Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Technologies
Work Preference
Timeline
SoftwareEngineer

Mike Brown

Hendersonville,NC

Summary

Highly accomplished Leader of Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, Site Reliability, and DevOps teams. An "expert-generalist" with a proven track record of driving cross-functional teams to deliver innovative solutions, streamline operations and improve end-user experience. Passionate about driving efficiency, optimizing processes and mentoring/developing talent to achieve business objectives. Strong ability to confidently and clearly communicate with all levels of an organization, including executive teams, regardless of technical backgrounds.

Overview

20
20
years of professional experience

Work History

V.P. of Software Engineering ( Platform and Developer Experience Manager)

Live Oak Bank
08.2022 - Current
  • Formed the Developer Experience team and introduced Platform Engineering practices with the goal of enhancing developer productivity
  • Manage team that creates novel solutions, custom tools and patterns, and integrates third-party solutions
  • Simultaneously serving in a managerial, product owner and individual contributor role
  • Increased developer satisfaction 20%+ year over year (past 2 years)
  • Owned, managed and administered all code repository and CICD solutions including Gitlab, GitHub and Octopus Deploy
  • Engineered and deployed a novel autoscaling Gitlab runner solution which provided enhanced security and flexibility beyond Gitlab's standard practices
  • Introduced concept of Architectural Decision Records to set organizational SDLC standards
  • Implemented DORA metrics and visibility into developer and DevOps practices
  • Integrated and extended third-party internal developer portal (Cortex) to streamline information and drive developer productivity
  • Formed initial investigative team to evaluate and introduce novel AI solutions to reduce workload and toil through automation, including automating internal and external release/change note writing and publishing, saving teams 2+ hours per release
  • Architected and currently implementing a novel AI solution for automating SRE functions
  • Partnered closely with Infrastructure and Dev Security teams on major initiatives inclusive of infrastructure patterns and standards, AWS environment reconfigurations and deployment strategies
  • Architected and designed a centralized secrets management solution to drastically lower cost and complexity without the need for expensive third-party solutions
  • Served as SME for DevOps and SRE based initiatives
  • Identified opportunities to improve business process flows and productivity.

V.P. of DevOps/(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering (+ IT and Security)

Commonbond
10.2021 - 08.2022
  • Established the Site Reliability team and practices
  • Reported directly to President and CEO for technical guidance and solutions
  • Promoted with added responsibilities of managing DevOps, Security and IT within 6 months while managing a team of 8+ senior and principal engineers
  • Re-platformed observability tooling and introduced SRE practices
  • Re-architected and re-platformed existing Kubernetes first environment architecture to fully Terraformed EKS/Fargate + Lambda environment following AWS best practices
  • Saved $108k/year(net) in fees while simultaneously adding new products to enhance and streamline development practices
  • Automated numerous operations responsibilities saving hundreds of hours of operations team work
  • Managed vendor relationships for DevOps, security and SRE
  • Developed enhanced corporate policies to maintain SOC2 compliance, improve security practices and enhance client relationships

Technologies Site Reliability Engineering Team Lead / Manager

Ally Bank
02.2019 - 10.2021
  • Founding member of team responsible for introducing and evangelizing the concepts of modern Site Reliability Engineering to the organization
  • Personally grew SRE team from 2 to over 10+ members, as well as serving as an operating model for other SRE groups in the organization
  • Team ultimately grew from solely SRE function to a SRE + DevOps structure internally named “Production Engineering”
  • Maintained team morale and productivity during COVID pandemic through effective leadership and interpersonal skills
  • Provided strategic feedback and guidance to leadership, inclusive of strategic roadmaps, gap, ROI and other objective data analysis
  • SRE contact for bank application during triage events and assisted with coordinating organizational triage efforts
  • Developed policies and standards that are used across the enterprise, such as standardized logging
  • Overhauled the “Voice of Customer” (customer issue support) process for other groups within the organization to provide more useful and direct information with less toil
  • Assisted in the migration to container-based infrastructure (Openshift) followed by current migration to AWS serverless frameworks
  • Assisted in migration of Code repository and CICD tools from Gitlab from Jenkins
  • Assisted with architecting and engineering transition to a HOT/HOT configuration for non-serverless applications
  • Championed and drove effort for the organization's first open-source project (https://github.com/Ally-Financial/soda)
  • Created and developed Contract-As-Code solution to mitigate breaking changes between internal APIs and reduce PII exposure
  • Assisted with initial configuration and implementation of feature flag implementation and canary releases using LaunchDarkly
  • Managed implementation of Bitrise mobile build server deployment and integration into Gitlab pipeline

Application Systems Engineer / Platform DevOps Engineer

AvidXChange
10.2017 - 02.2019
  • Application Systems engineer involved in maintaining and deploying IIS web applications in both Microsoft Azure and local datacenter utilizing VMWare
  • Functioned as Project leader, solutions architect and subject matter expert for various solutions including Azure infrastructure migration, Master Data Management, Treasury Management and various web applications
  • Assumed and restructured Master Data Management Project including re-architecting, re-engineering and associated project management, resulting in over $2 million in cost savings and greatly decreased development and support effort
  • Developed self healing alerting framework, infrastructure and application processes using Azure Logic Apps saving resulting in reduced support incidents and greater application reliability resulting in a reduction of over 500+ team alerts/tickets per year.
  • Took initiative to identity previously manual application tasks and engineered replacement automated solutions to ensure greater environment resiliency and uptime
  • Automated NACHA money movement le normalization, verifications and transfers, saving the company hours/day in productivity
  • Championed and assisted with implementation of Terraform IaC platform to drastically increase delivery speed and flexibility of architecture
  • Developed environment “shakeout” processes using a combination of technologies to deliver automated testing of all servers, services and website health with a user-friendly dashboard
  • Championed and developed a green/blue deployment strategy to perform production level deployments during business hours without downtime
  • Responsible for engineering and automating development pipeline

Lead Sales Engineer/ Senior Network Engineer / Administrator

Impact Technologies Group
03.2014 - 10.2017
  • Served as primary DevOps engineer involved in maintaining SAAS application for customers in the financial services sector
  • Architected and implemented modernized deployment strategy and DevOps practices
  • Assumed C.I.O. duties and responsibilities as required
  • Responsible for evaluation, and migration from premise / local datacenter-based environment to AWS
  • Implemented advanced security and logging including Alert Logic threat detection web application firewall and threat management system
  • Responsible for network engineering tasks for both production and internal environments

Senior IT Administrator/Network Administrator

Mercadien Technologies
06.2009 - 10.2014
  • Served as primary project consultant / project manager to regional businesses with differing network topologies including networks in “zero-downtime” industries
  • Responsible for working with existing client base in a ‘virtual C.I.O” position to help establish client budget, resource and technology planning
  • Principal engineer tasked with, designing, and implementing complex projects exceeding $2 million in value

Senior IT Administrator/Network Administrator

Integ Network Solutions
06.2005 - 06.2009
  • Served as primary IT consultant to local regional businesses
  • Promoted from entry level technician to senior-most engineer / site manager in less than 2 years of initial hire
  • Ultimately became responsible for new project architecture implementation, day to day operations and technician scheduling

Education

BA - Information Technology

Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ
05.2005

Skills

  • Modern Platform engineering architectures, implementation and team management
  • SRE concepts, implementation and team management (Traditional and STAMP based)
  • DevOps concepts, implementation and team management
  • Team Leadership in Platform, DevEx,SRE and DevOps fields
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) application architectures
  • Internal Developer Platform Implementation
  • Logging and Observability
  • Infrastructure as Code Solutions
  • Automation and process enhancements
  • Novel AI solutioning and integration
  • Application security solutions and administration
  • Python, NodeJS development

Technologies

  • CICD: Gitlab, GitHub, Octopus Deploy, ArgoCD
  • Cloud Providers (and Associated Solutions): AWS, Azure
  • Serverless Architectures: AWS Lambda, Azure Functions
  • Container-based: K8s, EKS, Fargate, Openshift, Docker
  • IaC: Terraform
  • AI: OpenAI, AWS Bedrock
  • Languages: Python, Bash, Powershell, NodeJS (mid-study), more
  • Dev Portals / Service-Catalog: Cortex, DevGrid
  • OS: Linux, Windows, Mac
  • Data: SQL, RDS, DynamoDB, Master Data Management
  • Observability: Splunk, Datadog, LogzIO, LogDNA, AppDynamics, Cloudwatch
  • Misc Web Technologies: Akamai CDN, Redis, LaunchDarkly, Retool
  • Other: VMWARE, various MSP technologies
  • Project Management: Atlassian Suite (JIRA, Confluence), ServiceNow

Work Preference

Work Type

Full Time

Work Location

Remote

Timeline

V.P. of Software Engineering ( Platform and Developer Experience Manager)

Live Oak Bank
08.2022 - Current

V.P. of DevOps/(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering (+ IT and Security)

Commonbond
10.2021 - 08.2022

Technologies Site Reliability Engineering Team Lead / Manager

Ally Bank
02.2019 - 10.2021

Application Systems Engineer / Platform DevOps Engineer

AvidXChange
10.2017 - 02.2019

Lead Sales Engineer/ Senior Network Engineer / Administrator

Impact Technologies Group
03.2014 - 10.2017

Senior IT Administrator/Network Administrator

Mercadien Technologies
06.2009 - 10.2014

Senior IT Administrator/Network Administrator

Integ Network Solutions
06.2005 - 06.2009

BA - Information Technology

Rutgers University

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Mike Brown