Profile

DevOps and Database Engineer with 10+ years of experience in:

• Database Administration (DBA)
• Data Engineering
• DevOps
• Linux Systems
• Python Development
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Containerization
• Kubernetes
• CI/CD

Certifications: AWS Systems Operations Associate, AWS Cloud Practitioner

Industry Experience: E-commerce, Airline, Start-up, Non-Profit

Work Experience

2024-Present
Engineering Manager at Recharge Payments (Los Angeles, CA)

• Lead and manage team of engineers responsible for all data infrastructure including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch
• Managed complex Elasticsearch migrations across multiple clusters, ensuring zero downtime and data consistency
• Reduced infrastructure costs by 30% through strategic optimization, right-sizing resources, and implementing cost-effective scaling strategies
• Established and executed quarterly OKRs for data infrastructure team, improving team velocity and project delivery by 40%
• Architected and implemented disaster recovery strategy for all data systems, reducing RTO from hours to minutes
• Collaborated with product engineering teams to design scalable data architectures supporting 10x growth in transaction volume
• Implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting strategy using SignalFX, Splunk, and custom dashboards, reducing MTTR by 60%
• Led cross-functional initiatives to improve database performance, resulting in 50% reduction in P95 query latency
• Established on-call rotation and incident response procedures, improving system reliability and reducing production incidents by 45%
• Mentored and developed engineers through 1:1s, career development plans, and technical leadership opportunities
• Managed annual infrastructure budget of $5 million, optimizing spend while maintaining performance and reliability
• Drove adoption of Infrastructure as Code practices across data infrastructure, improving deployment speed and reducing configuration drift
• Led hiring efforts, growing team from X to Y engineers while maintaining high hiring bar and team culture
• Established data governance policies and procedures, ensuring compliance and data quality across all systems
• Collaborated with security team to implement database encryption, access controls, and audit logging

2020-2024
Staff Database/DevOps Engineer at Recharge Payments (Los Angeles, CA)

• Built build tools container running in Linux that set up automated dynamic credentials for main applications
• Upgraded entire MySQL database suite from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8
• Migrated all Redis instances with a proxy in front to implement key sharding, consolidating ~30 instances into a few larger ones
• Led project to establish data integrity for the data model:
  • Enabled development teams to fix ongoing bugs
  • Built Python class to enable developers to build reports
  • Built export tool to write to Slack
• Migrated all cronjobs running inside containers in VMs to Kubernetes cronjobs using Helm/Skaffold in GCP
• Set up monitoring service in SignalFX to track slow queries and output logs to Splunk
• Migrated 2 TBs in real-time from one MySQL to another to horizontally scale monolith
• Wrote customized Python integrated with HAProxy and Kubernetes with zero downtime
• Migrated new SMS application from Heroku into CloudSQL in real-time with zero downtime
• Worked on POC with Vitess and their operator in Kubernetes; sharded a large table
• Created slow query dashboard to analyze and aggregate slow queries; wrote process to escalate bad queries to development
• Wrote Helm chart for BuildBuddy and set up internal cache for coding against MySQL
• Wrote PGHero Helm chart that scales PGHero in Kubernetes to optimize bad queries in PostgreSQL database
• Enabled Auto CI/CD for database changes using Liquibase and GitLab, enabling 30+ developers to have new DDL reviewed
• Reduced all unplanned read replica outages by writing MaxScale Helm chart and deploying MaxScale into Kubernetes
• Set up partitioning on multiple tables with scheduled Kubernetes cronjob written in Python to remove partitions greater than 90 days
• Wrote Terraform that enforced dynamic application credentials and users/privileges with Vault
• Enabled all developers to log into database via Vault database module and set up process for all oncoming databases
• Wrote long-running query daemon that analyzed long-running queries and killed PIDs based on business logic criteria
• Set up ephemeral PostgreSQL and MySQL environments for all developers to test code and for unit tests to run on
• Fixed hundreds of problematic queries and supported 10+ development teams
• Led the DR project for both MySQL and PostgreSQL and set up replicas in AWS from GCP

2019-Present
Developer/Architect at Guidestar Attendance (Remote)

• Architected Python web application using Flask for attendance and meal tracking for daycare systems
• Designed PostgreSQL database schema using Alembic to manage schema migrations
• Modified application such that database automatically shuts down during periods of inactivity without an outage, saving thousands every month
• Quickly pivoted to add new features to aid adoption of the system during pandemic, providing useful features to clients to help them re-open
• Efficiently reduced costs during closures to provide relief to closed daycares, reduced cloud spend by 85% per month without any outages or perceived loss of functionality

2017-2020
Senior DevOps Engineer at Allegiant Air (Las Vegas, NV)

• Led team of engineers to migrate all of Allegiant microservices into containers using OpenShift
• Built out Terraform infrastructure that integrated with both AWS and VRA
• Designed Jenkins CI/CD pipeline that migrated all Spring Boot applications off of Bamboo
• Built out many Ansible roles and playbooks:
  • AD authentication in AWS
  • Installing and configuring DB2, MySQL, MongoDB in AWS
  • Installing and configuring Consul, Traefik, Spring Boot, RabbitMQ
• Built out F5 VIPs, iRules, Pools, etc.
• Built Python application capable of integrating with Git and creating automated Pull Requests

2015-2017
Senior DBA at Allegiant Air (Las Vegas, NV)

• Managed thousands of databases by automating backups, replication, mirroring, installations, refreshes, and deployments
• Set up, built, and maintained customized Flyway configuration system
• Wrote data extract logic in T-SQL for the legality 117 application to ensure pilots could fly
• Architected several data models including new hotel data model, check-in data model, seat data model, web search data model

2014-2015
DBA at Caesars Entertainment (Las Vegas, NV)

• Primary responsibility was to write BTEQ and Tpump scripts for Teradata and maintain legacy ETL/BI applications

2012-2014
Database Engineer at Wealth Engine (Bethesda, MD)

• Built several PL/SQL jobs in Oracle to do data mining of wealth information
• Designed ETL from several data sources to load ongoing data into new Exadata system

2010-2012
Consultant at IBM (Herndon, VA)

• Pfizer - Developed data model to capture supply chain metrics for corporate leadership

2009-2010
Operations Research Analyst at Northrop Grumman (Fairfax, VA)

• Authored 10-page mathematical section on Kalman filters for government confidential study

Education

2005-2009
Bachelor of Science, Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Maryland / Yeshiva University (College Park, MD)

• B.S., cum laude with Department Honors, Mathematics and Computer Science
• Overall GPA: 3.65 | Major GPA: 4.0
• Recipient of several scholarships, including Dean’s Academic and Northrop Grumman Scholarship