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

Scalability

Currently Principal Staff Cloud Engineer, with over a decade of public cloud experience
Experience managing containers and orchestration at scale, including legacy and stateful apps
Experienced in cluster monitoring and management techniques

Systems

Expert Unix application and systems troubleshooting
Comfortable with configuration software such as Chef and Ansible
Familiar with modern monitoring and tracing solutions

Software

Competencies in Golang, Clojure, Ruby, SQL, and more
Comfortable with different coding styles: imperative / compositional; object-oriented; functional; event-driven
Prefer a fast text editor and a shell to an IDE

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
Work productively in a highly regulated environment driven by constantly evolving requirements and standards

Recent Experience

2011–Present

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

Designed and implemented several different deployment mechanisms based on evolving business requirements. The latest container-based deployment system saves 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.

2008–2009

Head of System Operations, Starcut USA, Inc. (New York City)

Built and managed an early, high-profile deployment of cloud technology at scale, for hosting the 2008 Beijing Olympics mobile web site for NBC. Successfully served considerable request load before ELBs or EC2 autoscaling were available as AWS Services.
Responsible for the 24/7 uptime and support for several hundred high-profile mobile web properties.
Managed the company video transcoding pipeline.

Benton Roberts