Summary
Overview
Work History
Skills
Accomplishments
Awards
People
Timeline
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Dave Fynan

Dave Fynan

North Carolina,NC

Summary

A Director, Global Head of Production Engineering SRE at WP Engine, a role that enables me to fully draw upon my leadership skills, diversity of background, my extensive experience in production services and my drive for innovative transformation and development of technology. My key skills are: 1. Transparently energetic and passionately building and sustaining engineering talent, ensuring a motivated workforce. 2. My ethos to work across the breadth of the firm creating cutting-edge tooling that enables them to truly take part in delivering tangible value, and a competitive edge. 3. Act as a key digital disruptor, driving excellence in technology while lowering risk, cost, while supporting revenue growth through delivery of stability and speed of recovery.

Overview

25
25
years of professional experience

Work History

Head of Production Engineering, AIOPs and Production SRE

WP Engine
01.2024 - 09.2025
  • Global Head of SRE and SRE Tooling, responsible for:
  • 1. Lead Production Engineering and SRE functions, overseeing global production teams responsible for reliability, scalability, and performance on GCP, Azure and AWS Cloud Platforms.
  • 2. Own strategy and delivery of AIOps and automation tooling to drive proactive incident detection, automation, and operational efficiency.
  • 3. Define and enforce SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to align reliability outcomes with business objectives.
  • 4. Direct production system architecture, tooling, and processes to ensure high availability of mission-critical WordPress hosting platforms.
  • 5. Drive observability, monitoring, and incident response maturity across the production environment. Including pivoting in tooling, creating a new strategy that was cost effective and single pane of glass.
  • 6. Develop and scale operational best practices, improving MTTR and MTTD, Incident and Problem Management
  • 7. Mentor and grow high-performing SRE and Production Engineering teams, fostering a culture of accountability and operational excellence. Delivering a full SRE curriculum for all year online training.
  • 8. Owner of DR Compliance for all Engineering organizations.
  • Also responsible for multiple large-scale programs such as:
  • 1. Built the 2-year operational strategy and planning to achieve operational excellence
  • 2. Split the SRE organization into 2, ensuring focus on SW delivery for Tooling and AIOPs and SRE engineering
  • 3. Delivered the first Operational Excellence Dashboards at WP Engine for Production metric transparency.
  • 4. Built a control framework covering all key metrics operational to drive operational excellence with executive and Manager levels.
  • 5. Delivered an automation agenda, where from implementation delivered 268k HW cost reduction, 44, 200 toil hours saved, 331, 600 auto heal events.

Head of Production Engineering

Deutsche Bank
01.2018 - 12.2023
  • Global Lead of 230 Personnel, and Product Owner for 27 Production Applications/tools, including:
  • 1. Observability Platforms for application and infrastructure, utilizing strategic SaaS Product New Relic and Google Cloud GCO, with strategic migration away from multiple competing products such as Appdynamics and Geneos.
  • 2. Award winning AIOps service, delivering an ecosystem of tools using Ansible, Jenkins, ServiceNow and internally developed applications, utilizing AI/ML and LLM to produce transparency to production, reducing toil and attributed cost, plus significant reduction in MTTD and MTTR for all Business Units
  • 3. Workload Automation Utilizing Control-M, Cloud Composer, Google Tasks, Apache Airflow and Uc4
  • 4. Capacity Management utilizing BMC TrueSight and Event Mgt through Netcool and New Relic tooling
  • 5. Production SRE and operations Services for all Products of responsibility
  • 6. Production Tooling Architecture group, owning all decisions on roadmap compliance and innovation
  • 7. Controls, process and governance owner e.g. Availability and Application Operations for the firm
  • Also responsible for multiple large-scale programs such as:
  • 1. Software rationalization and consolidation leading to significant cost reduction (21m)
  • 2. Migration of Production tooling to Google Cloud (GCP)
  • 3. Large resiliency programs to meet external regulation, while providing increased stability
  • 4. Global Hackathon and Guild chair to drive innovation and an engineering culture
  • 5. Owner and producer of the Production SRE training curriculums

Head of Production SRE and Operations - Enterprise Risk

Deutsche Bank
01.2015 - 01.2018
  • Global Head of 140 Personnel for Production Services (in London), covering all T+1 Risk services in DB and Lead Transformation manager for Risk, Treasury and Finance. Producing the firm's first operational manual for SRE and driving a shift from Operator to Engineer across all Production technology departments.

Head of Production Front Office Listed Derivatives

Deutsche Bank
01.2010 - 01.2015
  • Global Head of 90 Personnel for Production Services (in London), for multiple Front Office services, including Listed Derivatives, Global Liquidity Mgt and Risk.

Head of Service Management

London Stock Exchange Group
01.2001 - 01.2010
  • Effective management of a team of Service Managers responsible for the main London, Italian and South African Equity Markets, as well as the London (EDX) and the Norwegian (Oslo) Derivative Exchange platforms.

Skills

  • Leadership
  • Strategic IT leader adept at aligning technology with business goals Led cross-functional teams in complex projects, delivering solutions on time and within budget Proven track record in driving innovation, optimizing processes, and ensuring cybersecurity Strong communicator skilled in translating technical concepts for non-technical and senior stakeholders I truly believe that the team is the greatest asset, and leadership comes through a strong strategy but also care and due diligence to the people you are responsible for
  • Innovation
  • Demonstrated innovative thinking by consistently proposing and implementing solutions that automate processes, enhance efficiency, and drive positive outcomes Proactively seek opportunities to challenge conventional approaches, resulting in creative problem-solving and continuous improvement Winner of multiple Individual and team awards for driving innovation to the firm and ensuring it is done with a whole of Production approach
  • Delivery
  • Consistently achieved successful IT delivery by meticulously planning projects, managing resources, and mitigating risks Track record of meeting deadlines and exceeding expectations, ensuring seamless technology solutions that drive business growth Proven through a 40% reduction in command manual interventions, 17m automation executions, 45k application self heals with no human intervention and 900k hours saved through automation
  • People
  • Exemplary people manager with a history of fostering a collaborative and motivated team environment Effective in coaching, mentoring, and resolving conflicts, resulting in high employee engagement, productivity, and retention rates Leadership award winner
  • Collaboration
  • Adept collaborator, skilled in working across all technology departments to achieve common goals including cost reduction year on year Proven ability to leverage diverse perspectives, communicate effectively, and contribute to successful cross-functional projects and initiatives

Accomplishments

  • AIOPs
  • Delivered an ecosystem of inhouse built and vendor products, with a foundation of AI and LLM that provides key services that create similarity patterns and visualization that supports significant reduction in MTTD, MTTR, Risks and Costs. Key services provide:
  • 1. Technology Self healing from alert to resolution with no human interaction
  • 2. Automated Service Requests, including chatbot interactivity reducing human processing
  • 3. Straight Through Change, reducing administration through automation for repetitive change
  • 4. Full Disaster Recovery, stitching automation tasks, saving thousands of hours of effort and providing Business stability
  • 5. Blast Radius reduction through delivery of deployment caused error rate increase and cut off switch
  • 6. Saved Deutsche Bank ~900,000 hours through 1.7m automated execution.
  • Observability live in Production

Awards

Risk Finance and Treasury Innovation Award - For delivery of an automation solution for manual intervention - 2019, Walter Boehm for Innovation - Highest achievement for innovation in DB - 2020, DB Leadership Award - 1 of 3 winners voted by the people, out of a population of 10k - 2021, CTO Hackathon - Delivering a self healing solution in 24hrs that solved a platform non-compliance to MTTR - 2022, Global Hackathon - Winner of best AI Solution for Private Banking - 2023, DB World Cup Innovation - 2nd Place out of 1000+ submissions for ‘Procurement to Retire’ automation strategy - 2023

People

  • 1. Ring fenced a female tester to re-train as an engineer; she is now a developer running a development team
  • 2. Sponsored key initiatives through the Hackathons to provide a platform to provide information delivery and advertisement of events
  • 3. Mentor multiple diverse colleagues, working towards promotion

Timeline

Head of Production Engineering, AIOPs and Production SRE

WP Engine
01.2024 - 09.2025

Head of Production Engineering

Deutsche Bank
01.2018 - 12.2023

Head of Production SRE and Operations - Enterprise Risk

Deutsche Bank
01.2015 - 01.2018

Head of Production Front Office Listed Derivatives

Deutsche Bank
01.2010 - 01.2015

Head of Service Management

London Stock Exchange Group
01.2001 - 01.2010

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Dave Fynan