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.