Mason Huemmer

Founded the Cloud Operations department, reporting directly to Vice President of Engineering, establishing a culture of collaboration between development and operations to improve:

• deployment frequency,
• automated processes,
• And enhanced system reliability

As a result of leading the Cloud Operations department, I achieved the following:

• Designed and implemented a Hub-Spoke network architecture using Infrastructure-as-code, successfully migrating all existing services to this more efficient and scalable system
• Designed and implemented Failover/DR strategy for mission-critical services within Microsoft Azure
• Instrumental in our company's achievement of SOC 2 Certification by implementing and upholding controls across our Cloud Infrastructure and IT
• Collaborated with the Engineering department to successfully adopt strategies from Continuous Delivery, such as Trunk-based Development, feature-flag development, and continuous testing.
• Transitioned code deployment pipelines to YAML templates in Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions, as well as, moving to self-hosted agents, enhancing automation and consistency across the development lifecycle.

Collaborated as a key member of the DevSecOps team, working to ensure security considerations and testing are embedded in the SDLC through

• Automated security testing
• Threat modeling and risk assessment
• And infrastructure-as-code

While serving on this team, I achieved the following key milestones:

• Led the development and execution of a company-wide Infrastructure-as-Code initiative, leveraging Terraform and GitLab for cloud infrastructure automation, transferring ownership to Development teams.
• Worked with the IT Security team to deploy Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Antivirus on all Azure VMs, improving system security and threat mitigation.
• Supported the seamless transition from New Relic to Datadog.
• Aided in reducing Azure expenditures by implementing Kubecost for AKS, offering teams granular insights into their spending.
• Engineered an automated process with Azure Image Builder for the monthly creation of secure Windows VM images.
• Played a crucial role in the implementation of Azure NIST policies, ensuring our infrastructure adhered to compliance standards.
• Developed tools to streamline daily tasks for developers, enhancing productivity and workflow efficiency using Bash, PowerShell, Python, and GO.

• Developed and championed the organization-wide DevOps vision and strategy in 2021, leading to transformative changes in culture, practices, and tools, significantly enhancing operational efficiency and collaboration across teams.
• Strategically designed an organizational hierarchy that fosters product team ownership, embedding clear guardrails to ensure alignment with overarching business goals and operational standards.
• Designed and led the implementation of a Hub-Spoke Network Architecture for Azure, ensuring optimal network performance and scalability. Concurrently directed the establishment of governance and subscription strategies, with a keen focus on security, to enhance organizational control and compliance across Azure environments.
• Developed and implemented Model Ops proof-of-concept for Data Science team using Docker Container Registry, Kubernetes, InfluxDB, and H2O.ai, LaunchDarkly, and Terraform Cloud

• Redesigned our CICD pipelines, redesigned IaC to reduce technical debt and infrastructural improvements, and provided the company with 80% cost reduction.
• Redesigned and implemented single-branch deployments for faster and smaller releases - greatly improved stability and faster deployments across environments Deep dive into new technologies and infrastructural redesigns, providing recommendation to DevOps Architect
• Configured and Released Red/Black deployments for each of our AKS clusters (Dev, QA, Load, Prod)
• Developed pipelines to deploy .NET Core, .NET Framework MVC, GOLANG, Maven, NodeJS, Python
• Review / Clean-up / approve submitted work from Offshore teams with regards to CICD pipelines (Jenkins / Azure Pipelines) and Infrastructure changes
• Assist our development and QA teams to address any blockers during their sprint Set day-to-day priorities for the DevOps team
• Documented technical workflows / processes with an overview of our entire infrastructure and the technology stack.