Interac is a Canadian interbank network. I was brought on board to help implement their identity solution (based on OIDC and SAML) that would link Canadian business to our high assurance digital identity network.

• Produced a container orchestration platform based on the hashicorp stack - Nomad, consul, vault.
• Developed and maintained Infrastructure as code - Terraform and Ansible.
• Lead the Devops efforts on an agile squad for a new identity based product.
• Brought a project from development to production-grade in 6 months time.
• Mentored the devops team.
• Developed various custom tooling in go and python.

Wonolo is a leading In-Demand staffing platform. Their platform is entirely hosted in the cloud (AWS). I was brought onboard to help develop, maintain, and support their cloud infrastructure platform. This role had me focused on cloud infrastructure and platform development for use by our various internal development teams.

• Maintained and improved a cost-effective production grade AWS cloud infrastructure including (but not limited to): auto-scaling-groups, spot-instances, SNS notifications, ALBs, IAM, ACM, exc.
• Developed and maintained a container orchestration platform based on the hashicorp Nomad stack.
• Developed and maintained the terraform code base which described the entirety of the aws infrastructure.
• Maintained the platform chef based infrastructure code base.
• Introduced terragrunt to help reduce the complexity of the terraform code base.
• Developed a ton of ansible infrastructure code to replace the chef based code.
• Became a subject matter expert in designing, deploying, and maintaining the container orchestration platform. This primarily consisted of Nomad, Consul, Fabio.
• Developed various custom devop tooling in go to handle things like: SNS notifications, EBS volume cleanup, chef node cleanup, consul ACL cleanup, DNS record cleanup, exc.
• Introduced an OIDC proxy to improve authentication to an existing admin portal web app which had only basic auth.
• Handled team hiring (successfully hired 3 individuals) and reported directly to VP.

SecureKey is a company involved with identity and authentication. I was promoted to Cloud Engineering Manager after 4 years of Devop related engineering prior. This was a new team that I had to build out. I continued to contribute vital IC work as a manager.

• Developed various coding challenges and interview techniques to evaluate candidates.
• Developed a terraform code base that describes our entire aws infrastructure.
• Championed the use of kubernetes for both development and production environments. Used both EKS and Rancher for kubernetes clusters.
• Helped develop the CI pipeline and process using gitlab.
• Put together various documentation and training material to help the team succeed.
• Handled various progress reports, planning sessions, project goals through regular scheduled meetings with other branches of the organization.
• Managed a team of 4 individuals, while still regularly contributing code.
• Developed tooling in go to help test various OIDC flows that integrated with our product. See my github profile for muggle-oidc.

SecureKey is a company involved with identity and authentication. I was brought on-board to help lead the engineering effort on their new high assurance digital identity platform called verified.me. During my time here, I became entrenched with security and privacy focused designs and automation.

• Introduced devops concepts to the organization, including the use of docker (which was very new at the time). Lead a team of 3 engineers.
• Developed infrastructure code in both terraform (targeting vmware and aws) and ansible.
• My love affair with go started here, developed much tooling using go. Also developed the build process and cross-compiling aspects for the company’s go applications.
• Developed a ton of highly intricate ansible code to fully automate the deployment of environments of every class (development, staging, production)
• Developed the CI build system based on Jenkins and docker-compose
• Made several application code commits (in go) that were well received by the development team for both optimization and bug fixes.
• Created a demo on-boarding application (backend API written in go) that leveraged kubernetes to deploy workloads dynamically based on customer sign-ups.
• Contributed much of my knowledge and time to the design and architecture of the verified.me high-assurance identity platform that was based on blockchain (hyperledger fabric).
• Gained expert-level knowledge with various security systems including the use of HSMs, pkcs11, vulnerability assessments and mitigation, pen testing result assessments, and various encryption standards.
• Provided countless hours of support both internally to the ops team and externally to our various customers/partners such as financial institutions and governments.
• Developed some open-source tools (available on my github profile) such as aws-power-toggle and vsummary.
• Produced a ton of design, support, and training documentation that were often used for customer facing documentation and integration guides.
• Developed custom monitoring solutions based on sensu, prometheus, and custom go code.
• Often relied upon for advanced troubleshooting and difficult customer escalations.

Hostopia is a large wholesale web/mail hosting platform. Their web platform would receive billions of HTTP requests per day. They wanted to move to virtualization to help optimize their growing amount of physical servers, and chose me for the job.

• Extensively evaluated various enterprise grade virtualization solutions available at the time. Including VMware and RHEV.
• Directly handled much of the physical to virtual server migrations (P2V). Accomplished most of this without downtime. Was able to retire a truck load of old 1u servers.
• Developed many puppet modules to help with the automation of web server deployments.
• Introduced a static asset web farm based on NGINX that’s sole purpose to was serve static content without having to bother the PHP based apache web server farm. This improved performance by several factors.
• Worked with Cisco UCS Flexpod designs. Netapp FCoE, NFS. F5 Load balancers.
• Designed and deployed a self-hosted ELK stack for log aggregation that scaled to 100 million log messages per day. This completely revolutionized the existing logs that were stored on disk from a central syslog server.
• Helped design a security system that leveraged the new log system’s API to help identify potentially malicious activity from the HTTP access logs.
• Developed custom F5 iRules to help manipulate inbound HTTP traffic to greatly optimize the time to first byte.

This was my first job in the industry. GANZ had a hit product called Webkinz. Basically, they were plush toys that came with a text code that would allow children to play with an online representation of it (webkinz.com) along with other players.

• Learned all about Linux administration here. The OS of choice was Gentoo at first, but later we migrated to CentOS.
• Was introduced to web application system design and implementation here. Gained vital fundamentals on how HTTP works. Also learned how to deploy and configure web servers (Lighttpd and Apache) and how to balance connections to them (via load balancers).
• Was introduced to virtualization here. We used Xen for development servers. I was later promoted and tasked with virtualizing production servers. I ended up going with a KVM based solution (ConVirture) for use in production. Went from zero production virtualization to about 40% by my departure.
• Was introduced to system monitoring and logging here. Learned and configured various monitoring tools such as OpenNMS, SolarWinds Orion, Nagios, Graylog, Cacti.
• Gained extensive knowledge of various fundamental services and protocols here. From the top of my head they include: HTTP, LDAP, SAMBA, NFS, DNS, DHCP, SNMP, SMTP, TCPDUMP, TFTP, PXE, SSH, Syslog, TCP/IP, UDP, Load Balancing, Apache, Lighttpd, MySQL, Postgres.