Systems Engineer Senior

Benjamin M. Batten *

Benjamin M. Batten

Sykesville, Maryland USA

Mobile/WhatsApp: 443-***-****

Email: *********@*****.***

Google Chat: *********@*****.***

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-batten

Indeed: https://my.indeed.com/p/benjaminb-fokaclv

QUALIFICATIONS SUMMARY

Ben has worked in Information Technology for almost 30 years and as a Senior Systems Engineer for over 20 years providing vision, practical application, and support in high performance clustered computing environments, in both commercial and government spaces. He brings strong cross-domain technical abilities — very strong RHEL and CentOS Linux experience along with multiple other Linux distributions. In addition, Ben is versed and interoperates among Windows Server, networking, storage, software, data-management and machine-room logistics. Customer success and achieving goals with a hands-on style have always been his focus.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Red Vector, Inc., Senior Product Support Engineer, September 2022 to April 2025 Summary

Senior Product Support Engineer (fully remote) responsible for deployment and support for an enterprise class on-prem and cloud-based insider-threat security detection and analysis technology based Hadoop HDFS, HBase, Kafka message queueing, and Redvector’s software and algorithms. Provide remote and occasional onsite deployment support: analyze, diagnose, and resolve customer software platform and data ingest issues for clients. Created a simplified installer for the company’s latest Fulcrum software greatly reducing time-to-live and getting customers operating; reduced the task from several days to a few hours. Pavilion Data Systems, Senior Systems Engineer, December 2021 to March 2022 Summary

Worked for the Customer Success Team as a Systems Engineer (fully remote) supporting the PDS product line which can be viewed at https://pavilion.io. Worked with the Customer Success Team deploying and configuring the PDS storage appliance which comprised a customized CentOS and proprietary software that managed and controlled large arrays of NVMe storage. Supported the local infrastructure (co-located) mainly composed of VMs running on vSphere 7.

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Sierra Nevada Corporation, Senior Systems Engineer Consultant (TEKsystems), March 2021 to August 2021

Summary

As a consultant through TEKsystems I provided Senior Systems Engineering skills and experience to the SNC customer’s engineering and security teams on a BigData project for the Department of Homeland Security. Worked heavily with the Security Team and supported VMs running on a moderately sized on-prem vSphere 6.7

IronNet Cybersecurity, Senior Systems Engineer, June 2017 to July 2020. Summary

At IronNet I worked as a Senior Systems Engineer supporting both Corporate Infrastructure and Customer Success Team as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) roles providing leadership and response in both teams. Worked directly developers and Engineers on building out a start-up level infrastructure into a full Enterprise environment. Evaluated and demo’d Terraform to the devs and engineers by deploying a small datacenter within a vSphere 6.5 system. Built out a co- located Splunk system which I later worked with Splunk Professional Services to convert to Splunk Cloud. Additionally configured and assisted developer access and utilization of AWS services.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Senior Systems Engineer (Contractor, Apex Systems), January 2017 to June 2017.

Summary

Provided senior Linux and UNIX administration in a fully Amazon Web Services contained environment. Heavily utilized and programmed ExtraHop for Web activity monitoring, restricted to parsing and analyzing HTTP header data due to HIPAA restrictions. Exelon Corporation, Senior Systems Engineer (Contractor, Pontoon Systems), September 2016 to January 2017

Summary

Worked as a tier-3 Systems Engineer providing high level design, implementation, configuration and support for Exelon’s Red Hat and CentOS Linux systems and deploying and configuring their Cloudforms initiative.

Raytheon Intelligence, Information & Services, Senior Systems Engineer, March 2010 to September 2016.

Summary

Senior Platform Engineering team member working Tier-3 Support and Research & Development team assignments. Classified environment.

(Employment 2010-1995 available upon request)

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TECHNICAL SKILLS & LANGUAGES

v Operating Systems: Extensive UNIX/Linux OS engineering and administration experience on both physical and virtualized systems. Primarily Red Hat and variant Linux (Red Hat, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Korora) and Sun Solaris UNIX. v Networking: thoroughly familiar with TCP/IP (v4 and v6) transport and network layers. Ethernet, VLANs, IPv4/IPv6, ARP, DHCP, PXE booting, DNS/AWS Route 53, Syslog and Splunk services.

v Identity Management: Red Hat IdM, AWS Identity Center/IAM, Entra Active Directory, Okta, Keycloak, and older but still relevant LDAP technologies such as 389 Server and OpenLDAP. OpenID and SAML connected systems. Certificate management services for users, systems, and applications.

v Cloud Technologies: Deploying, configuring and development of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.

v Data Management: Data extraction with Apache Nifi, Data streaming and queueing with Kafka and Apache MQ, distributed file systems (Apache/HDP/Cloudera HDFS, NFS) v Visualization/Health & Status/Metrics: Experienced with Grafana, Nagios, Ambari and Prometheus. Configuring Syslog, deploying Splunk services, tuning sensors. v Hardware: Extensive experience with HP BladeSystems technologies, Extensive experience with HP and Dell rack server technologies. Supermicro rack and blade technologies. Consolidation focus: (more with cores/RAM/high-speed networking) v Virtualization, Containers and Clusters: AWS EC2, VMware vSphere (6.x/5.x/4.x/3.x), Kubernetes master/nodes/pods, Docker, Docker Containers, Red Hat Virtualization, oVirt, OpenStack, Pacemaker (Red Hat) Clusters

v DevOps and TechOps: supported all lifecycle areas for development and QA teams, TeamCity CI/CD, familiar with software version control such as GitHub/Git/SVN/CVS. Experience working with Amazon Web Services VPCs, EC2, S3, IAM on the AWS Console and AWS CLI.

v Automation and Configuration Management: Ansible ad-hoc and Playbook based configuration management, SaltStack master and minion/target configuration with ad- hoc and scheduled jobs, Puppet and Cfengine, Red Hat Network Satellite, Foreman- Katello, server and YUM repositories to provision and maintain systems. Live Kernel patching with Kpatch for rebootless kernel patches and security updates. I have most recently been employing Ansible in enterprise environments but have applied and administered SaltStack and Puppet in previous roles. v Naming and Identity Management Services: Red Hat IdM/FreeIPA, InfoBlox NIOS systems, ICS BIND, OpenLDAP providers and consumers, and NIS+/NIS, files. v Networking: IPv4/IPv6, TCP/IP, Switching and VLANs, ARP, DHCP, PXE booting, DNS. v Security: SSH, OpenSSL TLS/SSLv3, file authentication hashing (SHA256+), SELinux. Splunk Enterprise on-prem and Cloud service, Tenable on-prem and Cloud, Public Key Infrastructure application and concepts, Vulnerability scanning and Target-hardening

(find weaknesses or openings, reduce the profile paired with sensible user and system exposure), resolving STIG remediations, restricting ciphers, Firewalld and IPtables management. Previous ExtraHop deep packet inspection experience. Nmap mapping/scanning. TCPdump and Wireshark network packet analysis. Benjamin M. Batten 4

v Scripting/Programming/Development: Experienced in a wide range of interpreted and compiled languages: UNIX shells, YAML and Jinja for Ansible and SaltStack configuration module and scripting directives, JavaScript (v8 and Nodejs), C, Perl, Ruby, Awk and Sed in a Systems Engineering and Administration capacity. Develop scripts, packages,

(re)configure drivers/modules and system Kernels as-needed. v Storage and File Systems: NFSv3/4, Spinning disk and flash-based networked and direct-attached storage systems: Fiber Channel and Infiniband connected storage

(direct- and SAN-attached), SATA and SAS connected disks. Clustered and stand-alone configurations. Flash/SSD and spinning disk product applications from Texas Memory

(now IBM), HP, FusionIO, and DDN. Linux file system management and performance tuning for high-speed storage environments (XFS, Ext4/3/2, etc.). v Database/Application Support: Supported test, development, pre-production and production environments including front-end user applications, data-flow, and processing and database systems. Includes support of Postgres and MySQL in Linux environments, Java/JDBC, Elasticsearch (1.x and 2.x), Solr, and other similar NoSQL environments.

v Break-fix/Bug/Ticketing: Jira, Confluence, SalesForce, PagerDuty, DialPad Technologies/Frameworks/Platforms/Standards

v Best-practices: target-hardening and attack surface reduction policies; STIG, CERT, Securityfocus.com and vendor security/technology advisories to maintain system update security; actively work with security teams to scan, monitor and remediate systems with scanning technologies such as Tenable, Nessus, Nmap, Wireshark, TCPdump; employ digital certificates to validate IDs, files and data. Maintain separate centralized logging system and event-correlation and monitoring tools. v Secure communication and integrity practices utilizing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for users, systems and applications, Virtual Private Networking, TLS/SSLv3, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, PGP/GPG, and hashing mechanisms such as SHA256/SHA512 applications to verify file integrity.

v Firewall implementation and rules. Experience includes Linux-based Firewalld/IPTables, Cisco and Palo Alto appliances and policy management, Linux TCP/IP network stack tuning and Kernel configuration (Sysctl’s, module). EDUCATION

B.A., Political Science, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC; May 1995. CLASSES/CERTIFICATIONS/AWARDS

v AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials, October 2021. v C Programming, Catonsville Community College, spring 2000. v Pascal Programming, Catonsville Community College, spring 1998.

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