SUMMARY:

• Senior Systems Engineer with 20 years of experience in creating and maintaining high performance UNIX and Linux computing environments for both private and public sectors. I bring strong focus and hands - on style and experience in large to small server deployments and ancillary subsystems - networking, storage, software and logistics supporting Infrastructure and Platform environments in dynamic software development environments. This includes full life-cycle experience: working with data-center personnel to secure power-space-cooling, rack-and-stack, provisioning of server resources and daily administration and sustainment. I specialize in high-speed networking and storage systems. I have maintained and completely redesigned niche systems from large multi-rack rack and blade server platforms to shrinking that into tactically custom designed systems. I work daily with developers to get them the resources they need physical, virtual and cloud-based.
• Best-practices: fundamental security (target-hardening and data/system-integrity assurance) utilizing practical privacy, security, and basic not-used-not-enabled policies; Survey CERT and vendor security/technology advisories to maintain core system security; actively examine systems with rootkit-detection, network sniffing and system scanning technologies; system scanning/snooping tools, digital ID data/file verification. Maintaining separate centralized logging system and event-correlation and monitoring tools.
• Secure communication and integrity practices utilizing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Virtual Private Networking, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, PGP/GPG, and basic MD5 hash application. Use various tools to prevent eavesdropping and secure system access with RSA and Diffie-Hellman public/private keys types. Use PGP/GPG for signing and encrypting data and verifying their integrity.
• Firewall implementation and rules. Experience includes Cisco ASA/ACL and IPTables/Netfilter. Solaris and Linux TCP/IP kernel/network stack tuning for security purposes.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Operating Systems: Extensive UNIX/Linux OS engineering and administration experience on both physical and virtualized systems. Primarily Red Hat and variant Linux (Red Hat, CentOS, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Korora) and Sun Solaris UNIX.

Hardware: Extensive experience with HP BladeSystems technologies, Extensive experience with HP and Dell rack server technologies. Supermicro rack and blade technologies. Consolidation focus (more with cores/RAM/high-speed networking)

Virtualization: Red Hat Virtualization 4, VMware ESXi/vCenter Server and Appliance (6.x/5.x/4.x/3.x), oVirt

Cloud/DevOps: Red Hat CloudForms, Apache and Cloudera Hadoop with Accumulo and Zookeeper key-store and control subsystems, Docker and Dock-Machine, large Pacemaker (Red Hat) Clusters, supported large software and analytic teams, familiar with software version control such as Git/SVN/CVS. Experienced with creating and managing AWS/EC2 instances.

Configuration Management: Ansible, SaltStack, Puppet and Cfengine, Red Hat Network Satellite (also CentOS Spacewalk) server and Yum repositories to provision and maintain systems. Live Kernel patching with KSplice and Kpatch for rebootless kernel patches and security updates.

Naming and Identity Management Services: DNS, Red Hat IDM/FreeIPA and OpenLDAP, NIS+, NIS, files.

Security: PKI, SSH, TLS/SSLv3, Target-hardening (reduced profile paired with sensible user and system exposure)

Scripting/Programming/Development: Experienced in a wide range of interpreted and compiled languages UNIX shells, JavaScript, C, Perl, Ruby, Awk and Sed in a Systems Engineering and Administration capacity. Develop scripts, packages, drivers/modules and systems Kernels as-needed.

Storage and File Systems: NFSv3/4, Spinning disk and flash-based networked and direct-attached storage systems Fiber Channel and Infiniband connected storage (direct- and SAN-attached), SATA and SAS connected disks. Clustered and stand-alone configurations. Flash/SSD and spinning disk product applications from Texas Memory (now IBM), HP, FusionIO, and DDN. Linux file system management and performance tuning for high-speed storage environments (XFS, Ext4/3/2, etc.).

Database/Application Support: Supported test, development, pre-production and production environments including front-end user applications, data-flow, and processing and database systems. Includes extensive support of Oracle (RAC and standalone in both Solaris and Linux environments), Java/JDBC, Elasticsearch (1.x and 2.x), Solr, and other similar NoSQL environments.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential

UNIX Admin (Contractor)

Responsibilities:

• Provide senior Linux and UNIX administration in a fully Amazon Web Services contained environment.
• Manage and develop a third-party monitoring tool known as Extrahop to provide another level of monitoring and metrics for the cms.gov portal.

Confidential

UNIX Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Tier 3 UNIX Engineer providing high level design, fabrication and support for Exelon’s Linux systems and Cloud initiative.
• This includes design and deployment to country-wide datacenters and Cloud-provider sites; turn-over, documentation and support of the tier-2 UNIX team providing operations support.
• Engage with internal Exelon customers and Architecture to provide practical advice on the evolution of current and future Linux and Cloud solutions.

Confidential

Senior Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Senior Platform Engineering team member working Tier-3 Support and Research & Development team assignments; provide life-cycle systems development, engineering and hands-on sustainment for core program systems.

Confidential

Senior Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Senior High Performance Computing Systems team member; Systems Administrator and member of a semi-permanent architecture focus group responsible for the Research and Development for new and existing projects.

Confidential

UNIX Systems Engineer

Responsibilities:

• UNIX Systems team member jointly responsible for all aspects of daily operations of a large, highly managed 7x24 UNIX environment covering over 300 high-end, mid-range and entry level systems.
• Daily Support includes managing resources, maintenance and troubleshooting activities affecting of a range of database, web, and application servers specific to business units.

Confidential

Contractor, Network Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Verizon Fraud Prevention Center's Sun UNIX and Local/Wide-area networks.
• Provided UNIX system engineering, support, and network administration, and sought out and implemented technological and process improvements.

Confidential

Senior System Network Engineer

Responsibilities:

• System and Network engineer providing overall network operations: installation, configuration, maintenance and security, Windows 2000/NT4 domain, Cisco network gear, and laboratory systems.
• Engineered innovative and value-added systems and functionality while employed here.

Confidential

UNIX System Administrator

Responsibilities:

• Provided advanced Sun Unix, Linux and Windows systems development, integration and operations for a specialized Application Service Provider and Java software engineering environment.

Confidential

Manager Information Systems

Responsibilities:

• Managed all the county Fire Department's IS/IT issues, resources, and staff. Provided advanced Sun Unix, Linux, Novell, and Windows systems integration and management in an emergency-preparedness setting.