Arshad Ahmadi
Site Reliability Engineering Director
Summary
Experienced site reliability engineering leader with over 20 years of IT and DevOps expertise, including 12 years in leadership roles. Committed to driving innovation, optimizing infrastructure, and cultivating high-performing teams for exceptional reliability and scalability of mission-critical systems. Passionate about leveraging extensive industry knowledge to create efficient and resilient solutions that meet evolving organizational needs.
Overview
28
28
years of professional experience
4
4
years of post-secondary education
Work History
Director of SRE
CivicPlus
11.2022 - Current
- Led a team to achieve a 99.95% uptime SLA while supporting a growing infrastructure hosting over 13 applications for government and enterprise clients
- Spearheaded cloud cost optimization and AWS infrastructure initiatives, achieving a 20% reduction in operational costs while enhancing system reliability and scalability
- Collaborated with directors across departments to integrate Site Reliability strategies with company-wide objectives, establishing a framework for consistent uptime, robust security protocols, and compliance adherence
- Designed and implemented disaster recovery (DR) and root cause analysis (RCA) processes, reducing incident resolution time by 30% and increasing operational continuity
- Advanced team expertise through structured AWS certification pathways, mentorship programs, and stretch assignments, fostering a high-performance culture grounded in accountability and innovation
- Played a key role in the technical integration process during CivicPlus's acquisition of ArchiveSocial, ensuring seamless transition of engineering teams, systems, and processes while maintaining platform performance and security
- Developed a data-driven business case for leadership, gaining expertise in financial analysis, strategic planning, and executive communication, paving the way for high-impact, cross-departmental initiatives
- Developed high-performing teams by providing mentorship, guidance, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Cultivated a positive work environment that fostered employee engagement, increased retention rates, and boosted overall team morale.
Director of Engineering
ArchiveSocial
04.2021 - 11.2022
- Company Overview: Acquired by CivicPlus
- Maintained 99.95%+ uptime for the ArchiveSocial platform by implementing proactive monitoring, incident management, and system optimization strategies
- Led production incident responses to ensure timely resolutions while introducing a comprehensive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) process to drive continuous improvement and operational learnings
- Promoted a DevOps-first culture across the organization by introducing CI/CD pipelines, automating workflows, and fostering collaboration between engineering, operations, and product teams
- Developed processes for gathering and reporting critical metrics, providing actionable insights into platform performance and driving company-wide transparency
- Oversaw the implementation of scalable system architectures to support rapid user growth, ensuring high availability, fault tolerance, and optimal performance
- Partnered with stakeholders across departments to align technical initiatives with business objectives, improving efficiency and delivering features that directly addressed customer needs
- Encouraged innovation within the team by allocating time for exploring new technologies and prototyping features that informed the product roadmap
- Mentored and coached engineers, fostering professional growth and enhancing team performance through feedback, training, and stretch assignments
- Ensured platform compliance with regulatory standards (e.g., SOC 2, HIPAA), implementing best practices for security and risk management
- Built strong teams through selective recruitment and post-hire mentorship of junior engineers.
Engineering Manager
ArchiveSocial
11.2019 - 04.2021
- Responsible for all interviewing and hiring for all open positions in the engineering department
- Responsible for measuring failures and successes at the individual contributor levels and at the scrum team levels
- Evaluating new software vendors for various projects (ex. Disaster Recovery)
- Responsible for mentorship and training of all software developers that reported to me
- Responsible for maintaining and reporting on security compliance based on various frameworks
- Responsible for overseeing all infrastructure needs using Amazon Web Services
- Lead project for migration all production environments into VPC from classic linked VPC
- Cost Optimization projects (ex. Purchase of RDS reserved instances, migrate backup strategy to a more cost-effective strategy, etc.)
- Enhancing Security Projects (ex. Implement new IAM rules for all developers to have access to only what they need and nothing more)
- Identifying single points of failures within the system and implementing a more reliable solution (ex. Migrating our timestamping service to a on to server instances that are housed in multiple availability zones within AWS)
Site Reliability Engineering Manager
Netsertive
04.2019 - 11.2019
- Responsible for leading the DBA, DevOps, and Sys Admin Teams
- Responsible for maintaining a 99.95% uptime on all internal and external facing systems including the main digital marketing platform
- Responsible for the security and compliance of all production and corporate systems
- Assisted engineering delivery teams with architectural designs of new applications and new features within the digital marketing platform
- PCI Security Officer
- Incident Response Manager for all production and corporate incidents
- Responsible for managing budget for all datacenter and third-party systems
- Responsible for finding and implementation of technics/processes/technology that can reduce cost without reducing uptime/system reliability
- Successfully reduced AWS bill by 20% by implementing containers for all microservices and managing them via Kubernetes
- Successfully reduced Database infrastructure cost by migrating all appropriate databases to serverless technology
DevOps Engineering Manager
Netsertive
04.2017 - 04.2019
- Responsible for building a backlog of DevOps related projects and ensure visibility of project progress to the rest of the engineering team
- Responsible for promoting a culture of DevOps into the entire engineering organization, including:
- Building tools and processes that enable Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
- Building tools and processes that will assist all engineering teams in planning and operation of code in production
- Building tools and processes that will ensure that continuous feedback is given back to the Engineering teams from various sources (ex
- End users, LogCralwer applications, System Monitoring, etc.)
- Responsible for All DevOps Related projects and showing progress on them to the rest of the organization
- Some projects include:
- Building and migration of our current systems and architecture to more of a Microservices Architecture
- Building, designing, and maintaining a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster
- Create and maintain a new push button deploy and build system
- All the DevOps Responsibilities listed below
IT Manager
Netsertive
08.2012 - 04.2017
- Responsible for the security, scalability, design, and the health of all production systems including providing a 99.9% uptime SLA to all Netsertive's customers
- Responsible for creating processes and tools that would enable users to provide quick and continuous feedback to the Engineering teams
- Responsible for creating processes with regards to maintaining a smooth and error less deployment to production
- Responsible for Major DevOps projects such as:
- Migration of all production systems to AWS from in house systems
- Migration of all databases from traditional MySQL running on EC2 instances to Amazon's relational database service, ex
- Aurora
- Migration of source code repository from SVN Server to BitBucket Server (Git)
- Migration of all build systems from shell scripts to Bamboo CI system
- Migration of local system and application logs to a centralized log system named Graylog
- Migration of bug tracking system from Bugzilla to Jira
- Migration of all documentation from in house wiki system to Google sites
- Implementation of scrum and agile methodologies into all engineering delivery teams (Scrum Master Certified)
- Implementation of centralized user management for production access using CentOS and joining each server into our Active Directory domain
- Responsible for all datacenter activities
- Responsible for creating and maintaining an On-Call Rotation to which I was always a 2nd level escalation points of contact
- Built and managed a DevOps a Team which are responsible for:
- Design and implementing a CI/CD pipeline using Bamboo, Bitbucket, Jenkins
- Design and maintenance of all monitoring systems using Zabbix, custom Python scripts, Pingdom
- Design and automation of environment build outs (Infrastructure as code) using Ansible scripts, Python scripts, Shell scripts, and Terraform Scripts when working with AWS
- Design and manage all AWS resources with security, uptime, and scalability, and redundancy in mind
- The following AWS Systems were heavily used: EC2, RDS, Aurora, VPC, Classic and Application ELB's, SNS, SQS, SWS, Lambda
- Delivery of new code on production deployment nights
- Provide 2nd level support to for all Netsertive's Applications
- Ensured that all the daily jobs of pulling data from 3rd party sources were done accurately and in a timely manner
- Ensured that all of production's application logs were free of errors and all errors were given back to Engineering team for a fix for next release
- Built and Managed an IT Team
- Responsible for a team of Helpdesk Support personnel that provided technical support too all of Netsertive's Internal users
- Responsible for a team of System Admins that were responsible for administrating Netsertive's Corporate systems including: Windows Active Directory, OKTA, G Suite (Google Apps), JIRA
- Responsible for Network and Corporate Security
- Responsible for Major IT Projects such as:
- Implementation of a SAML based authentication system using OKTA for all 3rd party and in-house corporate systems
- Migration of DNS services from GoDaddy to AWS Route 53
- Automation of User On-boarding and Off-Boarding
Systems Engineer
Netsertive
11.2010 - 08.2012
- Responsible for the design, setup, configuration, and maintenance of all Netsertive Corporate systems including: Windows Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Corporate Wi-Fi Network with 802.11x Authentication, Windows Update Services, IPSec and SSL VPN Systems, WatchGuard XTM-505 UTM Firewall and Threat protection system, Windows File Sharing services, Windows printing Services, Corporate Phone system, Corporate LAN, Cisco Catalyst 3500 Series switches, Windows Remote Installation Services, Windows Remote Access Services, G-Suite for Business (AKA Google Apps)
- Responsible for the design, setup, configuration, and maintenance of all dev/qa/staging/production Environments for Netsertive's Software Engineering Teams
- Implementation and configuration management of all production systems including apache, php, MySQL, java all running on Centos 6.5 and 7 Operating system
- Responsible for code delivery from development to test staging, and ultimately production environments
Systems Engineer
ChannelAdvisor
04.2002 - 11.2010
- Providing helpdesk support for all 450 ChannelAdvisor employees located on site and remote offices
- Installing/Configuring/Administering the Corporate server environment including Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory, MS Exchange 2003 Mail server, Windows 2k3 DNS servers, Windows 2k3 DHCP servers, Cisco Pix Firewall, Cisco VPN Concentrator, Symantec 9.0/10.0 Antivirus server, Symantec SMTP Mail Gateway servers, Symantec Brightmail Anti Spam Server, Pinnacle Security server, and Windows 2003 File, Print, Remote Access, and Remote Installation Services (RIS) servers
- Upgraded the corporate Domain from Windows 2000 to a Windows 2003 Active Directory
- Responsible for migrating users and computers from a non ChannelAdvisor domain to the ChannelAdvisor corporate domain When ChannelAdvisor acquired several smaller companies
- Responsible for writing all the ADSI based Active Directory scripts
- Administrating the company's Cisco VOIP phone system along with Unity Messaging system
- Later switched to a Linux based Asterisk server
- Installing/Configuring/administering all company's wireless devices, including Blackberry Enterprise server version 3.6 and 4.0, Blackberry 7290, 7295, 8700, 8300, 8800, 9000 devices, windows mobile devices, iPhones
- Installing/Configuring/administering all company's network devices such as dell/hp/Cisco switches, routers, Wireless Access points
- Installing/Configuring/administering Windows and Linux based application servers, including Synergy bug tracking system, Quality Center, Mariner Project Manager Server, Confluence Wiki Server, Jira Bug tracking server, Fisheye, Crucible, OpenFire Chat server, WSUS windows update server, Softrax/Contrax finance server
- Building and maintaining multiple dev, QA, staging, and production environments, which includes MSMQ, VMware ESX servers, VMware Virtual Center server, Windows 2003 web servers running IIS 6.0, Windows 2000 and 2005 SQL servers in a clustered and non-clustered setup, and in-house Windows 2003 and Windows 2000 application servers
- Dell Warranty parts direct Certified for Dell PowerEdge Servers, Desktops, laptops, and printers
- Participated in an on-call rotation providing 24/7 support for production/corporate systems
- Participated in major releases of ChannelAdvisor Software
- Providing technical documentation
Engineering support
Nortel Networks
06.2000 - 03.2001
- Providing phone support to all of the on site Optical and Access Node Installers
- Coordinate the procurement of materials for in-process Optical and Access Node projects
- Processing the Engineering Action Center's data, which includes weekly updates of data extracted from oracle database by use of Microsoft Access, data is then processed into charts and tables via Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint
- Designing and updating the Engineering Action Center's website
Office Manager
Fun Times Entertainment Services
03.1997 - 06.2000
- Answering all customer phone calls, creating and sending contracts, maintaining the office, and coordinating all scheduled services such as children's birthday parties, Adult DJ parties, and all-day corporate events
- Building and maintaining the Fun Times database using MS Access
- Building and maintaining the Fun Times website: www.funtimesbyrobertwhite.com
Education
Associates of Computer Networking Technologies -
Wake Technical Community College
Raleigh, NC 01.2000 - 07.2002
Bachelor of Computer Science - undefined
North Carolina State University (NCSU)
Raleigh, NC 08.2002 - 06.2004
Skills
Cloud Infrastructure & Orchestration
Site Reliability Engineering
DevOps & CI/CD
AI/ML Infrastructure
Big Data & Analytics
Incident Management & DR
Security & Compliance
Cost Optimization
Automation
Leadership
Strategic Planning
Project Management
Verbal and written communication
Strategies and goals
Vendor Negotiation
Timeline
Director of SRE
CivicPlus
11.2022 - Current
Director of Engineering
ArchiveSocial
04.2021 - 11.2022
Engineering Manager
ArchiveSocial
11.2019 - 04.2021
Site Reliability Engineering Manager
Netsertive
04.2019 - 11.2019
DevOps Engineering Manager
Netsertive
04.2017 - 04.2019
IT Manager
Netsertive
08.2012 - 04.2017
Systems Engineer
Netsertive
11.2010 - 08.2012
Bachelor of Computer Science - undefined
North Carolina State University (NCSU)
08.2002 - 06.2004
Systems Engineer
ChannelAdvisor
04.2002 - 11.2010
Engineering support
Nortel Networks
06.2000 - 03.2001
Associates of Computer Networking Technologies -
Wake Technical Community College
01.2000 - 07.2002
Office Manager
Fun Times Entertainment Services
03.1997 - 06.2000