Geoff Nelson

https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffreysnelson/

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

• 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

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:

Leadership

• Believe that a strong leader is someone who acts as a servant leader
• Lead globally dispersed teams (US, Prague, UK, France) focused on common gaols
• Mentoring program for all levels of employees
• Believe in investing in employees with continuos education and opportunities outside normal roles
• Hiring based on team fit, diversity as well as technical skills
• Mentored several team members that went on to become leaders themselves

Architecture

• Focused on platform engineering and providing services for all development teams
• Instituted monthly brown bags and open meetings to discuss new solutions and cross team collaboration
• Replaced existing logging platforms, provided automation tools, and provided services for configuration as code
• Focused on real world solutions and deliverables rather than obtuse guidelines
• Delivered optional consumable services that required our internal clients to adopt our solutions

Service Reliability Engineering

• 10 years working in Operations supporting all Concur production systems
• Created and managed global follow the sun on call rotation
• Worked with several monitoring solutions and integrations with pager notification systems.
• Reported monthly to C level members on SLO and SLA
• Designed and performed multiple DR simulations along with business continuity plans
• Promoted promotion of monitoring dashboards, metrics and alerts as code
• Established Service Onboarding guidelines used across production for documenting new systems

Product Owner

• Acted as Product Owner and Scrum master across several production services
• Worked across R&D teams to validate backlog for LaaS, Consul, Terraform, and Vault.
• Held bi-weekly planning meetings to groom backlog and discuss technical design issues
• Established communication channels to help streamline requests and reduce interruptions
• Held training sessions, brown bags and requirements gathering meetings with multiple R&D groups
• Always worked to promote the usage of Open Source as well as publish our services as publicgit

LaaS - Replacement logging platform

• Evaluated market for scalability, price and features
• Created proof of concept demo with live logging data from a subset of the environment
• Introduced new message queueing technologies to funnel logging messages to new system without impacting the legacy logging platform
• Successfully deployed ElasticSearch cluster with Kibana into production environment consuming over 2 TB of data daily
• Instituted indexing scheme along with index rotations for scalability and searchability
• Reduced overall cost of logging platform by removing antiquated backends and expense custom hardware
• Drastically reduced query and search times from minutes down to seconds
• Delivered brown bags, training sessions and documentation for company wide education

Configuration as Code

• Oversaw deployment and usage of Terraform, Consul and Vault
• Managed conversion of critical systems to utilize Terraform, Consul and Vault
• Provided means to promote logging dashboards and alerts through git and release automation
• Process improvements allowed R&D to update configuration without touching servers or opening up support tickets
• Deployed Puppet for complex builds and managed conversions for Operational Tiers