakeholder Relations, Jenkins, Jira, Microservices, On-Call, Perl, Point of Escalation Contact, Puppet, Python, OpenStack, Quality Assurance, Quality Solutions, Reliability, Root Cause Analysis, Scalability, Scripting, SDLC, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Software Quality, System Administration, Team Training, Tech Support, Testing, Troubleshooting, Usability

ENGINEERING EXPERIENCE

Blue Origin

Reston, VA

Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, 12/2022–11/2023

Brought software quality to Blue Origin development teams.

Responsible for creating and implementing software quality department at Blue Origin for its MES platform.

Wrote policy documents to guide software development teams in adding software quality to processes.

Performed technical analysis of current processes and recommended changes to insert QA in a staged manner.

Evaluated software testing suites through POC including Parasoft and Tricentis.

Performed UAT and integration testing.

Comcast

Reston, VA

Quality Assurance Engineer, 4/2019–12/2022

Drove software quality for the Gears platform controlling internal tools and millions of IOT devices.

Performed software requirements analysis, created test strategy, test plans and test cases for the Gears team. Interface with development team to determine business requirements and

Automate test cases using Golang, godog, Selenium, Selenium IDE, and Java.

Run automated tests from Jenkins and generate reports.

Additional duties included daily and/or oncall support. Continually update documentation.

Senior Product Development Engineer, 5/2017–4/2019

Provided quality operations engineering support

Provided 24x7 operations support for the ACE-CLU DevOps Team the ACE Console application framework.

Managed Docker swarm and migrated to AWS EC2 and ECS for staging and production environments.

Used Ansible 2.x and scripts for deployments. Other tools included Nagios, Puppet, Jenkins, Git, python, bash, VMWare, Prometheus, Grafana and standard Linux tools.

Senior Engineer for OpenStack SRE, 6/2016-4/2017

Managed and operated Comcast’s private OpenStack cloud

Managed over 22,000 instances across 2,400+ hosts using a combination of technologies including Ansible, Puppet, git, docker, Splunk, and Elastic stack.

Troubleshot common problems with various tools. Problems with compute nodes, volume management, firewalls, hardware failures, networking, basic Ceph issues, and images.

Created custom monitoring solutions in shell and Python.

Created and deployed base images, managed tenants and users.

Trained onboarding team members in policies and procedures.

Senior Engineer, 1/2010–6/2016

Site Reliability Engineering supporting Comcast’s Video on Demand services

Provided 24x7 operations support for dozens of services within the VOD product. Supported all aspects of hardware and software.

Automated processes with Perl, bash, Puppet and Ansible including hardware updates to software deployment.

Monitored systems with Nagios and migrated to statistics based alerting with Prometheus, Alerta, and Splunk.

Designed and deployed custom log storage solution with Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (ELK).

Developed operational standards used by development teams to work with the UDB environment.

Trained and mentored new team members.

AOL

Ashburn, VA

System Administrator, 4/2005-4/2009

Administered AOL’s DNS systems

Provided DNS services to AOL internal and external clients. Common tasks were change requests to support client projects, switch configuration and backup, and management of 14,000+ domains.

Coded, debugged and tested bash and Perl programs to support maintenance and modification of DNS systems.

Troubleshot DNS problems including logged errors, recursion and network issues.

Maintained and upgraded RHEL and CentOS servers.

Configured, tested and maintained GSLB on Foundry switches.

Built DNS test lab and optimized BIND 9.x by writing testing scripts to compile and test thousands of configurations.

Documented common tasks and updated existing procedures.

Trained NOC analysts in DNS concepts and procedures. Mentored new team members.

IBM

Herndon, VA

System Administrator, 2005-2006

Supported company development lab servers

Supported Language Analysis Systems’ (IBM) development lab servers. OS included Linux, Windows 2000, AIX and Solaris 9 and 10.

Eastport Analytics

Rosslyn, VA

Linux and Windows System Administrator, 2004-2005

Supporting office IT needs

Administered all aspects of IT operations of a heterogeneous network environment. Supported 30 Windows XP workstations and Windows 2000 and Linux server environment. Deployed, maintained and updated Windows and Linux OS.

Postfix, DNS/BIND 9, Apache, Oracle 9i, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, WebFocus 5.2.x, SuSE OpenExchange 4.1, VisuaLinks, CVS and other tools.

Secure Elements

Herndon, VA

Quality Assurance Engineer/Sales Engineer, 2003-2004

Implemented software quality to a startup’s security application

Developed test plans and cases from business requirements for Secure Elements’ vulnerability detection and remediation application.

Executed tests and communicated results to engineering team.

Supported sales team in a technical advisory role and deployed systems at customer sites.

Visa

McLean, VA

Technical Operations Support Analyst – 2002

Verified client interactions with Visa

Software quality and operations hybrid role ensuring client systems properly interact with VisaNet Access Points. Work directly with clients to ensure transactional correctness.

Configured QNX transaction servers and resolved hardware and software problems. Ensured network connectivity.

Tested client financial transactions for compliance with ISO 8583 and Visa standards.

Documented installation and testing processes, including database audit procedures.

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Arts in History

1993

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University - Blacksburg, VA

Master of Arts in Equine Science

1998

Sul Ross State University – Alpine, TX

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