Neal Lawson

E-Mail: jobs@sr375.com, Calendar: https://calendly.com/ogg

No cold calls please, schedule a meeting using my calendar. Thanks!

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Profile

Experienced DevOps Engineer, and Systems Architect with 15 years experience and expertise supporting, debugging, and administration in distributed environments across a wide range of products and bespoke solutions. Includes deployment of solutions using bare-metal solutions, and Amazon Web Services.

Experience

DevOps Director, ONEUNI, Inc.

September 2016 - October 2016

Brought on board to stand up the mobile learning platform from Empowered Careers, now known as the Open Innovation platform. Aforementioned included production, stage and development environments all running on AWS.  Assisted developers with debugging and other production issues.  The platform was up in time for the first day of classes. Unfortunately, the startup's runway ran out, so management was forced to shut down operations.

Technologies used in deployment:

  • Chef Server
  • Sensu (including Influxdb and Grafana)
  • Internal REST based service for ops
  • AWS (RDS, SES, SNS, SQS, S3, Elasticache, IAM, EC2, ELB, Route53)
  • MongoDB, Postgresql, Mysql

Staff QLearn DevOps Engineer, Qualcomm Education

July 2014 - September 2016

Responsible for systems that power mission-critical services supporting the QLearn App and QLearn K-12 App. Including system management tools, configuration management using Opscode Chef, and system support for developers.

  • Deployed and Maintained QLearn Service on AWS
  • Developed and Maintained Chef Cookbooks to manage our Service
  • Switched from Scount.App to Sensu for Service Monitoring
  • Deployed RunDeck to manage service.
  • Wrote and Deployed internal AWS inventory service (Ruby on Rails) to assist Developers and DevOps

Sr. Systems Engineer, EmpoweredU (Formerly: Empowered & EncoreCI)

June 2011 - July 2014

Built and maintained mission-critical backend services running on AWS that powered the mobile learning app. Including a staging and development environments for developers. Developed internal tools for our Ops Teams and Developers. Wrote nearly all of our Chef cookbooks for deploying our code.

Sr. Systems Administrator, Danger, Microsoft subsidiary (TAOS)

June 2010 - June 2011

Member of Operations team providing support for the "Danger Service" that powered the T-mobile Sidekick phone. Including on-call support, custom scripts, and server management of a large datacenter environment. Developed scripts and procedures to help with security remediation of over 4000 servers in a timely manner, limiting service disruption.

Network Administrator, La Sierra University

July 2008 - April 2010

Lead in the areas of System Administration (Solaris, Linux, Windows), Networking, Wiring and Telecommunications. Responsible for evaluating the effects new regulations and laws may have on these areas. Lead integration specialist entrusted with the research, development, support and implementation of new services to meet growing campus requirements.

Interim Director of IT, La Sierra University

October 2009 - January 2010

Plan, coordinate, direct, and design all operational activities of the IT department, as well as provide direction and support for IT solutions that enhance mission-critical business operations. Oversee options of technical support, infrastructure (network, phones, servers) and database support.

Interim Director of IT, La Sierra University

July 2008 - August 2008

Plan, coordinate, direct, and design all operational activities of the IT department, as well as provide direction and support for IT solutions that enhance mission-critical business operations. Oversee operations of technical support, infrastructure (network, phones, servers) and database support.

Systems Administrator, La Sierra University

September 2007 - July 2008

Managed production servers running Solaris, Linux and Windows, and VMware. Provided services: web, mail, and hosting, LDAP, Active Directory, File storage, MySql. Upgraded servers and services as appropriate, applied patches, implemented new technologies to meet demands. Setup and Deployed Active Directory.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science, Southwestern Adventist University

1996 - 2002

Strengths

  • Linux, Ubuntu CentOS
  • Mysql, Postgresql, Mongodb, Sqlite
  • PHP, Ruby, Bash, git
  • Apache, Nginx, HA Proxy, passenger
  • Bind, ISC Dhcp, pfsense, pxe, squid, postfix, openldap
  • AWS, Chef and cookbook authoring, jenkins
  • Sensu, nagios, cloudwatch