Heather Buerkle

Experience

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  The Mutual Group

  May 1993 - Jan 1997

  Programmer Analyst

  Designed and built PL/1 software for the Group Benefits division.Provided analysis for business data and created a new system to aid in the tracking of fraudulent providers.

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  Manulife Financial

  Jan 1997 - Jan 1999

  Intermediate Systems Designer

  Designed and built enhancements for Group Benefits software solutions and provided support for critical systems.

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  IBM Global Services Australia

  Jan 1999 - Jan 1999

  Programmer

  Analyzed C and C++ code for Year 2000 problems and identifying critical elements requiring correctionAssessed clients' Cobol and PL/1 applications to identify source code requiring correction for Year 2000 compliancy

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  Davids Ltd.

  Jan 2000 - Jan 2000

  Programmer/Analyst

  Enhanced company PL/1 systems with calculationss for Australia's new Goods and Services TaxDeveloped utillty programs for use in system conversion to GST processing

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  Manulife

  Jan 2000 - Jan 2023

  Expanded the Reliability Engineering team under my leadership from to 11 team members and achieved a 96th percentile (in Gallup overall database) employee engagement score.Partnered with global teams to provide end-to-end monitoring consulting and strategy.Consolidated tooling to reduce operational expenses and to enable team members to focus support and development effort on go-forward platforms. Tooling consolidation has included leadership of a large project in short timeline to consolidate AI Operations tools.In partnership with procurement teams, managed contract renewal processes with vendor partners.In collaboration with Enterprise Architecture team, contributed to a global monitoring and observability framework that provides to achieve alignment with tooling and data visibility consistently across Manulife with a goal of reducing incidents.Provided monthly reporting metrics and team progress to the CIO. Mas kaunti Led a team of 7 high performing Platform Reliability Engineers to provide application monitoring and data visibility solutions to our internal partner teams globally. This team scored in the top 3 of all IT teams for employee engagement.Defined application monitoring standards and practices to enable partner teams to establish end-to-end monitoring for their applications including dashboard and data analytics solutions.Implemented an AI Operations solution to improve incident management.Detailed a team strategy to align with organizational goals and KPIs related to application monitoring and data visibility.Established a data analytics team to provide creative data solutions to senior leaders.Contributed course content to a Reliability Engineering education program that resulted in a Stars of Excellence award for our team. Mas kaunti Provide support to our Manulife Securities, Distribution, Manulife Private Wealth and Manulife Capital Markets business teams.Contribute to departmental application strategy. This involves investigation and business case work to prove viability of components of the strategy and has included technical leadership to deliver on these components.Deliver business cases that are prioritized for project consideration. I work with our business partners to understand their issues and how technology could help them work more effectively. I take these problems, high level requirements and possible solutions to draft them into a business case. In some situations this involves working with third party vendors and procurement to facilitate a solution.Provide initial estimates, resourcing and solution options for project or consulting requests that come to our team from our business partners or other Information Systems teams.Facilitation of process and practice improvements to increase the effectiveness of how our BSA team delivers work. Partnering with our Divisional BSA Team, I have enabled our team to use tools such as HP ALM and have driven the creation of more efficient processes such as improved intake. I provide mentoring and guidance to BSA team members. Mas kaunti Championed and enhanced recognition of the value and contribution of professional Developers in the software development and support life cycles.Provided direction for building, improving and leveraging techniques, best practices and standards for the practice of application development.I am a Change Agent, and drove improvements that helped our Developers work more effectively. Status quo isn't good enough. I believe in continual improvements, and influence change from foundational ideas to bigger ideas that will benefit teams. With the Developer Team, I influenced best practices, processes and guidelines to ensure that we were delivering high quality solutions. I influenced the management team to support the Developer Community in these initiatives.Helped Developer team members make a strong impact, execute on their ideas for improvement and innovation, influence management and how to leverage their ideas for the overall improvement of the development practice. I believe in continual learning and helped Developers get the training they needed or the opportunities they were looking for from an 'on the job experience' standpoint. I assisted people discover their career path and helped them navigate how to get to where they wanted to go. I ensured that team members understood what is expected of them in a Developer role and how to leverage their own strengths to help them be successful. Effectively built relationships with many vendor partners who worked with us, including contractors, global delivery partners and third party companies who provided services to our team. Mas kaunti Lead Developer for a project team building a new insurance application using C# and BizTalk. Prepared a comprehensive performance test strategy and provided technical leadership of the performance testing team that brought together internal staff, vendor technical experts in India and external contractors.Mentored and provided leadership to teams using my developer experience to bring configurability, flexibility and fault-tolerance into solutions.Collaborated with medical evidence vendors and other third party companies to implement new automated data exchange systems and processes.Established and promoted new departmental technology standards such as SSRS, Visual Studio for performance testing and best practices for C# development. Mas kaunti

  • Lead Platform Reliability Engineer

    Mar 2022 - Jan 2023

  • Senior Platform Reliability Engineer

    May 2019 - Mar 2022

  • Senior Solutions Designer

    May 2017 - May 2019

  • Business Systems Consultant

    May 2015 - May 2017

  • Development Practice Manager

    May 2011 - May 2015

  • Development Consultant

    Jan 2000 - Jan 2011
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  Canada Life

  Jan 2023 - Jan 2024

  Sr Devops Engineering Specialist Lead