Nathaniel P. Eliot
+1 512 786 8842
resume@t9productions.com

Career Objective

I help companies adopt, take advantage of, and develop enterprise-class software.

Relevant Skills

• General: Decades of professional experience in information technology. Comfortable with many positions, from project manager to sole developer. Quick study and capable researcher, self-trained in all significant skills. Heavy emphasis on test-driven design, repeatable infrastructure, and other agile development and architecture practices. Experienced at debugging, both personal code and existing systems. Strong preferences for low cost, open source, and inter-operable solutions. Solid writing and copy-editing skills, including technical and policy writing.

• Leadership: Focused on soft, goal-driven leadership. Experienced with leading both from the ranks and from positions of authority. Good at identifying and nurturing talent in fellow professionals. Comfortable with building consensus across diverse business functions. Familiar with a variety of business failure modes and potential remedies.

• Software Development: Primary focus in system automation, including customization and extension of many popular open-source packages. Strong skills in functional and object-oriented programming across many diverse languages. Comfortable with most layers of common development stacks, with a preference for deep system integration.

• System Administration: Server administration and user technical support across all major platforms, in a wide range of software domains. Capable of end-to-end system implementation, including requirements gathering, architecture design, server provisioning and build, software development, product launch, and support infrastructure. Solid hardware-level understanding of most computer, electronic, and electrical components.

Preferred Technologies

• Development Languages: Go, Python, Ruby, Bash, Javascript
• Operating System: Linux (Ubuntu/Debian and Redhat/CentOS families)
• Clustering System: Kubernetes, ClusterAPI, Istio, ArgoCD, and other CNCF technologies
• Hosted Services: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Heroku, Github
• Other: Terraform, Docker, Git, Jenkins, Hadoop, MongoDB, CouchDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, EventMachine, NodeJS

Recent Experience

Auditboard

Staff Software Engineer, July 2022 - April 2023

Diagnosed alert fatigue in the operations team, and organized regular on-call reviews to reduce alert load to more reasonable levels. Developed SLO alerting framework in Datadog and Terraform to further simplify and unify monitoring. Took over core deployment process temporarily, to drive team-wide and company-wide improvements to it, then educated team in new process. Built consensus for and implemented a version deploy policy company-wide, reducing the operational burden of variance. Maintained and advanced underlying Kubernetes architecture across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Azure).

Indeed

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, June 2018 - July 2022

Built several generations of deployment systems for Kubernetes, which replaced a prior Mesos-based system within 18 months, and paved the way for a company-wide lift-and-shift to AWS. These clusters provide roughly 200 kCPUs and 500 TB of memory to over five thousand applications in sixteen datacenters worldwide. Pioneered and fostered more direct adoption of CNCF tooling company-wide in coordination with upper management, reducing dependencies on internal bespoke software. Supported infrastructure development efforts across five client teams, providing valuable operational direction and oversight. Developed SLO alerting in Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog, which reduced alert fatigue dramatically for those client teams and and their supporting SRE-on-call rotations.

The Greenfield Guild

Founder & CEO, January 2017 - December 2020

Founded The Greenfield Guild to respond to a gap in available cloud and Agile expertise in small and medium businesses. Developed core architectural experiments in Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker. Maintained core website in Wordpress. Recruited for, interviewed, and hired employees and freelancers for a variety of roles. Composed job proposals for a variety of clients, from early stage startups to large government entities. Attended conferences and networked with software vendors to provide early pipeline for the sales team. Increased firm’s visibility through a variety of means, including speaking opportunities and social media engagement.

T9 Productions

Sole Proprietorship, March 2003 - January 2018

Contract work in web development and system administration for various clients, across a broad range of domains; personal internet presence for email, remote testing, and personal projects and experimentation. Software development focused primarily on PHP and Python in LAMP environment (including Drupal/Ubercart), with sidelines into Plone/Zope and other architectures. System administration focused primarily on LAMP system installation and optimization, with sidelines in virtualization (Xen, LVM), developer tools (SVN, Git), and email (Sendmail, Spamassassin, and others).

Bazaarvoice

Staff DevOps Engineer, September 2013 - May 2016

Maintained and developed on the core infrastructure (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and custom Java and Scala code, deployed with Cloudformation and Puppet) for the new distributed data stack. Provided front-line operational support to relieve core developers during performance pushes. Took ownership of deployment for largest customer team during critical delivery push. Provided guidance and conducted experiments to further stabilize and test the core stack. Open sourced a useful ancillary tool (cloudformation-ruby-dsl) written by coworkers. Developed an internal PaaS offering using Flynn.io, which provides a stable, decentralized, container-based build and deployment framework to numerous teams in a variety of environments.

Infochimps

Senior Operations Engineer, May 2011 - June 2013

Core developer on the cluster orchestration suite Ironfan through two major releases, including adding support for multiple cloud providers. Supported eight developers in system deployment and incident responses. Standardized all internal cloud servers (85+ across 5+ active clients) to common deployment stack, including regular redeployment. Championed and built continuous integration (CI) for full-stack deployments. Wrote lightweight AAA (authentication, authorization, and accounting) server for our metered data offering (now discontinued). Continually reduced overall system expenses, by guiding developer usage, cleaning up data stores, and suggesting products for discontinuation. Organized and interacted regularly with Ironfan open source community, including presence via email, issue tracking, social media, and occasional speaking engagements (both in person, and via web-cast). Ran our internal role-playing game.

Robert Gardner Wellness

Strategic Advisor, 2009 - present

Worked with Robert to transform his education business from in-person to a multifaceted online model, greatly expanding his reach and more than doubling his yearly income. Advised him on various personnel decisions, including technical direction for online product development via contractors. Pushed for and invested in an advertising model which increased a core digital revenue stream (paid subscribers) by 42% in its first quarter, with similar growth projected for 2024.

References

Endorsements and references are available on LinkedIn.