Network Architect Direct Support

Christian Paul

*********@*****.*** – 801-***-****

Principal Network Architect

Solutions-oriented network architect & engineer with notable success implementing a broad range of technology-advancement initiatives while leading the design and implementation of both internal and commercial solutions in direct support of business objectives.

•Excels at innovation and creative solution, benefiting from significant experience leading and managing teams handling global projects, with a significant track record in learning new concepts extremely quickly, demonstrating applied knowledge, and motivating teams to succeed as a group

•Hands-on experience leading all stages of systems, network, and datacenter development/deployment/production efforts, including requirements definition, design, implementation, validation, and sustainment.

•Adept at navigating vendor-diverse environments & architectures to discover, resolve, and reproduce a variety of complex, multilayered issues

•Demonstrated capacity to handle immense workloads and multitask efficiently during high-stress periods, including emergency international deployments to perform repairs requiring last-second international travel amidst company-wide outages

•Strives to maintain a “No Engineer Left Behind” standard, coordinating both internal & cross-team knowledge transfers and providing mentoring when applicable

Core Competencies: Research & Development; Network Planning & Architecture; Scalability Design & Future-proofing; Project Management; Big Data Infrastructure & Transport; Data Integrity/Recovery; Fault-tolerant + Geodiverse + High Availability Datacenter Design; Site Reliability Engineering; Contingency Planning; Traffic Shaping; Risk Assessment; Disaster Recovery

Platforms: Extensive experience with Juniper, Cisco, Arista, F5, Palo Alto Networks, Infoblox, Brocade hardware. Nortel, Ericsson, ALU, Ciena, and Tekelec carrier hardware. IaaS, SaaS, PaaS environments.

Architecture: Mobile IP, SS7, SIP, WWAN. Frame & IPeFR, SDH/SONET, NVGRE, EVPL, VPLS/EoMPLS, pseudowire, MPLS/L2VPN & L3VPN, Cisco DMVPN, GETVPN, AWS (Route53, EC2, S3, VPC & ACL management), OpenStack architectures (Juno through Liberty), Gigamon and AppNeta traffic monitoring. Datacenter & DCI construction/migration. DR design & deployment, EIGRP, OSPF, BGP, VXLAN, MP-BGP

SDN & SD-WAN: Viptela vEdge 100wm & 2000. Moderate experience with NSX, OpenFlow, and ACI.

WAN Optimization: Riverbed Steelhead CX & Interceptor, Silverpeak NX-series

Switching: Cisco Nexus 1000v/2K/3K/5K/6K/7K/9K, Catalyst 2960/3560/3750/3850/4500/6500/9300/9400, Juniper EX 22/23/32/33/42/43/45/4600, EX4550, EX8208, EX9208 and Virtual Chassis, QFX 3600/5100/5200 and Virtual Chassis Fabric, Arista 7050/7100/7120/7300/7500, Brocade VDX 6740/6940, Meraki MS220/320/350/450, Open vSwitch, VMWare vSwitch/dvSwitch

Routing: Cisco ASR 100XX/9K, CRS-1, ISR 1900/2900/3825/3945/4321/4421, Juniper M20, T1600, J4350/6350, ACX2200/4000, MX5/40/80/240/960, Meraki MX65W/400/600, Brocade MLXe

Security: Cisco ASM, FWSM, ASA 5510/5515/5525/5550/5585-X, Juniper SRX100/210/650/1400/3600/5600 & SSG5/140/550, Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks PA-200/500/820/3000/5000/7000 lines & Panorama (inc. AppID & UserID tuning) pfSense, DarkTrace, Meraki MX

Load Balancing: F5 LTM/GTM/VIPRION+vCMP, A10 Thunder 5K series, HAProxy, LBaaS v2 (Liberty and above), AWS ELB

Tools: SolarWinds, Cacti, Thruk, Splunk, NetBrain, Weathermap, Nagios, Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) suites, MDM solutions such as MobileIron and AirWatch. Active Directory & Windows Server 2000-2012 administration. SIEM logging & analysis.

Administration: Access7, AnyConnect, Pulse Secure, Contivity, RIM BES & MVS, Atlassian JIRA, ServiceNow, ZenDesk, AlgoSec FireFlow. FCAPS management software.

Contracting & Consulting Experience

November 2024–

Network Engineer Salt Lake City, UT

Brought multiple field offices online with dual WAN connections across the Salt Lake valley.

September 2019 – December 2019

Power Integrations – Senior Network Engineer San Jose, CA

Migrated entire campus from Cat6500 to new Cat9K platform, implementing MACsec on interoffice links while retiring DMVPN over MPLS.

Brought multiple field offices online with dual WAN connections, deploying new policy-based routing & network-wide QoS policies to prioritize voice traffic and resolve ongoing voice quality issues.

November 2018 – August 2019

Sony Interactive Entertainment – Senior Network Systems Engineer San Mateo, CA

Performed network security evaluations and migrated Los Angeles and San Diego offices to PA-5060s from Cisco ASA5550s, mitigating growing security threats while maintaining uptime for developers during E3

Deployed new field offices in Toronto and Waterloo, utilizing newly-proposed active-active dual-WAN architecture on PA-820s

April 2018 – October 2018

San Jose State University – Network Architect San Jose, CA

Migrated network security from Cisco ASMs hosted in 6513s to Palo Alto Networks PA-7050s, decreasing response time and reducing congestion network-wide

Deployed Cisco DMVPN using ASR1004s at the hub and ASR1002s or 897s at spokes, phasing out prior GDOI+GETVPN setup

November 2017 – April 2018

Varian Medical Systems – Senior Network Engineer Palo Alto, CA

Planned, managed, and performed the complete logical and physical network separation of Varex Imaging from Varian Medical Systems.

Designed and deployed new spine-leaf network architecture in SuperNAP 7, utilizing Juniper’s Virtual Chassis Fabric with QFX5100 spine & leaf switches. Improved disaster-recovery transfer time from 3 hours to 2.5 hours of east-west traffic. Assembled datacenter cage from sealed boxes on bare floors to production-ready in one week.

Performed an international hardware refresh & security assessment, migrating from the Juniper SRX platform to the Palo Alto Networks firewall platform. Migrated 8 sites in three continents in 3 months, coordinating LCON on-site presence, project management, and vendor support.

May 2017 – November 2017

Autodesk - Core Network Engineer San Francisco, CA

Developed and implemented a POC for Arista switches supporting Silverpeak NX9700s, using DirectFlow to emulate WCCP on the Arista 7500s and providing an opportunity to retire hundreds of thousands of dollars of legacy hardware

Eliminated the legacy BlueCoat packet shapers at each DC, saving the company significant OpEx and optimizing network performance.

Developed, tested, and implemented a plan to upgrade the existing Juniper SRX 5800s for use as internal edge gateways. I installed an additional RE in each SRX, added redundant 4-port 40gbps linecards, and linked both of these (as an active-active cluster) to the Arista cores (utilizing MLAG).

October 2016 – april 2017

The GAP – Network Architect San Francisco, CA

Served as network architect on the hybrid cloud initiative team, utilizing Rackspace Private Cloud in three major datacenters worldwide with OpenStack Liberty as the infrastructure. Designed scripts and procedures to utilize an API to call F5’s Neutron plugin for LBaaSv2 in OpenStack Liberty, providing an individual virtual load balancer to each tenant. This utilized the existing VIPRION chassis pairs already installed and idling in each datacenter, providing a zero-cost deployment and leveraging underutilized assets instead of using HAPROXY on overtaxed servers.

Worked on the “follow-the-sun” initiative, the goal of which was to be able to move the capacity for peak business load across datacenters, around the globe, in a “follow-the-sun” model (i.e. predict the highest load in a 9-to-5 schedule, moving from Atlanta to California to Tokyo). Using vMotion coupled with a GSLB, resources could be allocated from any datacenter, anywhere in the world, with no logical difference.

Migrated from Cisco Catalyst 3750s to Nexus 3Ks and 2K/FEXs, allowing the access switch layer to utilize the FabricPath benefits provided by the core 7Ks.

Professional Experience

Hortonworks – Santa Clara, CA 2014 – 2016

Staff Network Engineer

Worked closely with C-level staff and VPs in network architecture & design meetings, as Hortonworks is a Hadoop consultant/professional-services shop. Responsible for leading discussions on best practices & optimal network design for Big Data performance in both third-party and Hortonworks-internal datacenter environments. Opened branch offices and colocation spaces worldwide, with mesh NVPN interconnects ensuring worldwide staff has 24/7 connectivity. Managed team of network engineers and served as technical escalation point for all other engineering & operations teams. Served as project manager for high-end projects such as datacenter migrations or company-wide infrastructure changes.

Key Contributions:

•Inherited a legacy datacenter environment designed for running Big Data projects (Hadoop and Cassandra) that was extremely overutilized and underperforming. Designed and deployed a completely new greenfield DC with a network architecture composed of a 3-stage Clos leaf-spine design, Nexus 9K hardware and a 100gbps core network.

•As project manager, worked with engineering personnel to develop, test, and launch internal OpenStack environment. Implemented F5 LTM 4000s for use with various OpenStack components, and multiple geodiverse WAN links behind Cisco ASA 5585Xs to Juniper MX480s balanced with BGP for a completed “best practices” proof-of-concept design used by Hortonworks sales personnel.

•Developed SDN project plan and worked closely with several vendors/products, including Cisco ACI, Juniper Contrail, and Floodlight, to determine which product would be the most beneficial to a Hadoop/Cassandra distributed-computing environment. After completing preliminary trials, OpenFlow on Arista 7050s and Cisco ACI on Nexus 9504+9396PXs were deployed for stress testing with the OpenStack project. Nexus Fabric Manager was utilized for simple mass deployments on Nexus 9K leafs, utilizing VXLAN over MP-BGP EVPN control plane

Proofpoint – Draper, UT 2012 – 2014

Network Engineer

Designed, implemented, and sustained corporate & production networks for both existing infrastructure and new acquisitions & mergers. Served as network liaison to project management teams both internally and externally during production rollouts of Proof-of-Concept (POC) and/or skunkworks developments. Worked closely with C-levels/VPs & customer-facing management to design, implement & deploy major network projects. Served as project manager for international projects spanning multiple vendors and hardware, working nonstop to ensure flawless deployment in addition to developing monitoring procedures and protocols to guarantee SLAs and company success. Managed technical relationships & resources with vendors, internal resources, and board members, engaging as necessary during project development.

Key Contributions:

•Assumed responsibility for the Citigroup global network design & deployment mid-project, and led this project to completion, while continuing to implement new datacenters internationally and ensuring customer loyalty. Reported on any issues & successes on a daily basis to the executive board, project management teams, and engaged Citigroup resources as necessary to ensure continued success.

•Developed an innovative encryption standard on a VPLS 10gbps inter-site mesh using MACsec encryption at each data center, saving $300,000 over typical layer 2 data encryptors.

•Designed and built entirely new Utah (Center7) “greenfield” datacenter, including everything from RFPs to all vendors & contractors. BOM & SOW presentation to C-level board, hands-on rack/stack/cable/label of all hardware & cabling, HVAC budgeting & presentation, and final TTU for production-ready status. Proofpoint was the first vendor to have a full row inside this brand-new datacenter.

•Architected multiple designs with extremely detailed documentation & methods of procedure (MOPs), coordinating a team of engineers during high-visibility network changes such as core firewall cutovers, core switch cutovers, and migrations from ASA to SRX or SRX to PAN.

•Built new datacenters in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Utah, scaling anywhere from 1 rack to 8 rows. Implemented Arista MLAG setup with dual 40gbps redundant links to aggregation layers & 2x10gbps to servers, utilizing OSPF routing on the internal side to ensure fault tolerance & high availability.

•Worked closely with management and senior Operations engineers to design and implement network changes to monitor, stabilize, and improve the existing network infrastructure, in both corporate and production environments.

•Audited network security for compliance with PCI, FISMA, and HIPAA standards.

AT&T Mobility – Salt Lake City, UT 2006 –2012

Senior Mobility Technical Engineer / Senior Systems Engineer

Provided a vibrant pre-sales support mechanism by creating and presenting innovative custom wireless data solutions and design proposals for SBA customers; this included whiteboard discussions, presentations and drafting responses. Designed high-level network architectures for major government & corporate accounts. Served as project manager for nationwide rollouts involving multiple vendors and hardware, working with all parties from end-to-end to ensure a smooth deployment in addition to developing sustainment procedures and protocols to ensure continued longevity. Developed solutions utilizing cloud computing and storage. Managed technical relationships & resources with internal & external partners, engaging as necessary during project development. Provided pre- and post-sale support and on-site engagement to enterprise & government accounts.

Key Contributions:

•Worked closely with national utility providers, developing intrinsically-safe mobile solutions for gas, power, and water meters and integrating with SCADA systems. Designed and implemented geodiverse back-end network connectivity to ensure maximum uptime.

•Served as primary technical liaison for field trials during testing & rollout of the AT&T 4G LTE network, including the RF team, the device team, and the switch translation team.

•Designed mission-critical Electronic Flight Bag systems for several major airlines, reducing the need for paper logs & navigational charts and greatly increasing efficiency for the airline personnel, the FAA, and all other vendors involved in the processing of EFB data. Secured the end-to-end data transmission and developed the system to meet FAA & FCC requirements.

•Worked closely with RF and Network groups to field test and troubleshoot network issues affecting multiple sites or switches. Served as on-call first responder with a 60-minute response time to anywhere in the county.

•Served as project manager for the Subscriber Product Engineering (SPE) team, testing prerelease hardware and handsets and assisting with hardware development

•Served as subject matter expert in competitive technologies (1xEVDO, Flarion) and enterprise environments (Windows 2000 & 2003 architectures)

•Rolled out the initial UMTS launch in Salt Lake County, participating in the subsequent HSDPA and HSUPA layer upgrades. Assisted Network, System Performance, and RF with field testing and quality control.

•Performed on-site Professional Services engagements for clients, configuring routers & firewalls, developing and standardizing Group Policy, and configuring Exchange & Blackberry Enterprise Server environments

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