Geoff Nelson
Profile
Accomplished international DevOps leader dedicated to continuous process improvement in the face of rapidly evolving and changing markets. Extremely results-oriented and proactive in addressing and resolving problems, offering 18+ years of progressive technology leadership experience.
Special Skills
Technical: AWS, Terraform, Node, Akamai, Elasticsearch, Docker, Kubernetes, SRE, API management
Leadership: Mentoring, Training, Problem Solving, Creative Solutions, Strategic Thinking
Employment History
Founder: Grow for Us (non-profit) 2020-2021
(Dedicated to bringing community gardeners, volunteers and food banks together.)
- Designed and implemented API first solution for capturing and presenting information using open source tools.
- Created CI/CD delivery pipeline to streamline deployments into AWS.
- Worked on all aspects of application design, technology decisions and coding deliverables..
Concur SAP(A global technology travel, expense, and invoice management company that promotes new technologies and processes)
Senior Director, Delivery Architecture 2015-2018
- Led the team that instantiated a new deployment into AWS China using terraform and consul, drastically reducing the overall configuration time from months to weeks.
- Directed ten cross platform teams to transfer all knowledge that automated their deployments and moved configuration from tribal knowledge to code. Results became one of Concur’s best practices used by all internal teams.
- Used Terraform, Consul, and Vault to automate full stack deployments into AWS which reduced the time of deployment from months to weeks and documented all the manual components into configuration code.
Director, DevOps & SRE 2010-2015
- Hired, built and led three global engineering teams (Prague, UK, US) that focused on delivering services to improve platform adoption and agility.
- Head of SRE teams focused on improved infrastructure for onboarding new development teams.
- Implemented LaaS platform for all development teams to utilize.
- Introduced several key platform services that were adopted widely by our development teams including elastic search, puppet, Memcached, and AWS automation.
Senior Manager, Release and Problem Management 2007-2010
- Introduced automation tools that took a manual based and inconsistent process and converted it into an automated system that was able to reliably audit 1,000 systems in 10 minutes that previously took 10 hours.
- Conducted monthly cross functional problem management reviews with the senior executives (CEO, CIO, CTO) for each of the products with presentations that showed the number of errors, speed of system, and flaws for each product and offered improvement solutions that were implemented.
- Introduced automation configuration management tools including Bladelogic and custom designed scripts
- Provided automated evidence for ongoing SOX, PCI, and ISO audits.
Production Manager 2005-2007
- Managed every application and full deployment with 50 new engineers across the globe providing 24/7 support to all our development and hosted application teams.
- Created mentorship training for new engineers on how to manage and troubleshoot 20 – 30 applications.
Engineer 1999-2005
- Responsible for managing and supporting systems for key flag ship clients (i.e.GM, HP)
- Designed and wrote a Hosted Management Console that was utilized by all engineering teams to track and manage client systems.
Education
Western Washington University:
Math and Computer Science Degree 1995-1999