Benton Roberts’ Résumé

Profile

I am a veteran computer professional with the technical and communication skills to apply cutting-edge digital technology to any organization’s bottom line. With more than 20 years of industry experience, I combine the hardcore technical expertise of an old-school sysadmin and new-school coder with the business pragmatism of a startup veteran.

Hands-On Skills

Software

Competencies in Python, Go, Ruby, Clojure, and more
Experience with Python ML toolchain: Pandas, PyTorch, Jupyter, et al.
Comfortable with different coding styles: imperative / compositional; object-oriented; functional
Prefer a text editor and a shell over an IDE, and pragmatism over perfection

Systems

Expert Unix application and systems troubleshooting
Fluent with modern DevOps / continuous integration and deployment techniques
Able to work productively in a highly regulated environment

Scalability

Experience managing containers and orchestration at scale: machine-learning workloads; ETL; legacy and stateful apps
Experienced in cluster monitoring and management techniques
Currently serving as Deputy CTO, with over a decade of experience using cloud APIs

Deeper Expertise

Cloud Workload Management

Containerize applications correctly, and consolidate virtual hosts
Work with developers to identify and improve application resource usage
Develop container-level and cluster-level autoscaling plans for Kubernetes or ECS

Continuous Delivery Pipelines

Negotiate an ongoing common shape for company applications among the technical and business stakeholders
Implement a workflow, based on immutable artifacts, for promoting apps through their deployment environments
Develop custom middleware for company auditing and access control requirements

Enterprise Operations

Identify the appropriate spot in the DevOps / SRE continuum to balance business requirements and staff expertise
Deep-dive troubleshoot into a wide range of problems, from the browser to the kernel
Develop flexible monitoring and tracing solutions driven by constantly evolving requirements and standards

Recent Experience

2022–Present

Deputy CTO, Redgrave Strategic Data Solutions (San Francisco / Denver / D.C.)

Designing and implementing bespoke software solutions to support legal operations.
Technical duties include a mix of case work, infrastructure development, and product development.
Non-technical duties include vendor vetting and management, technical pre-sales / marketing, and leadership / mentoring.

2011–2021

Principal Staff Cloud Engineer, Medidata Solutions, Inc. (New York / San Francisco)

Designed and implemented several different deployment mechanisms based on evolving business requirements. Addopting container-based deployment system saved the company 5-figures per month in AWS costs through increased server density.
Played a key role in managing the company’s cloud footprint, as it’s grown from several VMs to several thousand.
Involved in negotiating and evangelizing company technical standards, from post-IPO to recent company acquisition.

2009–2011

Chief Operations Officer, Aranetic LLC (New York / D.C.)

Applied agile technical and business practices to reducing legal discovery costs.
Made heavy use of test-driven-development, Amazon Web Services, a no-SQL document store, and Chef to build a rapidly-scalable document processing system.
As a principal, performed marketing, sales, and other startup duties.

Benton Roberts