James Brink

Building awesome stuff, with an amazing team. Initially hired into a SysOps/DevOps role which also included R&D work, and building proof of concepts for various products. Was quickly promoted to Director of Infrastructure where I became responsible for for managing the the operations team, and all production infrastructure.

• Extensive work with AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Created automated pipelines for an existing production application drastically reducing deployment times.
• Migrated existing infrastructure to version controlled solutions using tools such as Packer and Terraform.
• Created a highly available & resilient containerized VPN solution to address some very complex network and security restrictions.
• Deployed Kubernetes clusters and migrated many services away from AWS specific deployments/products which greatly increased deployment times, resiliency while reducing cost and vendor lock.
• Member of multiple architecture teams which made me accountable for both high level decisions, as well as lower level implementation details.
• Mentored fellow DevOps & Software Engineers regularly, on many topics such as Docker, Kubernetes, Code Quality, refactoring techniques and unit testing.

Hired as a Systems Administrator for shared hosting operations, and later progressed into an Engineering role on the Hosting Automation Team. Managed a mixed Windows/Linux production environment. Daily tasks included mitigating network attacks, monitoring infrastructure, resolving system configuration, performance, and capacity issues. I later transitioned into an engineering role where our team automated most of the daily operational tasks, reducing the workload of the operations team as well as decreasing downtime across the environment.

• Assisted with daily operations with primary focus on ensuring customers services were within the acceptable range for response times.
• Worked extensively with python and fabric to run remedial and deployment tasks across the environment.
• Became very familiar and effective at identifying and mitigating a wide range of network attacks.
• Created tools to assist and dramatically improve productivity of the daily operational tasks, further reducing customer downtime.
• Worked with Sensu to create health checks with remediation.

Contracted to work on the Small Business Services Team for an effort to migrate all Yahoo Small Business Services from Yahoo to Aabaco.

• Assisted with day to day operations of production, development and QA environments.
• Worked with team members to plan for migration of services away from Yahoo.
• Assisted in the build out a new QA environment.

Brought on board to take over management and monitoring for a range of enterprise applications. Responsibilities included application deployment, incident triage, and troubleshooting Linux and Windows environments. Promoted to System Administrator II after demonstrating an aptitude for tackling complicated infrastructure problems from availability to disaster recovery.

• Appointed as department Datacenter Continuity Coordinator.
• Developed multiple utilities for both desktop and web to assist in daily activities and incident troubleshooting.
• Created tools to allow associates to quickly and effortlessly identify system and application anomalies and escalate them to the appropriate teams.
• Created tools to automate the collection of data and creation of reports, eliminating the need for team members to perform these actions manually.

Hired to lead efforts to bring a project that was 4 months behind schedule up to date and deployed to production. By Utilizing Ruby on Rails, I started anew and rapidly prototyped and deployed the requested feature set within 2 weeks. In addition to application maintenance I was responsible for the oversight and mentorship of new Ruby developers.

• Delivered a project that was behind schedule to production within 2 weeks.
• Responsible for hiring and training additional engineers.
• Worked closely with product management to resolve any outstanding issues and address new features quickly.
• Leveraged agile methodologies for project management.
• Managed the Rackspace cloud infrastructure including maintenance, backups, and security updates.

While at Accram, my time was split between managing internal infrastructure, running the company’s small ISP, as well as managing customer’s networks and servers. My daily duties varied dramatically from one day to another, as we were always taking on new customers with new challenges. Spent a lot of time on projects, generally working as a lead. Selected to manage and lead customer technical onboarding and integrations. Worked directly with sales teams to identify and pursue new customers and deliver solutions specific to their needs.

• Planned and led infrastructure initiatives that included networking, server deployment, and cabling.
• Leveraged open source tools to engineer and implement a monitoring infrastructure for internal and external networks.
• Managed internal web applications, email servers, and DNS.
• Responsible for ensuring application redundancy and tested failover.