Chris Jowett

Resume created on DoYouBuzz

Experiences

Work with a team to create an organization guiding document leading teams through the process of improving their maturity from a Site Reliability perspective.
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.
Guide teams through the introduction and improvement of Monitoring and Observability best practices to allow for data-driven decisions.
Serve on a technical review board ensuring that the introduction of new technologies is well-considered from both an implementation and financial perspective.
Advocate for solutions that apply organization wide rather than for individual use cases allowing for better scalability and reuse.
Guide a newly formed team of Site Reliability Engineers in how best to assert ourselves within the organization.

Design and implement new technologies easing difficulty for developers enabling more rapid time to production
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
Work with development teams to ensure they are able to fully leverage the capabilities inherent in the architecture allowing them to focus on the core requirements of software as opposed to maintaining "boilerplate"
Educate and assist other engineers to allow them to maintain current skill sets as well as develop new ones.
Prioritize and lead a team of engineers to implement reliable solutions on time.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Monitoring of US Govt. communications assets to ensure OPSEC and INFOSEC compliance.

Skills

Site Reliability Architect