Jason Smith
Fort Worth,TX
Summary
Accomplished, self-directed, and highly motivated leader with extensive experience with cloud and on-premises solutions. 10+ years as an IT professional working in the financial services and health care industries. 6 years in a senior technical position and 4 years in a leadership position. An experienced product owner, scrum master, and team member within the Agile framework. A certified Azure Solutions Architect, SAFe for Agile Systems Architect, and a SAFe for Agile DevOps Expert.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
Work History
Manager, Cloud Engineering
First Command Financial Services
Fort Worth, TX
12.2023 - Current
- Scaled and managed a team of Cloud Engineers of various backgrounds and skillsets
- Product Owner, Scrum Master, and technical mentor for a shared services agile team
- Developed and executed cloud strategies and roadmaps, which aligned with business objectives and ensured scalability and reliability
- Optimized cloud spending through the implementation of FinOps practices, achieving a 30% reduction in cloud expenses
- Drove automation initiatives with DevSecOps practices using tools such as Azure DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Azure Policy, Azure Monitor, Azure Automation, Azure Security Center, Defender for Cloud, and Sentinel
- Collaborated with security and compliance teams to implement robust security practices, ensuring full compliance with the SEC, OCC, and FINRA audits
- Collaborated closely with cross-functional teams during project initiatives and incident response efforts, ensuring timely delivery of business solutions and resolution of critical issues affecting business operation.
Cloud Engineer & Team Lead
First Command Financial Services
Fort Worth, TX
08.2020 - 12.2023
- Technical leader in the development and adoption of a cloud-first strategy
- Primary engineer responsible for establishing and maintaining a hybrid data center, building the cloud governance strategies, and migrating systems into the cloud.
- Built the cloud environment hierarchies (tenants, subscriptions, resources groups).
- Deployed and managed the hub spoke network architecture (express route, VPNs (for HA redundancy), vNets, subnets, routing tables, network and application firewalls, application load balancers, and NSGs).
- Defined the identity and access management strategies, using role based access controls with least privileged access and just in time provisioning.
- Security and compliance audit policies, standard operating procedures, and defined best practices.
- Cost management strategy using asset tagging, budgeting, reporting, and alerting tools.
- Implemented highly available, disaster recoverable, application stacks
- Led the rollout of an API management solution that helped the organization publish, secure, transform, maintain, and monitor all cloud hosted APIs.
- Implemented a modern authentication strategy that enhanced our user and application access security.
- Contributing member of a DevOps team that deployed and maintained application stacks using Infrastructure as Code with CI/CD pipelines.
- Managed a centralized repository for all Infrastructure as Code modules
- Built and maintained Infrastructure as Code modules and CI/CD pipelines that enabled self-service deployments for the development teams
- Designed and configured Git branching strategies, CI/CD pipelines, checks, and gates.
- Administered Azure DevOps projects, boards, repos, pipelines, and connectors.
- Defined and implemented a cloud monitoring strategy which led to a full infrastructure and application monitoring migration from the SCOM and App Dynamics to Azure Monitor
- Subject matter expert for many SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions. See the skills table.
Senior System Administrator
First Command Financial Services
Fort Worth, TX
09.2017 - 08.2020
- Deployed, administered, secured, maintained, and updated 750+ virtual and physical servers
- Led two server end of life projects that resulted in upgrading or decommissioning 250+ systems
- Deployed and administered Domain Controllers, DNS, DHCP, business critical applications, databases, security solutions
- Implemented a Least Privileged Access governance strategy using a Privileged Access Management solution. This resulted in the removal of administrator access to non-privileged accounts across every server in the organization
- Automated OS imaging, security patching, and application deployments with System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)
- Built and managed an automated event notification solution using System Center Operations Manager and Everbridge
- Administered corporate email, voice, and IM
- Automated day to day processes using both out of the box and custom-built workflows.
System Administrator
PDX, Inc
Fort Worth, TX
02.2013 - 09.2017
- Automated the user provisioning process using a custom-built application
- Upgraded Domain Controllers and DHCP Servers from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2016 using Infrastructure as Code with Ansible
- Administered and Maintained Windows 2008-2016 Servers, Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and Group Policy
- Migration from Exchange 2007 - Exchange Online and Lync 2010 - Skype for Business 2015
- Administering and maintaining corporate email, voice, and IM
- Installation and maintenance of server/desktop/laptop/printer hardware and software
Education
Bachelor of Science - Management Information System, Database Administration and Web Development
Utah State University
Logan, UT12.2012
Skills
- App Hosting Solutions - Azure API Management, App Service Environments, App Service Plans, App Services, Function Apps, Web Apps, and Logic Apps
- Azure AD / EntraID Application Administration - Azure Registered Applications, Azure Enterprise Applications, and App Proxy Services
- Azure Cost Management -Tagging, Budgeting, and Reporting
- Azure DevOps Administrator - Projects, Boards, Repos, Pipelines, Policies, Connectors, User Access Controls
- Certificate Management - AD Certificate Services, Azure Certificates, 3rd Party Cas, and KMS
- Compliance Regulation Management - Azure Compliance Portal, Azure Policies, and AD Group Policy
- Data Management, ETL, and Analytics - Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Purview, Fabric, Azure Storage Accounts, Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and Azure SFTP
- Database Administration - SQL Servers, SQL DBs, Postgres, CosmosDBs
- DevOps Engineer - CI/CD Pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, Terraform, Ansible, ADO, Jenkins, GitFlow, GitHub-Flow
- Identity Access Management - Azure RBAC PIM, Least Privilege Access, Zero Trust, JIT provisioning, MFA, Conditional Access Policies, User and System Managed IDs, and OAuth20
- IdP Administration - EntraID, ADFS, and PingFederate Experienced in SSO, SAML, & SCIM setups
- Network Administration - Azure Express Route, Azure Application Gateway, F5 Load Balancers, Palo Alto Firewalls, Web Application Firewalls, mTLS Authentication, VPNs, vNets, Subnets, Private and Public DNS Routing, and NSGs
- Support – 24-hour Tier 1-3 (Help Desk, System Admin, & Cloud Engineering)
- System Administration - Active Directory 2012 R2 & 2016, Windows Server 2008-2022, Azure Virtual Machines, VMWare, Hyper-V, Windows Cluster Services, Azure Availability Sets, Azure Scale Sets System Center Suite (SCCM, SCOM, & Scorch), DNS, and DHCP
- System and Site Reliability - Application Insights, Log Analytics, Azure Arc, Azure Dashboards, Availability Tests, Azure Automation, Event Hub, and Azure Alerts
Timeline
Manager, Cloud Engineering
First Command Financial Services
12.2023 - Current
Cloud Engineer & Team Lead
First Command Financial Services
08.2020 - 12.2023
Senior System Administrator
First Command Financial Services
09.2017 - 08.2020
System Administrator
PDX, Inc
02.2013 - 09.2017
Bachelor of Science - Management Information System, Database Administration and Web Development
Utah State University
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