Karl Quinsland

Sprig 2022-04-01 — 2023-02-17

Highlights

• Modernized legacy Terraform and consolidated infrastructure saving thousands of $/month in AWS costs.
• Architected and deployed highly scalable CI/CD pipe for both IaC (infrastructure as code) and Lambda functions cutting expensive dev time to provision traditional and EKS based infrastructure, manage networking/security resources.
• Wrote extensive documentation for - and provided training on - new IaC/tooling. Automated document generation for existing IaC.
• Introduced and consistently coached colleagues on standardized ADR (architecture design review) based approach to documenting and debating merits of architecture.
• Led efforts to eliminate nuisance pages and implement consistent incident management process leading to faster/cheaper recovery.
• Responsible for running bug bounty program, triage reports and prioritizing remediation work for internal teams.
• Performed security focused code and architecture review for new product features.
• Improved home-grown EKS deployment pipeline and tooling.

Kiddom 2020-10-01 — 2022-04-01

Highlights

• Tool-smith: Wrote more than a few scripts/tools/lambda functions to automate everything from Cassandra cluster assembly to management of DNS entries and TLS Certificate provisioning to documentation generation.
• OSS contributor: new features and bug fixes merged into various Cassandra management tools and Terraform providers.
• Led efforts to increase observability into applications and infrastructure and build out a mature incident reporting and management apparatus.
• Overhauled IAM and introduced best practices for cross-account resource utilization... and managed it with Terraform.
• Brought IaC practices to as many things as possible including external services; onboarding new Eng. hires was done with a few PRs and tools like Atlantis did the heavy lifting.
• Developed extensive corpus of documentation around IaC driven processes as well as legacy infrastructure and it's replacement - both planned and implemented.
• Initiated the transition from legacy bare-metal /auto-scaled AMIs based architecture to an EKS based platform.

Touchpoint Restaurant Innovations 2018-10-01 — 2020-04-01

Highlights

• Tool-smith: Dozens of in-house tools some of which radically changed (read: streamlined and automated) how hardware was shipped to customers. Other tools developed as needed to rectify problems at hundreds of in-field deployments.
• Hashicorp evangelist. Terraform, Packer, Consul, Vault used/deployed to make for a largely immutable, smarter, more secure operating environment.
• Vocal advocate for the containerization of workloads whenever possible. Strong proponent of immutable infrastructure and declarative infrastructure as code.
• Tamer of Elastic Search (Open Distro for Elastic Search on Docker, specifically). Worked w/ Application Engineering side of the house on migration to ES7.
• Supervisor of in-field hardware; everything from instrumenting for prometheus and building Grafana dashboards to vetting OEM samples to reverse engineering troublesome firmware and proprietary APIs.

Eventbrite (via Ticketfly) 2017-09-01 — 2018-10-01

Highlights

• Worked to revise how Eventbrite and Ticketfly respond to critical incidences.
• Wrote tooling to better link Vault to Eventbrite's central authentication flow.
• Modernization of existing Puppet manifests.
• Coached colleagues on networking in AWS and Terraform best practices.
• Created networking components to securely share data between EB and TF data lakes; extensive work w/ EB DataScience team to fine-tune performance.

Ticketfly 2015-01-01 — 2017-09-01

Highlights

• Was 24x7 Tier 4 OnCall
• Rebuild a modern / skilled DevOps team.
• Significant tech-debt eradication, ancient stack archaeology, platform spelunking.
• Authored countless Chef cookbooks, ruby gems.
• SCALR server administrator.
• Mongo and MySQL dbe/a.
• Consult as an SRE and Architect for new apps and services.
• Successfully ran bare metal / data center exit & equipment disposition & data destruction efforts.
• Designed networking architecture for entirety of cloud deployment, negotiated and set up private fiber circuits, VPN tunnels and automated other security controls.

Acxiom 2014-02-01 — 2015-01-01

Highlights

• Developed chef training / coached internal teams on migration to Chef.
• Built tooling to automate administration of Aditive software and better integrate it within Acxiom's AWS environments.
• Worked with colleagues in Asia to support and roll out Aditive software for Asian markets.
• SRE, Ops, Dev work for a variety of internal and external applications, some of which serve millions of requests every day.

Aditive 2013-07-01 — 2014-02-01

Highlights

• Single handedly engineered and implemented growth/scale strategy for high demand web services.
• Responsible for most infrastructure maintenance, including upgrades to production appliances and live migrations to AWS/VPC from AWS/EC2 Classic.
• Designed and built a variety of deployment tools to aide under staffed development team with single-click / continuous deployment for testing and production environments.

UC, Merced 2009-08-01 — 2013-05-01

Courses

• Computer Security
• Networking
• Computer Architecture
• Databases
• Algorithms

Amateur Radio Operator

Intermediate Vault Training

• Python3: advanced
• golang: passable
• rust: new, liking a lot!
• php: rusty
• ruby: rusty
• C/++: hacky

• AWS: advanced / 10+ Years experience
• DigitalOcean: intermediate / 3+ Years experience.
• Google: passable

• kubernetes: advanced / 5+ Years experience.
• Docker: advanced

• Terraform: advanced / 8+ years experience.
• Packer: advanced
• Consul: advanced
• Vault: advanced

• Networking: duties ranging from setting up dedicated private circuits to troubleshooting latency to designed and automated VPC networking and associated network security controls
• troubleshooting: advanced+
• performance tuning: intermediate
• testing: intermediate

• avid gym rat
• automated nutrition optimization
• practitioner of various mindfulness techniques

• built/hacked several IoT devices; see https://karlquinsland.com/tags/esphome/

• Licensed HAM (we're allowed to build / test our own wireless protocols)
• Passionate student of all techniques/protocols for linking systems together

Provided on request

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