BENTON ROBERTS

RECENT EXPERIENCE

• 2017

• Senior Lead Cloud Engineer, Medidata Solutions, Inc. (New York City)

  2011 - present

  Medidata runs a large online software platform to manage clinical trials, and my team writes the tools that deploy and manage the platform, including the dozens of services from which its composed. We handle most of the mechanics of the product lifecycle, including staging environments, a rigorous validation process, production deployments, metrics, alerting, and security. We work closely with the individual service development teams, and agressively promote devops-style practices, both within the company and in our industry at large. We are currently rolling out a Docker-based development and deployment pipeline, integrating local workstation setup with deployments to Amazon Elastic Container Service.

• 2011

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

  2009-2011

  At Aranetic we applied agile technical and business practices to reducing legal discovery costs. We 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, I also performed marketing, sales, and other startup duties.

• 2009

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

  2008 - 2009

  At this Nokia subsidiary, my team and I were ultimately responsible for the 24/7 uptime and support for several hundred high-profile mobile web properties for "no-compromise" entertainment industry clients, including NBC Universal, ABC, MTV, and Maxim. In the early days of AWS, we built a self-assembling, automatically-scaling EC2 cluster to drive NBC's 2008 Beijing Olympics mobile web site.

• 2007

• Senior Systems Administrator, MeMedia Inc. (New York City)

  2006 -2007

  In this role, I was responsible for the constant uptime of the company's main application, and other systems, running across 60+ server computers in a dual-data center environment. I performed the full spectrum of sysadmin duties in the "pre-cloud" era: physical backups, network design, server provisioning, etc.

• 2006

• US Support Manger, Orad Inc. (New York City)

  2003 - 2006

  While working for Orad, I provided engineering support for real-time graphics clusters, applied mostly to virtual reality or broadcast television. In charge of all support activities for the US and Canadian customer base, I perfromed extensive field installation, support, and live demos for major corporate, government, and academic institutions.