Chris Jowett
Site Reliability Architect
San Antonio (78259) United States (Texas)
Employed
Open to opportunities
I'm always looking to advance not just myself, but those around me. I have a bit of a unique style of teaching, but I find that it is important to learn the "why" and not just the "how". I have a particular interest in AI systems and run my own self-hosted lab specifically to work with and learn more about them. In my spare time I enjoy working on personal servers, home automation projects, cars and motorcycles.
Senior Site Reliability Architect
Edward Jones Investments
Since February 2023
- Embedded within a team specifically managing the Kubernetes infrastructure to build a platform supporting the requirements of application developers.
- Ensure that scalability and reliability best practices are a core feature of the platform.
- Work with a team of Site Reliability Engineers and Architects to create an organization guiding document leading teams through the process of improving their maturity from a Site Reliability perspective.
- Guide teams through the introduction and improvement of Monitoring and Observability best practices to allow for data-driven decisions.
- Advocate for solutions that apply organization wide rather than for individual use cases allowing for better scalability and reuse.
- Serve as an escalation point for teams company-wide to provide guidance on best-practices and available tooling to ensure that company and team needs are met in a timely fashion while maintaining the quality of results.
- Serve on a technical review board ensuring that the introduction of new technologies is well-considered from both an implementation and financial perspective.
- Guided a newly formed team of Site Reliability Engineers in how best to assert ourselves within the organization.
DevOps Architect
ABC Fitness Solutions
October 2020
to February 2023
- Design and implement new technologies easing difficulty for developers enabling more rapid time to production.
- Implement a Kubernetes infrastructure utilizing Amazon EKS ensuring high scalability and maintainability by leveraging multiple node groups, spot instances where appropriate and both cluster and application level autoscaling.
- Work with development teams to ensure they are able to fully leverage the capabilities inherent in the AWS-based architecture (EKS, EBS, RDS, S3, IAM, Route53, CloudFront) allowing them to focus on the core requirements of software as opposed to maintaining "boilerplate".
- Build atop the basics provided by EKS to provide a highly secure and feature-rich platform, not just infrastructure or hardware.
- Utilize a combination of self-operated and cloud provided tooling where appropriate to balance capability and cost.
- Ensure a unified management of infrastructure across both cloud and datacenter footprints allowing teams to have similar deployment experiences
- Research industry leading technologies and methodologies to maintain the modern status of deployed infrastructure.
- Prioritize and lead a team of engineers to implement reliable solutions on time.
- Educate and assist other engineers to allow them to maintain current skill sets as well as develop new ones.
- Maintain visibility on budgetary concerns ensuring responsible use of available funding.
- Work with front-end developers and architects to design an efficient and manageable CDN infrastructure built atop AWS CloudFront
- Worked with networking and security teams to introduce AWS Direct Connect to better integrate Cloud and On-Prem footprints.
Senior DevOps Engineer
ABC Fitness Solutions
July 2017
to October 2020
- Manage the direction of the companies DevOps efforts.
- Designed and developed Jenkins Pipelines to build, test, containerize and deploy microservices.
- Design, configure and maintain an AWS EKS based Kubernetes infrastructure ensuring reliability and self-healing
- Work with cross-functional teams (development, networking, security, etc) to ensure a smooth transition from code to production deployments
- Develop process requirements related to product infrastructure
- Track and prioritize work efforts to ensure work is completed in a timely fashion
- Continually assess infrastructure design and utilization to ensure cost optimization, especially leveraging automatic deployment and scaling technologies to "right-size" systems.
Linux Systems Engineer II
Rackspace Hosting
August 2016
to July 2017
- Design future implementations of the infrastructure used on a global scale virtualized Database as a Service product.
- Maintain current configuration management systems as well as develop improvements to those systems.
- Research technologies to determine suitability within an active infrastructure.
- Act as an escalation point for Operations members maintaining the current version of the infrastructure stack.
Linux Operations Engineer III
Rackspace Hosting
July 2015
to August 2016
- Maintain the uptime and availability of a global scale infrastructure with systems numbering in the thousands.
- Leverage infrastructure automation systems to ensure consistent configurations and repeatable deployments.
- Act as an escalation point for teammates for in-depth technical issues about a custom software stack, precluding the ability to Google the answer.
TechOps Engineer
DigitalOcean
December 2014
to July 2015
- Performed operations tasks maintaining a cluster of about 10,000 systems.
- Maintaining a chef infrastructure to deploy custom applications as well as configuration.
- Writing custom code (Python) to perform frequent tasks such as new server configuration verification and systems assessment.
- Work with team members as well as front and mid line support administrators to resolve issues with company infrastructure.
Security Analyst II
Rackspace Hosting
July 2013
to December 2014
- Monitoring of corporate computer networks for external and internal threat activity.
- Coordination of responses to any detected threats.User guidance on proper security procedures and precautions.
Linux Administrator III
Rackspace Hosting
May 2012
to July 2013
- Lead Linux systems administrator for a team of about 20 people.
- Provided customer and team support during night shift hours.
- Education of co-workers on new technologies and novel uses of existing technologies.
- Guided co-workers on best practices for configuring scalable, production grade server clusters.
- Troubleshooting and disagnosis of infrastructure issues working with appropriate teams to attain quick and lasting resolutions.
Linux Administrator II
Rackspace Hosting
October 2010
to May 2012
- Aid customers in application design and configuration to ensure proper scalability for future needs.
- Act as a point of escalation for team members for more difficult configurations and issues.
- Guided company direction during initial stand-up/creation phase of a major new product.
Linux Systems Administrator
Sierra Nevada Corporation
March 2010
to October 2010
- Act as sole Linux subject matter expert for local office.
- Frequent travel to remote locations for testing and deployment of custom engineered Linux powered solutions.
- Maintain code repository and continuous integration system for software developers.
- Maintain virtualization environment used to test recently committed code.
Electronic Systems Security Analyst
United States Air Force
November 2003
to November 2009
- Monitoring of US Govt. communications assets to ensure OPSEC and INFOSEC compliance.
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Ubuntu/Debian
Advanced
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Gentoo
Advanced
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RHEL/CentOS
Good
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Kubernetes
Advanced
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AWS
Advanced
-
Proxmox
Good
-
Prometheus
Advanced
-
Thanos
Good
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OpenTelemetry
Good
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Elasticsearch
Good
-
Grafana
Advanced
-
Python
Good
-
Go
Intermediate
-
Bash
Advanced
-
Git & Github
Good
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Jenkins
Good
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JIRA
Good
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Terraform/Atlantis
Advanced
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Harness
Good
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Jenkins Pipelines (Scripted and Declarative)
Advanced
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Docker/OCI
Advanced
