| title | permalink |
|---|---|
Resume |
/resume/ |
Nathaniel Eliot
+1 512 786 8842
resume@t9productions.com
I help companies adopt, take advantage of, and develop enterprise-class software.
-
Leadership: Focused on soft, goal-driven leadership. Experienced with leading both from the ranks and from positions of authority. Good at identifying and nurturing talent in fellow professionals. Comfortable with building consensus across diverse business functions. Familiar with a variety of business failure modes and potential remedies. Experienced working with distributed, remote-first teams in multiple timezones. Solid writing and copy-editing skills, including technical and policy writing.
-
Software Development: Primary focus in system automation, including customization and extension of many popular open-source packages. Strong skills in functional and object-oriented programming across many diverse languages. Comfortable with most layers of common development stacks, with a preference for deep system integration. Heavy emphasis on test-driven design and other agile development practices.
-
Reliability Engineering: Server administration and user technical support across all major platforms, in a wide range of software domains. Capable of end-to-end system implementation, including requirements gathering, architecture design, server provisioning and build, software development, product launch, and support infrastructure. Strong focus on SLOs and other SRE / observability practices, including educating other teams in their adoption. Heavy emphasis on repeatable infrastructure and other agile architecture practices. Strong preferences for low cost, open source, and inter-operable solutions.
- Development Languages: Go, Python, Ruby, Bash, Javascript
- Operating System: Linux (Ubuntu/Debian and Redhat/CentOS families)
- Clustering System: Kubernetes, Helm, ClusterAPI, Istio, ArgoCD, and other CNCF technologies
- Hosted Services: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Heroku, Github
- Other: Terraform, Docker, Git, Jenkins, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, NodeJS
Staff Software Engineer, July 2022 - April 2023
Diagnosed alert fatigue in the operations team, and organized regular on-call reviews to reduce alert load to more reasonable levels. Developed and trained team on SLO alerting framework in Datadog and Terraform to further simplify and unify monitoring. Took over core deployment process temporarily, to drive team-wide and company-wide improvements to it, then educated team in new process. Recognized the need for, built consensus for, and implemented a version deploy policy company-wide, reducing the operational burden of variance. Maintained and advanced underlying Kubernetes architecture across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure).
Senior Site Reliability Engineer, June 2018 - July 2022
Built several generations of deployment systems for Kubernetes, which replaced a prior Mesos-based system within 18 months, and paved the way for a company-wide lift-and-shift to AWS. These clusters provide roughly 200 kCPUs and 500 TB of memory to over five thousand applications in sixteen datacenters worldwide. Successfully lobbied upper management to adopt the CNCF ecosystem more broadly, which removed costly-to-maintain dependencies and provided many novel capabilities to developers. Supported infrastructure development efforts across five client teams, providing valuable operational direction and oversight. Developed SLO alerting in Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog, which reduced alert fatigue dramatically for those client teams and and their supporting SRE-on-call rotations.
Founder & CEO, January 2017 - December 2020
Founded The Greenfield Guild to respond to a gap in available cloud and Agile expertise in small and medium businesses. Recruited, interviewed, hired, and managed a half-dozen employees and freelancers. Developed core architectural experiments in Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, and Wordpress. Composed job proposals for a variety of clients, from early stage startups to large government entities. Attended conferences and networked with software vendors to provide early pipeline for the sales team. Increased firm's visibility through a variety of means, including speaking opportunities and social media engagement.
Staff DevOps Engineer, September 2013 - May 2016
Maintained and developed on the core infrastructure (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and custom Java and Scala code, deployed with Cloudformation and Puppet) for the new distributed data stack. Provided front-line operational support to relieve core developers during performance pushes. Took ownership of deployment for largest customer team during critical delivery push. Provided guidance and conducted experiments to further stabilize and test the core stack. Open sourced a useful ancillary tool (cloudformation-ruby-dsl) written by coworkers. Developed an internal PaaS offering using Flynn.io, which provides a stable, decentralized, container-based build and deployment framework to numerous teams in a variety of environments.
Senior Operations Engineer, May 2011 - June 2013
Core developer on the cluster orchestration suite Ironfan through two major releases, including adding support for multiple cloud providers. Supported eight developers in system deployment and incident responses. Standardized all internal cloud servers (85+ across 5+ active clients) to common deployment stack, including regular redeployment. Championed and built continuous integration (CI) for full-stack deployments. Wrote lightweight AAA (authentication, authorization, and accounting) server for our metered data offering (now discontinued). Continually reduced overall system expenses, by guiding developer usage, cleaning up data stores, and suggesting products for discontinuation. Organized and interacted regularly with Ironfan open source community, including presence via email, issue tracking, social media, and occasional speaking engagements (both in person, and via web-cast). Ran our internal role-playing game.
Consultant, March 2003 - current
Contract work in web development and system administration for clients across a broad range of domains. Rebuilt a pre-funding startup's architecture and developer pipeline with Kubernetes and CNCF tools, to modernize and save costs. Provided long-term business development guidance to an online education business, including a recent advertising push resulting in a 42% growth in subscribers. Previous work included software development for the web in a variety of languages, and system administration for email, virtualization, developer tools, and web architecture.
Endorsements and references are available on LinkedIn.