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Resume

Dennis Roberts

dennisr@spacerodent.org

Linux and AWS focused DevOps and System Administration

Professional Profile

Accomplished Linux Engineer and Administrator who excels at automation. Skilled at documenting procedures and scripts used to perform tasks. Adept at assisting with configuring and maintaining systems and applications to improve functionality and address business concerns. Experienced at performing technical research and development enabling continuing innovation within the infrastructure. Knowledgeable at integrating new technologies into existing datacenter and cloud environments.

Specialties

Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Automation | Containers (Docker) | Continuous Integration & Deployment | DevOps | Disaster Recovery | Linux | Network Security | Scripting | System Migration | Systems Administration | Working with Ambiguity

Skills

Apache | Ansible | Atlassian Products | Backups & Recovery | Bash | Datadog | DNS | ElasticSearch | Git | GitLab | Jenkins | Kafka | MySQL | Nginx | Postfix | PostgreSQL | Python | Terraform | Tomcat | uWSGI

Career Highlights

TIDEWORKS / PRINCIPLE PLATFORM ENGINEER / 2019 – PRESENT

  • AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • AWS Network Firewall
  • Apache/Confluent Kafka
  • Manage 500+ VMs on VMware Vsphere
  • Migrating from on premise to AWS
  • PostgreSQL/Oracle/MongoDB
  • Terraform/Terragrunt and Ansible for automation
  • Designed and implemented automated provisioning system that initially provisions new systems and keeps them update to date.
  • Designed and implemented automated patching system that keeps all Linux/Windows systems patched every 30 days

ENERGYSAVVY ACQUIRED BY UPLIGHT / SENIOR DEVOPS ENGINEER / 2014 – 2018, 2018 – 2019

  • Actively managed and was on call for 140+ servers
  • Migrated 80 systems from Linode to AWS with less than 1 hour of downtime
  • Migrated 140 systems from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04 with less than 1 hour of downtime
  • Utilized Terraform to manage AWS and Datadog
  • Monitored performance, user management, backup, and recovery of PostgreSQL
  • Oversaw network security
  • Helped manage the Python 2.x to Python 3.x. migration
  • Rolled out OSSEC into a client and server configuration
  • Converted the existing Chef Solo setup to Ansible while writing custom library functions via Python
  • Developed command line tools in Python to automate interactions with AWS, Cloudflare, Foxpass, and JumpCloud

UNITY TECHNOLOGIES / DEVOPS ENGINEER / 2014

  • Deployed Node.js applications using NVM and NPM to AWS systems using Ansible
  • Utilized Nginx & Passenger/Phusion to deploy Ruby on Rails applications
  • Setup continuous integration with Jenkins to do automated package deployment to S3

Z2 / DEVOPS ENGINEER / 2013

  • Maintained and extended an internal CoffeeScript application used to create an internal graphing solution like Graphite
  • Utilized AWS to automate MySQL backup and recovery
  • Deployed and monitored a Node.js application via NVM, NPM, and Forever
  • Monitored, replicated, and deployed Redis
  • Improved efficiency by automating AWS via Ruby and AWS SDK
  • Automated large-scale iOS game backend support via Ruby

POPCAP / SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR / 2011 – 2013

  • Delivered critical support for Bejeweled Blitz – one of the largest and longest-running Facebook games
  • Deployed backend PHP applications interacting with the Bejeweled Blitz flash frontend
  • Converted physical servers to virtual ones using Xen, KVM, AWS, and RightScale
  • Improved functionality by replacing a Memcache fleet with a five server Couchbase cluster performing 100,000+ gets/second and backed with FusionIO PCI based SSD drives; created customized Nagios check to monitor cards flash wear leveling for proactive replacement
  • Co-designed and deployed a large-scale RabbitMQ solution for user notification controlled via custom Python scripts
  • Achieved and maintained 100% documentation easing the handoff of assignments to other team members

PELAGO / SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR / 2007 – 2011

  • Supported Whrrl, a mobile, location based application later sold to Groupon
  • Oversaw all facets of PBX, networking, end user support, production networks, deployments, scaling, and production code
  • Created an OAUTH2 Twitter connector in Java for a production application
  • Deployed and managed WatchGuard Firewalls and setup an office to datacenter VPN
  • Co-developed an internal ticketing system called Ticket Tamer in Perl and MySQL
  • Utilized Perl to write a customized Nagios configuration management system
  • Enabled a deployment system by writing a web-based control page for F5 BigIP load balancers
  • Updated sites in the main Whrrl backend application using AWS EC2/SQS and writing a web scraper

SPEAKEASY / SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR / 2006-2007

  • Large scale Qmail administration
  • Designed and implemented a gray-listing solution using Postfix and MySQL

AMAZON / SYSTEM ENGINEER / 2003 – 2006

  • Primary owner of DNS
  • Operations support of Amazon.com
  • Large scale (35k+ systems) support using CFEngine, Perl/Python
  • Helped designed and rolled out an internal any cast DNS solution using OSPF and Zebra
  • Wrote a web based control panel for Cisco Dynamic Directors (a now discontinued hardware appliance that routed traffic to one of three global data centers via DNS); This updated a formally manual and error prone process.
  • Helped write a transaction based configuration system that would allow a rack of servers to go from unpowered to available for use in less than one hour; This system worked on the rack level and not individual servers

AT&T WIRELESS / SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR / 1999 – 2003

  • Solaris 2.6/8 support and configuration
  • Perl/Bash scripting
  • Sun hardware support
  • Sun Enterprise Cluster Administration
  • Managed all well known services: DNS, SMTP, NTP, FTP
  • iPlanet/SunONE enterprise server suite support
  • Apache/JRUN/ColdFusion/ATG Dynamo
  • Performance tuning of Solaris/Networking/Web servers
  • UNIX backup and recovery using IBM ADSM and tape library
  • Created internal Solaris packages of popular open source packages
  • Wrote a custom deployment system written in Bash using SSH and fully parallelized for minimum downtime
  • Configured a custom MRTG system to do system monitoring for the use of predictive scaling
  • Participated in an on-call rotation on a team with five other people
  • Configured and Supported F5 BigIP load balancers and NetCache appliances using custom proxy settings based on departments

Education and Training

University of Washington extension

  • Introduction to C Programming, 2006
  • Intermediate C Programming, 2006
  • Advanced C Programming, 2006
  • C Programming: Data Structures and Algorithms, 2006