Vice President Service Delivery

Joseph Whiting

Seattle, WA *****

267-***-**** (mobile) **********@*******.***

https://linkedin.com/in/josephwhiting

Summary

Professional Internet engineer with a passion for structure, process and organization. With deep roots in datacenter colocation facilities, I'm driven by high 9's, uptime and redundancy. It's the infrastructure challenges that keep me awake at night while my attention to training, documentation and procedure will help us all sleep. I measure my management effectiveness by the happy faces I've helped get promotions and Linked-in updates about careers I've helped start. I monitor everything, because you can't measure what you don't know. I apply statistical principles to nail SLA's and KPI's and I'm happy to chat about how I can help your business grow a successful front line.

Employment History

Atria Wealth Solutions / Cuso Financial Feb/2020-Present

Remote (Role based in Seattle)

Vice President: Technology Operations

Currently managing a production Devops/SRE for a web platform supporting financial advisors nationwide. Duties include overseeing service delivery, maintenance and administration of physical and virtual hardware the primary and DR datacenters. Atria’s network consists of vmware ESXi clusters, storage arrays and associated network equipment. The team I lead is responsible for:

End to end service delivery, deployment pipeline maintenance and deployment, IoC using tools like terraform and rundeck and slack integrations.

Daily Support for a ruby on rails application and 25 micro services written in node/angular. The application compiles a large CRM platform used by financial advisors linked to custodial holding companies, credit unions throughout the US.

Deployment pipeline management for segregated environments using open-source tools

Contractual management for external services and vendor relations

Monitoring and alerting for the entire platform, incident management and root cause analysis process.

Strategic planning for capacity planning and service/hardware obsolescence and staffing

During my time with CUSO and the Atria group I standardized the code deployment process for the ruby on rails application (Capistrano) and the nodejs (shipit) application sets. Standardization and automation enabled our developers to utilize slack commands to orchestrate deployments and step out of the deployment loop. Shifting left significantly increased the development velocity, unlocking capacity for not only end user requests but also uplifting technical debt. I also re-architected the disaster recovery solution and segmented exactly what is required for business continuity in the event of an on-prem failure. I had to address the accumulation of manual toil stemming from a disorganized deployment process, disorderly monitoring and alerting systems which initially required a contract staff of 6 to support. I was able to reduce the size of the team to only 2 engineers after reprioritizing development around high value processes. I onboarded LogicMonitor enterprise monitoring to replace opensource Zabbix/Graphana toolsets and deployed several instances of ELK in containers for consolidation of environment specific logs. I deployed custom dashboards for key performance metrics related to user report duration and report queueing depth.

Parametric Portfolio / Eaton Vance Wealth Management October/2017-Feb/2020

Seattle, WA

Associate Vice President,Sr. Manager: IT Applications - Production Operations

Managed 4 teams for Parametric's internal application division, including; database engineers, release management, application support team and linux middleware group. I am also a key contributor to strategy, process governance, and scripting. My team is responsible for organizing, planning and orchestrating large infrastructure growth projects such as an Active:Active datacenter migration, chef to octopus tooling migration and a vm to containerization initiative. I was a key contributor for large 3rd party (vendor supported) application deployments such as enterprise Hortonworks and enterprise MongoDB. Together with my direct reports, we maintain 50 individual production equivalent environments through an agile deployment lifecycle. I was heavily involved in the automation tooling, tech stack choices and worked closely with development to carve out success. Parametric ran over 40 custom windows applications, web services, API's and console apps to facilitate daily trading of over 360 billion dollars in assets. They used a mix of open-source tools and windows services to bundle and place orders on wall street via FIX lines I maintained.

Parametric Portfolio Associates November/2016-Oct/2017

Seattle, WA

Manager, IT Applications

Along with the responsibilities listed above, I am also directly involved in my team’s professional development, goal setting, conference choices and career advancement. I’ve created professional development plans with each of my team members to use in conjunction with the Parametric yearly review cycle. As a manager I meet one on one with my staff weekly, resetting targets to align with departmental priority. We also celebrated wins and successes, I’ve had the luxury of a team building and offsite meeting budget and I’ve was lucky enough to plan several events to build moral.

Parametric Portfolio Associates February/2016-Nov/2016

Seattle, WA

Lead Production Systems Operations

Responsible for daily product operations, monitoring, capacity planning for a mixed Linux/Windows tech stack. Linux tooling owner and Hadoop/Bigdata administrator.

Application Stack: Vsphere/Vcenter Esxi5 hypervisor, HAproxy, Couchbase, RabbitMQ, Ubuntu, CentOS7, & Hortonworks, Chef and Rundeck, Octopus Deploy.

Scripted environment scanning tooling which auto updates Nagios configs nightly.

Created scalable monitoring solution utilizing statsD, Graphite, Grafana and custom aggregation tooling (wmic, wql and freeTDS), Managed ELK stack integration and logging growth for performance initiatives

Built and maintained Hortonworks suite on virtual hardware backed by Dell M630 blade servers/M1000 chassis and Datrium flash arrays.

Utilized docker for all linux prototyping

Support for over 40 production environments mirrors for development teams, QA, UAT and individual developers

Responsible for twice weekly after hours code pushes, incident response and after incident retrospectives.

Facilitated chef-migration to octopus-deploy (windows) and chef to docker.

Set up patch management via ubuntu landscape,

Recrafted base images, modernized linux infrastructure (RabbitMq, Couchbase, HaProxy).

Management and administration of NyFix (ullink) integration with our proprietary OMS used for domestic trading and, Fidessa/Minerva operating our international trading platform.

Airbiquity.com Sept/2012-Feb/2016

Seattle, WA

Senior Systems Engineer.

Airbiquity is the global leader in vehicle telematics. My role was to support automotive manufactures in the data communication layer enabling drivers to utilize online services and apps. The service also provides convenience features like remotely locking their doors, checking the health of their electric cars via smartphone and in-car infotainment services like pandora and iHeartRadio. My primary focus was the functionality of the application’s api gateways that provided service to several white label cloud services in the US, European Union, South American, Oceania and Asian markets. I supported large OEM’s such as Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, Renault, alpine/pioneer and Royal-Dutch-shell’s freight logistics program.

Achievements while at Airbiquity included implementation of observability tools for monitoring the server performance as well as the throughput per vendor, I created dashboards, usage reports and gathered metrics in Splunk, Cacti and Hadoop that were used to reconcile billing disputes with the OEM’s.

Application Stack: Xenserver/Centos/Mysql/Jboss:

Opsview(distributed nagios) perl wrapped JSON/Jolokia and SNMP instrumentation

Cacti for visualization perl wrapped monitoring scripts

F5/Netscaler

Puppet/Splunk

Infrastructure ownership:

Hortonworks Hadoop/YARN deployment (10 nodes) administration and deployment

Flume/Hive administration, author of several map/reduce ETL jobs

Hortonworks test cluster for experimentation and learning, (3 nodes)

Migration of cent/jboss xen-virtualized application stack to a Kubernetes orchestrated docker container set on a bare metal cluster.

Core Components: Etcd, Flanneld, Kubernetes, Docker, cAdvisor, Heapster, Grafana and Rsyslog Also configured a Mesos/Marathon POC solution;

Xenserver automation via xe and perl, push button deployment and capacity autoscale, I Created xen deployment tool for virtual server creation and customization without xencenter(windows dependency) Core components: Anaconda, Kickstarrt, isolinux, Perl, Mysql

Graphite and realtime D3/Cubism horizon graphing for high visual density system metrics

Core components: Python3, D3.js, graphite, whisper, carbon

Accretive Technology Group January/2012-September/2012

Seattle, WA Sysadmin/DevOps

Holiday/Vacation role focused on building skills and deepening my understanding of a challenging network. I joined a small elite group of linux engineers functioning as a devops unit. I was tasked to alleviate the day to day routine for senior members, automate and document common procedures, capture process, build in efficiencies, train the onsite NOC staff on linux fundamentals and use of scripted tools we provided.

System and configuration management with Puppet

Managing high volume/high availability with LVS clustering

Samhain/Beltane file integrity monitoring and IDS

Splunk and syslog aggregation

Git/CVS/SVN management

Network Security and intrusion detection

Bigfishgames August/2010–December/2011

Seattle, WA NOC Manager

I was hired to staff, train and develop a 24x7 support operation team and operate through maturity. I was hands-on tuning alarms and consolidating various email notification systems to reduce volume and worked toward a quiet, stable environment. My team has a sharp focus on monitoring key infrastructure initiatives from high-level metrics such as: hourly revenue, download failure rate and customer complaint queue, to low-level metrics: disk usage, cpu, memory and load. I leveraged Nagios customization and Perl automation considerably to reduce our TTR. I implemented numerous procedural improvements, resulting in greater access to documentation and ease of use.

Highlights

Continuous focus on ITIL 'Continual Process Improvement' methodology.

Created custom PHP tools to support operational change management procedures (CAB) and ran daily meetings with prepared docket of production changes scheduled for the next 24 hours.

Owned postmortem follow-up after operational failures, addressed infrastructure weakness and methods of earlier detection.

Created documentation system for training tier 1 engineers for incident response. I linked processes and procedures directly to documentation that was attached to alarm emails for ease of use and auditing.

Nagios upgrade and re-deployment, I compiled with embedded Perl and Nagios event broker (NEB) database support for mysql database injection, PNP4Nagios graphing. Re-factored dependency structure and untangled contacts connected to legacy irrelevant hostgroups.

Wrote custom Nagios and Zenoss plug-ins and contributed/encouraged customization of community submitted checks in Perl, PHP and Shell.

Created scripts for automatic network discovery and Nagios configuration generation.

Created scripts for automatic Nagios service dependency creation.

Created custom checks for 3rd party API's and solved many challenging mechanized web action monitors.

Daily triage of 5 Request Tracker(RT) queues spanning all of technical operations, managed ticket closing initiative focused on re-scoping/de-scoping the operational backlog; resulted in over 2/3 reduction in open tickets.

Team responsible for adding new hosts to Cacti and researching new templates.

Managed all outside vendor communication (colocation, payment services, outsourced sales and CS tools).

Responsible for end-of-year performance reviews and upholding company values.

Responsible for tier 1 shift rotations and tier 2 (escalation) shift coverage.

Marchex March/2006–August/2010

Seattle, WA

Operation Center Manager (NOC/SOC)

Developed tier 1 team to support production operations for the Marchex PayPerClick platform, plane for operational capacity and growth. Detect systemic defects and manage root cause analysis process. It is my responsibility to ensure business rules and operational procedures are followed, recovery documentation exists and that staff is trained for all contingencies to keep high 9's.

Managed Tier 1 24/7/365 production operations support team.

Mentored and trained Linux SA staff of 6, wrote performance reviews and set yearly goals.

Provided stretch goals and training opportunities for all shifts.

Prioritized short and long-term tasks/projects for both myself and our group.

Acted as troubleshooting, escalation and process advisor 24/7.

Supported the scaling growth of Marchex products by setting monitoring and alarming initiatives around KPI and performance thresholds.

Ensured corporate, production and network infrastructure problems were acknowledged with estimated times to recover, created hourly update and postmortem analysis processes to be followed by the company at large. * Designed and built all NOC automation and reporting tools that integrated with Nagios, RT ticketing and Cacti/rrd.

Maintained Linux systems and Marchex software in accordance with industry best practices, focused on performance, growth and scalability.

Assisted in production application deployments, maintenance; facilitated production emergency conferences and executive communication.

Managed all user access to production systems, databases and colocations; delivered audits for SOX compliance quarterly.

Automated a process to ensure all terminated users were removed from disparate systems, databases and product UI's within SOX-mandated time frames.

Provided weekly forum for problem management meetings focusing on root cause analysis and lessons learned.

Defined metrics to drive reduction in MTR and MTF.

Ad-hoc Debian administration and scripting code reviews.

Achievements at Marchex.com

Awarded yearly Tebelskis Award for 80% reduction in application downtime.

Sponsored 2 successful 8-week documentation contests.

Developed automated shift reporting scripts in Perl and Shell. Zero team attrition.

Motorola June/2005–March/2006

Seattle, WA

NOC Lead Systems Analyst

As the NOC member on board, I created onboarding and training procedures for the emerging team

Monitored proprietary Motorola content delivery service (Screen 3) for cellular providers.

Relied heavily on Unix Shell/Perl scripts and HP open view to verify service availability.

Onboarded HP OpenView and defined service thresholds and dashboards.

Developed automated availability metric reports and customizable charts for management team.

Integrated metrics with HelpStar trouble ticketing system.

Responsible for scheduling 24/7/365.

Microsoft + VMC May/2004–June/2005

Santa Clara, CA / Canyon Park, WA

Datacenter Technician: Shift Lead

Shift Lead and manager responsible for approximately 30,000 Microsoft servers, SAN storage and network infrastructure for properties like Hotmail, PassPort, MSN and MSNTV to Microsoft.com.

Trained new staff members and other daily shift-related processes, including documentation, procedural implementations, tracking of ticketing queue and issue prioritization.

Installation, configuration, maintenance and troubleshooting of Solaris and Windows OS’ on bare metal, windows 2000 and Windows 2003 server clusters; setup software, hardware

Education

Masters of Science: Information Systems Management May/2019 – June/2020

Foster School of Business, University of Washington

Seattle, WA

Bachelor of Science: Information Systems & Technology Sept/1999 – June/2004

Drexel University

Philadelphia, PA

Certification

ITIL Foundation V3 (9/2011)

Contracts and Internships

Hewlett Packard + 7-11 Feb/2004–April/2004

Las Vegas, NV / San Francisco, CA

Project certified engineer – field technician

-I participated in the national 7-11 back office rollout. Replaced existing back office and critical gas pump equipment with HP products.

Bechtel/SAIC Yucca Mountain Project Sept/2003–Jan/2004

Las Vegas, NV

Jr. Actuate Developer, SQL programmer

-Principal Developer of Actuate e-reports, monitoring an extensive Corrective Action Program mandated by the US Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Committee. I owned Version updates, database maintenance diagramming, documentation and emergency troubleshooting.

Comcast Cable Communications Aug/2001–Sept/2002

Cherry Hill, NJ

Jr. Network Manager, Help Desk

-Aided in design, physical setup and service of the 24/7/365 Network testing lab mirroring the Comcast national cable modem network. Setup including all racks, lab hardware/equipment, servers, cabling.

Weblinc Aug/2000–Dec/2000

Philadelphia, PA

Web developer

-Developed dynamic HTML Web pages using Cold Fusion, SQL and JavaScript technologies.

United Refrigeration Aug/1999–May/2000

Philadelphia, PA

Jr. Windows Admin, Helpdesk

-Y2K upgrade team leader, performed all maintenance, troubleshooting, software evaluation and ad-hoc network configuration. I was responsible for backups, logon scripts and user education.

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