Dennis Walker

Took principal accountability for the delivery of the world's only cloud-native, data center infrastructure management product suite designed for the world's largest and most sophisticated supercomputers. Managed an organization of ~60, comprised of 8 engineering teams, including the annual budget of $12MM USD. Also, provided the day-to-day instructions for another 20 contractors and Indian engineers.

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Delivered many of the world's largest supercomputers, satisfying hundreds of contractual requirements and securing half a billion U.S. dollars in revenue.
e.g.

• Third largest supercomputer as of 2023 - https://www.top500.org/system/180048/
• Eighth largest supercomputer as of 2023 - https://www.top500.org/system/179972/

My users included many Nobel prize winners whose frontier-advancing discoveries can be read about on sites like phys.org.

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Interpreted customer requirements, structured the roadmap of initiatives and epics, and groomed several backlogs of user stories. As of April '23, clarified the goals and work through the modification of 6,500 Jira issues, providing engineers with actionable work and enabling the larger organization and customers to coordinate with our progress.

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Designed and implemented the release management tooling and procedures covering the packaging and automated patching of hundreds of internal repositories, containers, helm charts, RPMs, binaries, OS images. Drove the deployment times from 1-2 months down to 1-2 days on bare-metal hardware and 1 hour in the public cloud. Implemented true continuous integration for a dozen products representing the entire solution.

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Was directly involved in coordinating issue resolution for hundreds of issues, even getting hands-on with the triage resolutions, writing code, drafting procedures, and revising automated test suites.

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Drove many cross-product initiatives, leading to greater automation, resiliency, security, and scalability across the BU involving hundreds of engineers.

Founded Broadwing Ltd, a software and systems engineering consultancy specializing in DevOps, security, SRE, and interim CTO services. Acquired the majority of company talent including executives and more than thirty engineers. Grew the annual revenue by 300% from 2019 to 2020, despite the pandemic. Notable customers included the U.S. government, a regional energy company, multiple SaaS platform startups, and several fortune 500 companies.

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Responsibilities included:

• Designed enterprise-level technological blueprints and system architectures.
• Supported complex sales leads and opportunities.
• Handled client inquiries with exceptional professionalism and enthusiasm.
• Provided project leadership in dynamic technology-driven environment with multiple priorities.
• Facilitated ongoing team development and growth through training and professional skills enhancement.
• Maintained thorough understanding of all key and current technologies, platforms and trends.
• Coordinated third-party vendors and client IT teams to seamlessly deliver effective solutions.

Spark Neuro had ambitious goals including scanning one billion human brains to enable all neuroscientists to create data products which translate biological telemetry data into readily-accessible insights and diagnostics. In support of this, built the team and the platform in six months.

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• Attracted and hired top-tier engineering and ops teams. Grew engineering by 1000% while maintaining engineering budgets.
• Took ownership of existing superstar data scientist team. Mapped experiments to incremental progress and update level of effort estimates.
• Implemented strong machine learning version controls around training data, models, experiments, ETL pipelines, and API endpoints.
• Identified and prioritized product portfolio roadmap of milestones, including algorithms, desktop apps, data-mart, and SaaS platform
• Delivered an operationally excellent platform within 6 months. Our early adopters included many internationally recognizable enterprises including Netflix, GM, and FedEx.

Ran R&D within Pythian's Tehama business unit, creating innovative products using artificial intelligence in massively scalable platforms. Personally designed and developed Tehama's audit platform, exposing human behavioral analytics through a natural language query interface.

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• Managed data science, its goals and objectives, coordinating expectations with business stakeholders.
• Created pipelines of AI models turning desktop session videos into visible features over time.
• Implemented strong data provenance to version-control modifications to data.
• Developed APIs and single-page web-apps governed by automated scenario and unit tests.
• Created infrastructure-as-code framework orchestrating hosting environments.
• Delivered working prototype within 3 months and market-ready solution in 6.

Led and shaped technical presales thought leadership and solution analyses with a team of 35-40 world-class product owners, architects, developers, DevOps/SRE engineers, data scientists and data engineers.

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• Created repeatable service definitions and consulting strategies.
• Was accountable for technical analysis opening $40MM USD in new opportunities.
• Directly engaged in digital transformation gap analyses and program management for complex engagements, many of which were $1MM+ in size.
• Supported marketing efforts through production of collateral, case studies, and by representing our technical expertise to partners including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Revised digital transformation consulting service offerings while delivering $16MM in revenue for the department's first year in operation. Was responsible for organizational design, job descriptions, RACI/KPI identification, professional development, the hiring pipeline, utilization actuals/forecasts reporting and the BU budget. Personally led the most complex technology audits.

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• Drove improvements to enhance operational and interdepartmental efficiencies.
• Prioritized and allocated top-tier talent to meet engagement targets.
• Strategized and executed transformational roadmaps enabling customers forward momentum to operations, design, development and growth.
• Created agile product owner service definition and team to identify and track ROI using customer business driver metrics and success criteria.

Was promoted as part of Pythian's acquisition of Blackbird. Led interdepartmental collaboration to identify opportunities and deliver new DevOps capabilities to existing projects. Managed DevOps engagements to ensure delivery was on target and within budgets.

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• Developed thought leadership and case studies around operational excellence axioms, e.g. performance engineering, CI/CD, infrastructure lifecycle management, and operational visibility.
• Managed hiring pipeline, resource scheduling, and budgets for DevOps personnel.
• Integrated management and processes with new parent company procedures enabling point-in-time reporting.
• Demonstrated leadership skills in managing projects from concept to completion
• Supported sales and marketing with collateral and partner interviews. Landed multiple partner proficiency recognitions for DevOps from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
• Grew month-over-month revenue by 400%.

Led key engagements for DriveDev which later became Blackbird and then Pythian.

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• Enabled client to rapidly recover after their failed launch to retain $15MM in investment revenue. Designed and developed greenfield cloud-based architecture within 3 months enabling them to capture $55MM in revenue in series-B round.
• Personally developed and led team members through implementation on many solutions including continuous delivery, customer analytics, database administration, new APIs driving business logic, cloud architecture, and operational visibility.
• Reduced platform deployment times down from months to minutes.
• Implemented single-pane-of glass dashboards illustrating platform health state at-a-glance.
• Developed customer behavioral analytics platform transacting billions in revenue.
• Directly remediated countless operations incidents, following up with root-cause analyses, retrospectives, and platform improvements.

Started consulting for systems engineering and software development while still in college, and grew it to 25 FTE. Wore every hat during twelve years of ownership from writing code to producing marketing collateral and giving industry talks at conferences.

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• Managed company-level architecture, platform and data configuration processes and implementation protocols.
• Embraced macro-level strategic decisions and micro-level implementation.
• Laid out complete business continuity plan to maintain data protection in event of natural disaster or long-term outage.
• Directed software and systems engineering teams' complex project development and functionality objectives.

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Also, personally developed and led teams through many technology projects including:

• C# and MSSQL - Medical billing SaaS platform for doctors and collections,
• Objective C and PHP - Mobile app for photo-taking, inspection with survey SaaS platform.
• Java / Spring - Media warehousing and sales distribution SaaS platform.
• Adobe Flex and PHP - Facebook, flash, massively multiplayer poker game.
• Java - Account sign-up qualification and provisioning for global 4G data providers.
• Objective C and PHP - Instagram competitor.