Jacob Randall

Senior Systems Engineer

Summary

profile

Systems Engineer with over ten years of experience building and maintaining large-scale platforms. Collaborating with engineering teams to ensure system stability and performance. Monitoring key metrics to increase platform efficiency and lower costs.

  • Hybrid Data Centers
    Designed and operated infrastructure that spans corporate data centers as well as AWS and GCE.
  • Cloud Services
    Experience with AWS EC2, S3, IAM, ELB, Route53, CloudFront and VPC as well as Google Compute Engine.
  • Packer Deployment Pipeline
    Integrated Packer to streamline the build pipeline of images for custom auto scaling instances in all AWS regions and GCE.
  • Platform Stability
    Deployed monitoring and alerting of platform benchmarks and availability using multiple external monitoring solutions.
  • Configuration Management
    Centralized infrastructure and application configuration in Chef.
  • Network Routing
    Diagnosed network issues and implemented solutions to work around problems.
  • Technical Design
    Designed high-performance, efficient and easily maintainable systems that adhere to best practices.
  • Customer Interaction
    Developed a positive relationship with customers. Determined their expectations and strove to exceed them.
  • Team Management
    Led offshore engineering team of five to achieve milestones and project success. Identified project risks and provided solutions.

Projects

Data Center Migration


Designed and executed primary data center migration. Utilized replication strategies of PostgreSQL and Riak to keep scheduled downtime to a bare minimum. Worked with engineering team members to add features to ensure a smooth rollback if needed.

Avoiding Downtime with Iptables


Implemented workaround for network maintenance that would have caused severe scheduled downtime for customers. Leveraged iptables to route traffic transparently across secondary network layer without requiring major changes or redeployments of infrastructure.

Database Management


Implemented database monitoring and alerting of query performance. Promoted data archiving policies that reduced the storage footprint more than 50% while increasing longevity and performance. Identified other potential strategies such as partitioning and partial indexes.

Packer Deployment Pipeline


Utilized Packer to streamline the build pipeline of machine images for AWS and GCE. Platform scaled up faster to handle spikes and spent less money by reducing launch times more than 50%. Image creation time reduced more than 80%. Increased image integrity through automation.

Experience