Career History

Here is my career story, reverse chronologically. No names for privacy reasons, you can hear them if you want to hire me.

The format is a short introduction to the position and the context at the time, followed by my most interesting achievements. The list is not exhaustive else it would be too long to be useful.

Linux Expert / In-House Consultant (2019-Now)

Having significant professional experience with linux, combined with over a decade of working on linux distributions in an open-source context, I moved into a higher position, where I acted as a linux expert, in-house technology consultant, while still performing admin duties in between.

• Creating and executing SOC2-related documents and policies. These included phishing simulations, cybersecurity training, risk assessments, business continuity plans, cybersecurity standards, and physical security standards.
• Act as a consultant for the whole company on all things technology, and especially linux. This typically involved highly specialized knowledge, such as protocol design, cryptography, cryptocurrency estimates, how SELinux works, hardware emulation…
• Orchestration of a complete bring-up of a new office location.
• Redesign of the architecture of several products.
• Coordination of compliance efforts. Applicable standards included HIPAA, SOC2, GDPR.

My efforts made several products possible where they otherwise would have been, saved R&D money investigating projects that are known and proven to be impossible, and allowed passing audits that would have otherwise failed.

Admin (2017-2019)

Due to my clear proficiency with linux and results working with the admin, I was offered an administration position. I accepted, having realized it interested me more than writing code. I ended up touching all of the company’s projects instead of the one I had worked on as a developer previously.

• Replaced a broken and abandoned puppet-based deployment system with saltstack and ansible.
• Setting up autoscaling cloud infrastructure.
• Complete services migration with zero downtime. This migration included moving physical server locations!
• Completely eliminating the need for manual intervention in all common cases. A significant departure from the prior state of affairs, where services needed to be manually restarted daily.

C++ Developer (2014-2017)

I started out as a C++ developer, and worked on a browser engine that ran on servers.

• I rewrote the engine-using project from scratch, increasing server capacity dramatically. Prior to this each server could only run 1-2 instances at a time.
• Collaborated with the admin to install and encourage other developers to use CI/CD best practices.
• Refactored the logging system and unified multiple disjoint logging subsystems under it. This dramatically improved performance, as the old system would fill RAM up entirely.
• Optimized several subsystems, eliminating race conditions and memory leaks. The most impressive of these was one that resulted in a 20% performance boost by rewriting a single class.
• Investigated server incidents in collaboration with the admin.