Sr. Manager Software Engineering

EXPERIENCE

Global Software Company – Sr. Manager: Cloud Engineering – 5/2022 – present

Platform and Software as a Service (_aaS) fork of legendary enterprise hardware & software juggernaut. I recruit and develop globally distributed high performance teams to further our strategic vision to be the best-in-breed edge-to-cloud provider. My full-stack UI (User Interface), Infrastructure, and IAM (Identity & Access Management) teams are all critical to the success of our flagship GreenLake Cloud Platform (GLCP). We are exposing advanced Microservices to public & private cloud customers alike thru a single pane of glass using an innovative approach to Micro-Frontends. We take seriously our CTO’s mandate to “delight the customer”, by working closely with the business to meet ambitious delivery schedules while simultaneously partnering with engineering teams and Quality Assurance (QA) to manage cross-cutting concerns regarding security, scalability, reliability and proactively pay down technical debt. 

Highlights include:

● Leveraging GitHub Actions to automate and extend our CI/CD pipeline to the cloud & beyond.

● Developing and improving dashboards to measure Key Performance Indicators.

● Established & nurtured vendor relationships to improve our developer experience, delivery times.

● Collaborated with cross functional teams to introduce an SRE style support model for GLCP.

● Improved observability using AI tooling to detect anomalies before the customer.

● Established & exceeded ambitious Service Level Objectives (SLO) for greenfield services.

● Developed a community of practice around Terraform & other Infrastructure as Code (IaC)tooling.

● Provided self-service administration of Artifactory using GitHub Actions.

● Improved measurable test coverage by 80% using SonarCube.

● Initiated cost reduction efforts to mitigate cloud spend; preliminary results: -20%.

TDAmeritrade (now Charles Schwab) – Sr. Manager: Software Development & Engineering – 11/2018 – 5/2022

Executive management sought to consolidate operations for the entire ThinkOrSwim distributed trading platform and infrastructure under forward looking (DevOps) leadership. I was recruited back to execute on this vision. With accountability to C- level stakeholders in both the technical & trading organizations, I grew and mentored a follow-the-sun team of 35 highly motivated engineers (50% FTE; 50% subcontractors) on three continents to support TDA’s premiere 24 x 7 trading platform. Challenged to scale (on-prem) by a factor of five in anticipation of record market volume & volatility we met this goal ahead of schedule using

hybrid cloud technology as well as innovative use of containers (Docker) and orchestration. Automated as much of the compliance & reporting operational responsibilities as possible in a heavily regulated industry.

● Increased product portfolio by 100% while reducing headcount (attrition) by 15%.

● Automated scheduling of 24 x 7 follow-the-sun support rotation for US shifts.

● Automated submission of change control documents.

● Improved Associate Engagement Survey scores, already among the highest in our org.

● Migrated Confluence (wiki) pages to evergreen pages linked to canonical information sources.

● Designed data migration and synchronization architecture for Schwab integration.

● Containerized our Oracle & PostgreSQL services in Non-Production Environments using Docker.

● Shifted from weekly deployment model to daily deployment model to promote agility.

● On-boarded 100+ hybrid cloud (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) Java/Spring applications.

● Piloted the use of Grafana & InfluxDb for monitoring cloud-based applications.

● One of handful of technical leads focused on scalability of our back-end services.

● Operationalized migration of Tibco message bus to Apache Kafka.

● Ported numerous Perl, Ruby, tcl, & groovy scripts to Python for standardization.

● Reduced Jira backlog by 75% by improving grooming & closure processes.

● Created roadmap for migration of a very Azure-centric site to a provider agnostic design.

● Completed migration of ½ our on-prem infrastructure from leased to owned data center.

● Led migration of our entire East Coast infrastructure to a data center newly built for DR.

● Formed a committee of technical architects focused on scalability of our back-end services.

● Applied Zachman Framework methodology to improving observability.

● Recovering from departure of several key leaders post Schwab acquisition reorganized the team along service provider / consumer lines without impacting delivery.

Relativity – Sr. Manager: Software Engineering & DevOps – 6/2017 – 11/2018

Built 24x7 expert teams to deploy & operate boutique software in the cloud. Our extremely dynamic flagship product suite empowers users to create thousands of databases and billions of objects, applying sophisticated analytics and machine learning to SQL & NoSQL data using sophisticated search algorithms.

● Hired to manage Database Operations in the cloud & was quickly promoted to Sr. Manager as founding member of Service Delivery organization formed from Ops, Support, & SRE teams.

● Built 24x7 follow-the-sun teams to transform a software developer into a serious SAAS contender.

● Recruited & trained founding members (four engineers and one manager) of our Krakow office.

● Seeded newly created team of Site Reliability Engineers with senior members of my Ops teams.

● Automated evidence provisioning for ISO compliance controls at various levels.

● Developed metrics-based operating model focused on continuous improvement.

● Continually refined information provided to our enterprise BI platform & related dashboards.

● Transitioned follow-the-sun operations teams from scrum to kanban, improving shift turnover.

● Improved tooling & metrics for on-prem customers migrating multi-TB datasets to the cloud.

● Worked closely with marketing & pre-sales to manage and exceed customer expectations.

● Collaborated daily with internal continuous delivery providers (DevOps) to extend our continuous delivery pipeline to the cloud and beyond using Chef, Python, Power-shell, Jenkins, groovy, etc.

● Collaborated with internal software developers (.NET, Java/Scala/Groovy, Javascript) to continually improve the operational sustainability and performance of our software.

● Worked with other engineering teams to roll out Docker & Kubernetes in the cloud.

● Developed and enforce standard operating procedures to exceed customer expectations.

● Co-developed SQL “Platform as a Service” offering and rolled it out in four global datacenters.

● Added four new data centers, 5x tenancy while decreasing headcount by 10%.

● Integrated three different ticketing systems into a singular BI “dashboard” for C-level consumption.

● Introduced Instance, Schema, and query-level database monitoring tools to our product suite.

● Assisted in migration from RDBMS to no-SQL for natural-language search heavy workloads.

TDAmeritrade – Sr. Manager, Applications Development – 6/2012 – 6/2017

Recruited and nurtured extremely talented and innovative agile development & QA teams to deliver highly effective software for highly visible flagship brands in trading, marketing, and customer-service:

● Collaborated with other DevOps teams to deliver our first few cloud-ready (PaaS) applications.

● Customized scrum methodology to maximize agility and project transparency.

● Adopted kanban practices for KLO (Keep the Lights On) work streams.

● Drafted as agile coach & mentor for new R&D team built by incoming (and current) CIO.

● Built cross-functional QA team to focus on automation of smoke & regression, mobile UI testing.

● Worked daily with product owners & other stakeholders to prioritize & schedule deliverables.

● Introduced mobile-first approach for all green-field development using responsive design.

● Automated continuous delivery pipeline end-to-end for non-production environments.

● Promoted Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to improved requirements traceability.

● Adopted lean practices & metrics to ensure continuous improvement of weekly releases.

● AppDev InfoSec Leadership committee founding member with C* level accountability.

● Reduced mean time to first code commit 5x using Ubuntu (Linux) VMs for developer workstations.

● Promoted MacOS X as alternative (to Windows 7 /Ubuntu VM) for developer workstations.

● Reduced hardware footprint of legacy apps by 50+% with monitoring & improved configuration.

● Provided JMX access to all services for performance tuning, monitoring & configuration purposes.

● Leveraged google (and other) analytics to help maximize ROI on web development resources.

● Leveraged modern Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to improve our google profile.

● Leveraged high-level JVM tools (e.g. Scala, Groovy / Grails, etc.) to improve productivity.

● Created POC of restful interface with Javascript client to allow privileged access to stored procs.

● Reduced (ITIL Tier 1) support load from 2 FTEs to .5 FTEs while reducing support backlog.

● Reduced (ITIL Tier 2) release manager & problem management exposure from 1 FTE to 5 FTE.

● De facto DBA for production & development MS SQL-Server databases.

● De facto administrator for Ubuntu VMs, Jira, Jenkins, SVN, MySQL, build & deployment scripts.

● De facto administrator for Linux (Virtual & Physical) servers (SLES) prior to migration to RHEL.

● Automated Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) audits as much as accessibly possible.

● Migrated applications from server-heavy (e.g. Struts, JavaServerPages) applications to architectures with a clearly demarcated REST interface and JavaScript client frameworks.

● Migrated Jira, SVN, Jenkins, Oracle from Solaris to Linux (RHEL).

● Migrations: z/OS Oracle => Linux Oracle; Solaris Oracle => Linux Oracle; Oracle 10g => Oracle 12c;SQL-Server 2005 => 2016; SLES => RHEL; Jira 3.x => 7.x; Subversion => git.

● Ported sbt -> Maven; java 1.6 => java 8; scala => java 8; Flash => html 5; backbone => Angular.

● Initiated migration to PostgreSQL from MS SQL-Server.

● Promoted adoption of NoSQL databases as an alternative to some Oracle use-cases.

● Integrated ELK, log4j, syslogd, JMX & other monitoring into a single splunk framework.

● Responsible for compliance-related data governance related to overseas & Futures & Forex.

● Replaced legacy environment (dev, QA, prod) specific deployment scripts with a singular Fabric

framework orchestrated by the Jenkins continuous integration tool.

● Integrated multi-lingual Content Management Systems (CMS’s) with tdameritradeasia.com.

● Productized web-based (Python, Django) risk portal and nurtured other end-user-computing (EUC) Python, Ruby, VBA, etc. scripts & projects, bringing them into the AppDev fold.

● Created Rotational Training Program (extended “sit-withs”) for EUC talent, pairing them with professional mentors for professional development.

● Aggressively recruited & mentored junior year college interns as not only recruitment & PR opportunities but also to give back to the community, leverage their skills & fresh perspective.

● Trained stakeholders on agile methodologies, specifically Scrum & Kanban and continually reinforced the well-received invitation to participate in daily agile ceremonies & rituals.

● Active participant, persistent pundit, and continuous improver of our DR & HA strategies.

Spot Trading, LLC – IT Operations Manager, 7/2011 – 4/2012

Managed the (ITIL) tier II in a fast-paced, agile DevOps environment. Owned operational risk across the firm along with dynamic, low-latency infrastructure:

● Adopted HP iLO for out-of-band management of critical servers.

● Created configuration-management database (h/ware, s/ware, dependencies) with web-based UI.

● Increased production release frequency from 3 weekly to 5 weekly while reducing release-related

outages by 20% and reducing change-management meetings 10 weekly to 5 weekly.

● Accelerated migration of C# / Windows applications to C++ / Linux.

● Managed and improved multi-cast market data (LBM) infrastructure.

● Reduced problem backlog by 80% thru aggressive prioritization and cross team collaboration.

● Scrum master for all infrastructure-related projects.

● Trained Developers & Systems Administrators on Linux.

● Using lean principles, reduced change-management meetings from 10 weekly to 3 weekly.

● Virtualized production infrastructure without degradation in runtime performance.

● Wrote distributed Powershell scripts for configuration management (convergence report) auditing.

Optionmonster – IT Infrastructure Manager, 7/2010 – 7/2011

Managed 24 x 7 web-based retail trading infrastructure. Slashed budget by more than 20%:

● Built & maintained highly available services, networks, database, servers & storage.

● Responsible for desktops, security, email & telephony.

● Improved coordination and transparency through customized project-management software.

● Integrated instrumentation for Java & Python-based applications with open-source monitoring.

● Improved release management processes for database-related code & patches (MySQL, Oracle) by providing a framework for idempotent application & promotion of DDL changes.

● Adopted Dell’s OpenManage & iDRAC as well as HP’s iLo for out-of-band server management.

● Served as liaison between AppDev & Ops under the CIO with directs on both teams.

● Created hot-warm DR strategy for database tier inclusive of MySQL, Oracle (Standard Edition), and Microsoft SQL-Server.

Laitek/Migratek – Part-time Consultant – 4/2008 – 11/2018

Reporting directly to the owner, I developed a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for a unique hybrid cloud project management application and related tooling for this leading-edge SaaS (Software as a Service) provider in the medical imaging space. Work was scheduled for customers using a cloud-based CRM fully and seamlessly integrated with the actual on-prem work being done which in turn updated project reporting, billing, etc. in real time. Automated migrations of SQL, NoSQL, and binary data for multiple customers

Ronin Capital – Sr. Database Architect, 3/2004 – 7/2010

Responsible for 24 x 6 databases & go-to guy for java & Perl in this C++ shop / electronic trading boutique:

● Provisioned, installed & configured all enterprise database hardware & software.

● Responsible for logical & physical database design of enterprise databases.

● Built frameworks for monitoring & alerting on all enterprise databases (Sybase, Oracle).

● Established Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for performance tuning on DBMS platforms.

● Maintained 100% uptime during trading hours and 0% unplanned downtime, 0% data loss.

● Designed replication topology and monitoring for US / overseas database merges.

● Created various database design patterns for ETL and for a unique approach to leveraging replication for replicating OLTP data to data warehouses without impacting OLTP performance.

● Wrote a web-based portal for status of database instances and replication topology.

● Created a tool to integrate database schema (DDL) changes with C++ code. It also provided auditing over time & across environments (Dev, QA, US-Prod,..). The tool had a command-line interface for make & cron as well as a real-time web-interface for humans & web-clients.

● Wrote a rule-based dividend forecasting system in java & SQL.

● Wrote & maintained applications for market data, FIX (and other) parsers, and trading GUIs.

● Built a “quant lab” using Java, Python, and tick by tick data to backtest trading strategies.

● Leveraged downtime cycles on trading hardware to backtest models using genetic algorithms.

● Supported first C# application at Ronin.

● Established data usage & retention policies, coding standards, QA and release procedures.

● Collaborated with developers, quants, traders to ensure efficient & manageable database access.

● Initiated POC (Proof-Of-Concept) for migrating cfEngine installation to Puppet.

● In addition to enterprise (Sybase) instances, supported departmental instances of an Oracle RAC, MS SQL-Server, MySQL, kdb, Informix and others

Credit Suisse – VP, Software Development, 3/2003 – 3/2004

Managed java development team supporting SAAS product for institutional and buy-side investors:

● Ported large, mission-critical databases across vendors and versions without disruption.

● Improved performance of flagship application by 25 to 600% for targeted operations.

● Rewrote mission-critical 4GL legacy application previously hosted on a standalone PC as java-based service on a JEE cluster.

● Replaced volumes of outdated written procedures & fragile shell-scripts which had evolved over (hard) times with a custom-written self-documenting menu-based tool.

● Introduced code reviews, design-pattern usage, nightly builds, unit testing& other agile practices.

Schneider Logistics – Sr. Architect, 7/2002 – 3/2003

Technical lead for reengineering of 3 legacy financial services applications into a scalable, flexible, low-latency J2EE platform featuring pub/sub messaging, user-defined business rules, and an MVC framework.

● Introduced pair programming to internalize benefits of jRules consultant.

● Wrote code to generate Java client user interfaces (Swing or SWT) from COBOL green screen definitions.

● Developed Javascript POC to quickly search on-line optical library of product information.

Goldman-Sachs – Enterprise Architect, 1/2000 – 7/2002

Co-founded “RAD” R&D group, applying next-generation solutions to trading systems problems, including:

● Rapid Application Development (pre-cursor to Agile) tools & practices.

● Migration (much of it automated) of C++ applications to Java without performance degradation.

● Messaging (e.g. pub/sub) middleware such as Tibco, Talarian, etc.

● Distributed computing environments such as Javaspaces.

● N-tier architectures which eventually became J2EE.

● Clustering & fault-tolerance to remove single points of failure (SPOFs).

● Monitoring systems (e.g. Tibco Hawk).

● UML modeling tools, design patterns, integrated development environments (IDEs).

● Distributed source-code management (SCM), build & deployment.

● Improved Configuration Management & QA process and metrics in support of CMMI compliance.

Hull Trading / Goldman-Sachs – Unix Sys Admin Manager, 1/1997 – 1/2000

Managed Unix & VMS Administrators. Supported electronic & open-outcry traders on four continents.

● Extended coverage of mission-critical systems from 8x5 to 23x6.

● Expanded scope beyond SunOS to include Solaris, AIX, Linux & VMS.

● Wrote web-based portals for systems configuration management & documentation repository.

● Developed Hulls’ first customer-facing web-pages and numerous intranet pages.

● Completely automated X11 upgrades on each subnet replete with safe rollback if required.

● Wrote cross-domain replacement for NIS as stop-gap when NIS/NIS++ conversion was broken.

● Web-enabled trouble ticketing and change-request processes.

● Developed and taught classes: Perl, source-code control basics, and other topics.

● Worked closely with quants to automate dividend forecasting for index & ETF traders.

● Designed custom storage solution replacing commercial NAS at 20% reduced cost with improved performance, resiliency, scalability, and performance.

UCLA Medical Center - RIS/PACS Systems / DB Administrator, 1994 – 1997

Supported imaging & distributed workflow applications for campus-wide research hospital environments:

● Automated systems, network, and database (Sybase) monitoring.

● Expanded coverage hours from 8x5 to 7x24.

● Reduced hardware support costs by 80%.

● Wrote rule-based image-routing to replace hard-coded C++ application code.

● Maintained multi-tier (Windows or Mac / Unix / mainframe) apps & Ingres database.

● Supported HL7 (ISO/HL7 27931) interfaces between RIS and other systems.

C.D.C. - Director of Information Systems, 1989 – 1994

Built professional IT org to provide technology solutions to business problems in Unix & PC environments.

EDUCATION

BS, Computer Science; CSU, Dominguez Hills, CA. Minor in Spanish. College-prep Certificate; Instituto Ramiro de Maeztu, Madrid, Spain.