Jeff Vier's Resume

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.

Duties include:

Infrastructure and SRE teams leadership
- Hiring / team expansion (from 3 to 22)
- Technical / architectural vision and direction
Quality team leadership
- Founding of Test Engineering team (test frameworks, tooling)
- Hiring / team expansion
- Drove implementation of testing framework and adoption of test pyramid (to replace UI-only browser testing)
Significant infrastructure refactoring
- Drove implementation of tracing tooling (Dynatrace)
- Migration ond consolidation of aged, disparate observability tooling (monitoring, metrics, logging moved from DataDog and Loggly to Dynatrace and Grafana Prometheus/Loki)
- Oversaw containerization normalization - Shifted from homebuilt Docker/ECS infrastructure to Kubernetes on EKS with istio service mesh
Guided standing up production stack in EU
Oversaw drastic reduction in AWS spend (-33%) while increasing platform performance

Duties include:

Technical scoping on projects
Executive and technical consultation with customers
Interviewing technical resources (individuals and providers)
Training material review and refineenmt

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

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)

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)

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

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

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