Jeff Vier

jeff@jeffvier.com
m: +1 408 613 7922
jeffvier.com/resume.html
linkedin.com/in/jeffvier
github.com/boinger

Executive Summary

Strategic and results-driven Technical Operations Executive with over 25 years of experience leading global DevOps, engineering, security, and IT teams. Proven track record of transforming infrastructure, optimizing costs, and driving large-scale operational efficiencies through innovative approaches and advanced SRE methodologies. Adept at building high-performing teams, aligning technology strategy with business objectives, and guiding complex digital transformations to enhance scalability, resilience, and reliability at enterprise level.

Achievement Highlights

Core Competencies

Professional Experience

Vice President, Production Engineering

@ Globality
2020-24
Palo Alto, CA

Duties included:

  • Directed Infrastructure and SRE teams, expanding from 3 to 22 members (at peak) to support global platform growth and strategic innovation.
  • Led Quality team expansion (from 9 to 24 members at peak). Founded the Test Engineering group. Implemented modern testing framework & tooling (eschewing UI-only testing).
  • Led Technical Support team to streamline ticket flow and inter-team communications. Worked cross-team to reduce toil.
  • Interim head of IT Corporate and Infrastructure teams (2022-2023).
  • Implemented a tiered support model, significantly reducing incident response times and optimizing on-call rotation.
  • Drove infrastructure modernization, overseeing a migration to Kubernetes (EKS) & Istio (from self-managed Docker/ECS) and enhanced observability with tools including Dynatrace and Grafana/Prometheus/Loki.
  • Oversaw overhaul of IaaS stack -- from a fragile Terraform / Ansible / in-house-tool to Pulumi / Spacelift / Ansible.
  • Integrated generative AI (ChatGPT) into the infrastructure and GitHub Copilot into the development pipeline, increasing engineering productivity and code quality.
  • Guided GDPR-compliant platform build in Europe. All platforms certified AICPA SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant.
  • Expanded remote hiring, achieving both enhanced team coverage and cost savings through strategic global talent sourcing.

Principal Technical Advisor

@ CloudWerx
2020-23
Bay Area, CA

Duties included:

  • Advised on technical strategy, project scoping, and resource alignment for high-impact client projects, including cloud and DevOps transformations.
  • Conducted technical resource assessments, supporting optimal alignment of talent with project objectives for client success.
  • Reviewed and refined training materials for client training engagements

Vice President - Infrastructure, Security, & Operations

@ ICIX
(now part of Riskonnect)
2019-20
San Mateo, CA

Duties included:

  • Led DevOps/Technical Operations and Infrastructure teams, spearheading security, compliance, and operational initiatives for enterprise-level reliability.
  • Led Customer Support & Customer Success teams. Implemented Salesforce Service Cloud (including Customer Community) to manage customer engagement.
  • Achieved AICPA SOC 2 certification (2019), establishing robust compliance practices.
  • Reduced operational overhead through effective vendor management and cross-functional collaboration with Product and Engineering teams.

Group Vice President - Engineering Operations

@ Magic Memories
2017-19
HQ: Sydney, NSW, Australia (remote)

Duties included:

  • Member of the Senior Leadership Team. Delivered monthly updates and quarterly deep-dives to board of directors.
  • Managed seven global teams, standardizing processes across 200+ sites and fostering a collaborative, globally-active team structure.
  • Streamlined critical processes by implementing Salesforce Service Cloud and unifying site systems, enhancing service reliability at scale.
  • Led global initiatives to integrate monitoring tools and create cohesive, venue-level metrics tracking, enhancing visibility and response times.

Director of Operations Engineering

@ Forex Capital Markets (FXCM)
2015-17
HQ: New York, New York (remote)

Duties included:

  • Led operations engineering projects, introducing API-based solutions and upgrading legacy monitoring systems to support high-availability demands.
  • Implemented a comprehensive API framework to improve team efficiency and scalability for infrastructure management.
  • Cross-team code review

Sr. Director of Online Operations

@ ICIX
(now part of Riskonnect)
2012-14
South San Francisco, CA

Duties included:

  • Team management and hiring of three teams -- SRE/DevOps, DBAs, and Corporate IT
  • Managed 3rd-party security consulting, policy coordination, and auditing
  • Lead coordinator of responses to customer technical RFIs
  • Budgeting and planning -- Ushered in significant cost savings in multiple areas
  • Robust IaaC work via Puppet including authoring several modules (see github.com/boinger for open source work)
  • Implemented aggressive infrastructure optimization through service containerziation (Docker)
  • Engineering (both prototyping and production code) of several geographically-distributed application pieces

Vice President of Operations

@ XDN
(acquired by Fortinet)
2012
San Mateo, CA

Duties included:

  • Member of the senior leadership team which successfully facilitated sale of the company
  • Extensive overhaul of a [mostly] manually-managed platform
  • Driver of multiple best practice overhauls including Ops-driven software releases, SRE-style production support, Operational runbooks and product documentation, and metrics-driven monitoring.
  • OpEx reduction (elimination of over-provisioned server resources & improved operational efficiency for significant ROI increase)
  • Overhaul of customer support systems & procedures, resulting in far fewer support issues and greater customer satisfaction/retention
  • Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity planning

Manager of Operations -- Mozilla Services

@ Mozilla
2010-12
Mountain View, CA

Duties included:

  • Manager of Operations Team for Mozilla's hosted product division "Services", which included Firefox Sync, BrowserID/Persona, and various backend API layers.
  • Established best practices in many facets of Operations (SRE, change management, product release, etc) that were adopted into other divisions of the company
  • Database systems architecture overhaul
  • Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity planning
[...further employment history on LinkedIn]

Education

University of Cincinnati

  • Electronic Media in the College-Conservatory of Music
  • Foundation Design (Fashion) in the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning

Community Involvement

Hobbies/Interests