Technical Operations leader with over 25 years experience in a variety of engineering, technical operations / DevOps / SRE, and other information technology functions.
Focused on building streamlined, technically robust teams to maximize production reliability, scale, and efficiency.
- Lead seven global engineering operations teams, spread over 10 countries (across 9 time zones). Unified SOPs across formerly disparate regions/teams.
- Oversaw and assisted in engineering the rapid (6 month) overhaul of XDN's production environment, customer support methodology, and back-end Operations systems. Company was successfully acquired.
- In under 6 months, brought Mozilla's Firefox Sync project from an ad hoc managed "Labs" project to a properly automated, well documented, above-SLA performing service handling several million unique users on inherited (low-spec) hardware. Implemented robust SRE-style production engineering methodology for platform support. After which, was the primary architect of a higher density, modern hardware platform.
- Budgeted, designed, and was on-site management for (and participated in considerable hands-on work on) LiveOps' new high-density datacenter presence. With 19 month lead time, delivered within 0.01% of forecasted budget.
Independent Contractor / Consultant
April 2020 - Present
Duties included:
- Product architectural review (Python on Linux/Apache/Postgres stack)
- Guidance on software development methodology and best practices
- Programming (python, shell)
- Software security review/analysis
- Kubernetes proof-of-concept work
January 2019 -- March 2020
San Mateo, CA
Duties included:
- DevOps/Technical Operations team leadership and hiring
- [Temporary] Leadership of Customer Support/Success team
- Managed 3rd-party IT and security consulting, policy coordination, and auditing
- Headed SOC-2 certification process (successful initial audit in summer 2019)
- Budgeting and planning
- Product architecture (in collaboration with Product and Engineering teams)
- Successfully implemented Salesforce Service Cloud, including Customer Community
June 2017 -- March 2019
HQ: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Duties included:
- Member of the Senior Leadership Team
- Delivered monthly board of directors updates with quarterly deep-dives
- Leadership of seven global teams:
- Three regional Technical Site Delivery/SRE teams (venue-based systems administration and support)
- Global Cloud Operations/SRE team (AWS-based infrastructure and other SaaS product and database administration - DevOps-style team)
- Business Solutions and Logistics (equipment orders and repairs, site launch logistics, etc)
- Customer Service (customer-facing support team)
- Technical Project Management
- Shifted from regionally isolated, siloed team structures to unified, globally-active, remote-tolerant teams
- Budgeting, project planning, and personnel hiring
- Launching of multiple major global technical initiatives, including ticketing systems consolidation (to Salesforce Service Cloud), site systems standardization, and monitoring & metrics to the venue-level (over 200 geographically spread locations)
January 2015 -- April 2017
New York, New York (remote)
Duties included:
- Team leadership
- Project architecture, planning, and review
- Engineering work on Ops-related APIs, daemons, and tools leverged by systems/infrastructure and SRE teams
- Developed base API ("generAPI") for simplified API implementation
- Code review
- Initiated overhaul of monitoring system (Nagios-based)
December 2012 -- December 2014
South San Francisco, CA
Duties included:
- Team management and hiring
- Site Reliability/DevOps
- Database Administration
- Desktop Support/internal IT
- Managed 3rd-party security consulting, policy coordination, and auditing
- Lead coordinator of customer technical RFIs
- Budgeting and planning -- Ushered in significant cost savings in multiple areas
- Project architecture (collaboration with Engineering)
- Puppet configuration work including authoring several modules (see github.com/boinger for open source work)
- Service containerziation (Docker)
- Data center hardware spec and migration planning
- Engineering (both prototyping and production code) of several geographically-distributed application pieces
VP of Operations
@ XDN (acquired by Fortinet)
June 2012 -- December 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
- Introduction of best-practices:
- Ops-driven software releases
- SRE-style production support methodology
- Comprehensive runbooks & project documentation
- Metrics-driven monitoring initiative
- OpEx reduction (elimination of over-provisioned server resources & improved operational efficiency resulting in significantly higher ROI)
- Overhaul of customer support systems & procedures, resulting in far fewer support issues and greater customer satisfaction/retention
- Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning
- Personnel planning and hiring
Manager of Operations -- Services
@ Mozilla
September 2010 -- June 2012
Mountain View, CA
Duties included:
- Manager of Operations Team for Mozilla's hosted product division "Services", which includes 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
- Personnel planning and hiring
University of Cincinnati
1994-97
- Electronic Media in the College-Conservatory of Music (1995-97)
- Foundation Design (Fashion) in the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning (1994-95)
- Treasurer of Hayward Hills Property Owners' Association (non-HOA neighborhood association)
- Rescue Dog Fosterer
Last updated 21 July 2020
