BENJAMIN YOUNG
Information Technology
Summary
Accomplished Director of Entperise IT with over 15 years of experience leading technology teams, driving strategic innovation, and delivering enterprise-wide solutions. Adept at developing and executing IT strategies that align with organizational goals, optimizing infrastructure, and ensuring robust cybersecurity measures. Proven track record in managing multimillion-dollar budgets, enhancing operational efficiency, and fostering cross-functional collaboration. Skilled in cloud design & operations, digital transformations, and change management, with a strong commitment to excellence, stakeholder engagement, and continuous improvement. Recognized for visionary leadership, business acumen, and the ability to build high-performing teams using CICD best-practices.
Overview
20
20
years of professional experience
Work History
Director of Infrastructure Architecture
General Electric Company
01.2022 - Current
- Managed eight-person scrum team to transition into using enterprise autoamtion tooling, which reduced maintenance and change management times by 60%.
- Create the first multi-solution & multi-location delivery estimation tool that reduced SOW estimation development time down from months to days.
- Negotiated the Business Partnership Agreement with RedHat, achieving 30% reduction in licensing costs and realizing 5% margin on licensing.
- Led & trained delivery teams in infrastructure automation and scalable application delivery processes, which enabled standard deployment models.
- Established new CICD capabilities, contributing to $257 million in sales from 2022 to 2025.
- Developed hybrid deployment processes for AWS, Azure, and on-prem environments, shortening project timelines from 18 to 3 months.
Enterprise Cloud Architect
McCormick & Co Inc
09.2020 - 01.2022
- Managed a 5-person team responsible for automating IT infrastructure using ServiceNow and Ansible, reducing delivery times from 4 months to 10 minutes.
- Developed and implemented an organizational change framework with Azure DevOps for agile development, utilizing CI/CD processes and infrastructure-as-code.
- Planned and managed enterprise cloud agreements for responsible spending of $35 million in public cloud resources over five years.
- Mentored junior architects on cloud design principles and methodologies under the "code-first" mindset.
- Led architectural review boards to ensure alignment with business objectives and cybersecurity compliance.
- Implemented best practices for cloud resource management and cost optimization.
- Collaborated with stakeholders and vendors to design cloud architecture standards & governance, ensuring scalability and security per NIST 800-53 guidelines.
- Developed migration strategies for transitioning applications to cloud environments.
- Evaluated & designed emerging cloud AI/ML (Databricks, DataFactory, etc.) technologies to enhance operational efficiency and expand competitive sales goals.
- Spearheaded the development of the first scalable AI/ML cloud architecture, which supported 15 independent business segments.
Enterprise Cloud Architect
Acuity Brands Lighting
Conyers
09.2019 - 09.2020
- Designed the PaaS hosting deployment process, which saved over $300k annually in Azure expenditures.
- Responsibly managed and planned the enterprise cloud agreements for the consumption of $5 million dollars of Azure cloud resources over a 5-year period.
- Implemented a dual-purpose DR/Failover architecture in a multi-region topology for both IaaS and PaaS services that automatically engages standby resources when outages are detected.
- Worked with infrastructure and automation engineers to build CI/CD pipelines using infrastructure-as-code methodologies, almost eliminating manual stand-up and tear-down of services.
- Managed and administered global datacenters containing 1000s of both Windows and Linux systems.
- Collaborated with technical experts and architects from multiple IT lanes to build robust and scalable solutions that enable instance growth while minimizing costs and improving performance monitoring.
- Worked with enterprise engineers to design on-prem automation to ensure datacenter operations & security KPIs were being met.
Senior IT Project Manager
United Technologies Corporation – Carrier
Athens
01.2017 - 09.2019
- Led digital IT infrastructure overhaul to Microsoft Azure, achieving over $500,000 in savings and reducing management commitments by 40%.
- Collaborated with Cross-Business Innovation teams to create the tools and automate the processes for global corporate cloud offerings, incorporating orchestration using Scalr and Ansible.
- Managed regional datacenters consisting of over 100 servers, which supported 24x7 operations with a near-zero downtime requirement.
- Reduced IT support overhead by implementing CI/CD techniques and agile methodologies, decreasing solution delivery time and IT support costs by 30%.
- Established business intelligence solutions and data warehouse architecture with Azure SQL PaaS, eliminating $250,000 in annual software licensing fees.
- Directed development teams to design a B2B authentication process using Azure services for secure connectivity to ERP systems for over 300 suppliers.
Director of Information Technology
Oconee Presbyterian Church
01.2013 - 01.2018
- Collaborated with key stakeholders to plan, implement, and integrate the CRM software, the organizational website, and network data storage to promote user-friendly access and enhanced functionality for internal and external consumers.
- Delivered Microsoft-based products that allowed for ease of use and cross-platform operability, which decreased IT overhead costs by 28% and realized an ROI in less than one year.
- Negotiated third-party vendor contracts for internal network reconfigurations to enable wireless roaming for over 500 simultaneous users.
Health Information Systems Manager
Department of Veterans Affairs
01.2013 - 01.2015
- Developed a clinical reporting method for staff that reduced metric reporting errors for a 40,000-patient population by 60%, and automated the data modeling process.
- Instituted a local VA work-study program that provided over 500 student veterans with career development opportunities.
- Improved and managed interfaces between healthcare systems to enhance the coordination of patient care requirements, and secure HIPAA-regulated personal information across a multi-branch, geographically separated hospital.
- Worked with DoD leadership to implement a streamlined check-in process using ID cards and kiosks, reducing VA healthcare wait times by 15%.
HR Information Systems Manager
Unites States Army
01.2006 - 01.2012
- Managed a five-person team that was responsible for successfully operating and securing the DoD’s digital credentialing and identity system which contained over 2.4 million individual records.
- Assembled and conducted a cross-functional, multi-departmental team to develop the digital and physical security checkpoint processes for DoD contractor verification that was used across the military.
- Orchestrated an automated data collection and processing system for over 19,000 employees which decreased data entry & analysis time by 50%.
- Managed the application integrations of over 150 different systems to ensure accurate manpower and strength management and tracking.
Education
Master of Business Technology - Information Technology
University of Georgia
Athens, GA01.2020
Bachelor of Business Administration - Computer Information Systems
University of North Georgia
Dahlonega, GA01.2016
Skills
- Multi-Cloud (Azure & AWS)
- Agile (SCRUM)
- Hypervisors (VMware, Nutanix & Hyper-V)
- ERP (JDE, SAP)
- Devops (Azure & Jira)
- Ansible & Terraform
- Infrastructure as Code
- Containerized Architecture (Kubernetes, OpenShift, Rancher)
- CI/CD pipelines
- Enterprise Architecture
- Risk management
- Stakeholder engagement
- Cost optimization
- CyberSecurity Compliance
- Vendor negotiation
- Change management
- Team leadership
- Information security
- Incident management
- Capacity planning
- Process improvement
- Business continuity
- Automation
- Hybrid cloud environments
- Serverless architectures
- Microservices architecture
- Disaster recovery planning
- High availability systems
References
https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminayoung1/details/recommendations/
Additonal references available upon request.
Timeline
Director of Infrastructure Architecture
General Electric Company
01.2022 - Current
Enterprise Cloud Architect
McCormick & Co Inc
09.2020 - 01.2022
Enterprise Cloud Architect
Acuity Brands Lighting
09.2019 - 09.2020
Senior IT Project Manager
United Technologies Corporation – Carrier
01.2017 - 09.2019
Director of Information Technology
Oconee Presbyterian Church
01.2013 - 01.2018
Health Information Systems Manager
Department of Veterans Affairs
01.2013 - 01.2015
HR Information Systems Manager
Unites States Army
01.2006 - 01.2012
Master of Business Technology - Information Technology
University of Georgia
Bachelor of Business Administration - Computer Information Systems
University of North Georgia