Senior Software Engineer → Staff Software Engineer - Platform Operations at Notorious Studios

Let’s make our own Legacy

When news of Puny Human’s closure began to make the rounds, I was contacted by Notorious Studios, a AA studio lead by former Blizzard Entertainment veterans. They were building the game that would become “Legacy: Steel & Sorcery” and needed someone to own the server platform hosting story. Given my experience with building greenfield architecture in AWS, and my penchant for making cost effective, “boring” architecture choices that provide high reliability with sane complexity, we came to the conclusion that I’d be a great addition to the team.

I was excited to leverage more Infrastructure as Code tooling, which lead me towards Pulumi, a platform-agnostic Cloud Development Kit framework. I chose Pulumi because it leverages the pedigree of other IaC tools like Terraform with the beauty of taking advantage of Python’s native language semantics, making adding logic and testing simple. We were able to complete our deployment of Legacy’s backend well in advance of our early access date, which allowed us to battle harden our systems in advance of our launch and provide fantastic uptime to our global player base.

Like with many startups, I wear many hats, so in addition to owning the infrastructure platform for game hosting, I also own all of the company IT, development support and back office systems. I built a mesh VPN system used for site to site and client access with Tailscale. I also set up a cost effective hybrid cloud hosting environment for LOB and development application hosting. In addition, I manage licenses for our SaaS and Vendor Managed systems, and set the standard for information security and compliance for the studio.

IT Manager, Producer at Puny Human Games

When your side hustle in a fun industry becomes your main gig

When I assumed the platform operations manager position for WebAssign, I wanted a project to help keep my engineering skills sharp. This led me to offer IT operations support in my off-hours to Puny Human, a video game studio working on games both in-house and co-developed. While contracting with Puny Human, I modernized their application hosting stack and drastically cut their IT operational expenses by taking advantage of Docker and modern cloud hosting platforms. As the studio grew, I scaled their hosting strategy to a hybrid cloud model that allowed them to take advantage of both on-prem and cloud resources. This became a critical asset when the pandemic hit, as we already had the networking and server infrastructure ready to support a fully remote workforce.

Eventually, as Altair began to spin down, Puny Human offered me a full-time position, which formalized my role as the studio’s IT IT Manager as well as a consulting DevOps Engineer for their co-development arm. During my full-time tenure, I was part of Puny Human’s leadership team, providing mentorship for other engineers, and had the honor of working on “The Callisto Protocol”, a AAA title by Striking Distance Studios. Later on at Puny Human, I served as producer for Nexus.gg’s Game Engine Integration SDKs, where Puny Human developed maintainable SDKs for game studios to integrate with Nexus’ Support-A-Creator program.

Puny Human was taking a big bet on making their second game and was actively seeking funding for the project. Unfortunately, due to market forces and the state of the economy, we could not secure the funding needed to continue development, and the studio was forced to close. When one door closes, another opens, and I was fortunate enough to be offered a position at Notorious Studios.

Chief Technology Officer at Altair Interactive

Shooting for the stars

I’ve always had a passion for broadcasting. My maternal grandfather worked in radio and television for much of his career. As my first tech mentor, his stories of scaling transmitter towers, going on air during a crisis, and working in the first color TV studio in the area fascinated me. I even spent some time at a broadcast production company earlier in my career, a nod in his direction. As a result, when the live streaming video space began to take off, I was immediately drawn to it. I loved the accessibility it provided folks to share their stories and their hobbies. I loved seeing the technology evolve and improve as well.

What I didn’t love was seeing how the major players in the space were failing to protect the very users that bring value to their platform. The incumbents were like a dog that caught the car, and weren’t quite sure what to do with it, being torn between doing right by marginalized communities and trying to appease their purchasers in focusing on profitability. Determined to try and make a difference, I started Altair with a colleague in the summer of 2020. Altair was envisioned to be an equitable, user-first live video streaming platform for user generated content. We worked to build a platform that would allow content creators to have more control over their content, and to provide a safe and inclusive environment for all users. As CTO, I was Altair’s application architect, DevOps engineer and project manager. I lead the development on our Django powered backend servers, built out our hosting stack atop AWS EKS, Rancher and RDS, and oversaw frontend development.

While Altair was not able to launch due to lack of operational runway, the team and I were able to complete development work on the platform’s MVP features. More importantly, I personally feel we aided by strengthening the voices of the marginalized and underrepresented in the greater streaming community. We also saw many of Altair’s launch and planned future features being adopted by the more notable flagship streaming platforms’ Trust and Safety programs. Despite our choice not to launch, I continue to believe to this day that our work and our mission made a positive impact on the streaming space at large.

Systems Engineer → Manager, Platform Operations at Cengage Group

Helping students around the world to learn, and learning to lead

In January of 2018, I joined Cengage as a systems engineer on the WebAssign team. WebAssign is a digital learning platform that provides online homework, tutorial, and assessment products for higher education that serves over 1 million users per school year. I was hired to bring both my systems engineering and project management experience to the team, with the expectation to assume the team lead position. After only a few months at Cengage, our team’s manager was offered a great opportunity. Rather than move into the team lead position I was originally hired for, I was promoted to take our manager’s place.

I was responsible for leading a team of platform operations and database engineers that managed the server, storage and networking infrastructure. We achieved quite a bit during my almost 3 years with Cengage. We scaled our platform to support three-times our previous concurrent user record. In addition we migrated our 15 TB high read / high write MySQL database backend from 5.7 to 8 with less than 10 minutes of downtime. We also significantly improved the speed and durability of our deployment pipeline, and drastically reduced our average maintenance window length from 2 hours to 10 minutes.

While at Cengage, I was also recognized for leading a rapid response effort to triage, mitigate and remedy a major security incident on a sister platform in the company. This included writing a malware scanner in Python to find and remediate infections, and leveraging my experience with Cloudflare’s WAF to mitigate application vulnerabilities.

I learned quite a bit while at Cengage, not only about the technical aspects of running a large-scale platform, but also about the challenges that being a leader of people brings. I miss the team and the work we did together, and am so proud of what we accomplished. Leaving Cengage to venture into my own mission was an incredibly hard decision.

Senior Systems Administrator - Production Support Engineer at IBM

A quick, but impactful stay at Big Blue

Looking for a new challenge, I joined IBM as a Senior Systems Administrator in the Watson Health division. My role was to support a newly acquired product, eClinicalOS, a clinical trial management platform. I was responsible for the production support of the application, which included troubleshooting issues, performing system upgrades, and ensuring the overall health of the production environment.

I migrated the application from a legacy VMWare vSphere 4 environment on compute and storage far past its prime to a modern, efficient VMWare vSphere 5.5 environment. In addition, I also upgraded the disaster recovery datacenter’s core networking infrastructure with zero downtime. All of our work was done to the standards of a highly regulated healthcare environment, including HIPAA and 21 CFR Part 11 regulatory compliance.

Halfway into my time at IBM, I stepped in as the team lead when our manager left the org. I was responsible for project managing a team of 5 engineers, coordinating our efforts with the rest of the product team, and ensuring that we met our service level agreements.

My time with IBM was short, however, as I was headhunted to become a technical team lead at another company.

Systems Engineer at Transportation Insight

Who says the friends you make playing video games can’t level up your career?

I received a random call from a friend in the middle of my workday one summer afternoon. I was working for an IT outsourcing company and a bit stalled in my career progression. What I expected to be a quick chat, and for us to catch up after work ended up catching me off-guard: “Hey, I’m working for this company out in North Carolina, and I’m building a team. I’d like for you to join. What do you say?”

Originally hired as a Data Engineer, I helped build the company’s first big data platform and developed the hosting platform for a real-time logistics analytics application called “Insight Fusion.” Insight Fusion was launched atop AWS after struggling to get reasonable performance out of the existing hosting and cloud platforms currently in use by the company. The data science platform was built atop SuperMicro servers, VMWare vSphere and Microsoft Storage Spaces, which allowed me to make a high-performance, low-cost general purpose computing platform that could be retooled quickly to adapt to different workloads.

After a year into my time at TI, with a successful launch of Insight Fusion and the hosting platform for future data projects well underway, I transitioned from Data Engineer to Systems Engineer. My responsibilities expanded to include supporting and upgrading all of Transportation Insight’s server and networking infrastructure. This included onboarding Docker containers as the deployment artifact for the company’s new line-of-business application, leveraging Ansible for configuration management and deployment, and revamping our existing IT hosting stack while also integrating the infrastructure acquired during mergers and acquisitions.