Eli S.

Experience

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  Trilobyte Network Consulting

  Jan 1996 - Jan 1998

  Proprietor

  Provide IT consulting, installation, and administration services for Small and Medium Business clients. Generate sales to customers based on an upgrade path from deprecated networking technologies (Lantastic, Netware, OS/2 environments running on Token Ring, ARCnet, 10base2/10base5 networks) to Ethernet. System upgrades, network/print/display device sales.

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  Computer Exchange

  Jan 1998 - Jan 2001

  Information Technology System Network Administrator
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  New England Systems and Controls

  Jan 2001 - Jan 2003

  System Programmer
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  Angstrom Microsystems

  Jan 2003 - Jan 2004

  Cluster Systems Architect
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  University of Utah - Center for High Performance Computing

  Jan 2004 - Jan 2005

  Systems Engineer
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  Overstock.com

  Jan 2005 - Jan 2005

  Systems Engineer
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  Industrial Light & Magic

  Sept 2005 - May 2011

  Senior Production Systems Engineer

  Led Systems R+D effort, collaborating with IT Ops and Engineering. Partnered with executive team to champion & develop project plans for successful prototypes in support of strategic business objectives, owning vision & strategy development for core infrastructure systems & services.Project: Led first dynamic production studio infrastructure with HP and Teradici, enabling rapid, local studio deployments to follow primary filming & production tax breaks. Results: Launched first remote satellite studio requiring only networking & thin clients, from which artists worked in collaboration with HQ, minimizing up-front equipment costs while provisioning & maintaining infrastructure.Project: Led development of the first production multi-GPU high-performance computing systems to provide platform for visualization of particle physics simulations, enabling sims to occur at higher fidelity & speeds. Tech Stack: SLES, RHEL, Linux Kernel work, Solaris, Quadroplex, IBM + HP blade systems, Netapp, Texas Memory Systersm, NAS, Sun Unified Storage, SAN, DTrace, Zabbix, Nagios, Cacti, Ganglia, cfEngine, Subversion (SVN), Cuda, OpenCL, Perl, Python, C++, XML, Brocade, Foundry, Procurve, Juniper, MySQL, Oracle. Show less

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  ExpertVoice

  May 2011 - Dec 2013

  Director of IT

  Led IT and Engineering Operations teams, developing scalable platforms with a focus on data security and reliability. Responsible for IT strategy, workforce planning, and budget management. Led risk management framework, and software redesigns to meet PCI DSS regulatory compliance. Project: Designed and led implementation of Changesaw, a PaaS automation system exceeding AWS Cloudformation's capabilities on our bare-metal and VMware infrastructure, enabling fully automated A/B deployments of physical infrastructure changes & code releases, across pre-release & live Production environments. Tech Stack: AWS, VMWare, RHEL, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet Fortigate, Procurve, Cloudformation, NGINX, HAProxy, Java, Tomcat, Spring Framework, MongoDB, SOLR, Subversion (SVN), New Relic, Zabbix, Jenkins, JMX, MS Server 2008R2, Active Directory, MySQL, Percona, memcached, Apache Zookeeper, Redis, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Dell Blades + R-series servers, XML, YAML, Containers. Show less

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  Janrain, Inc.

  Jan 2014 - Apr 2015

  Director of Cloud Operations

  Led IT, Online Operations, and Infosec teams. Focused on raising organizational maturity around Infosec & DevOps processes, architecture improvements, resiliency and platform scalability challenges, change control, and reducing operating costs. Drove modernization of product architecture, infrastructure automation, release & deployment tooling, and continuous deployment processes. Led initial ISO 27001:2005 compliance certification and two consecutive successful audits, developing ISMS documentation and collaborating cross-functionally to develop compliance processes.Project: Defined & achieved targets for OPEX reductions related to AWS costs. Developed budgets, led complete infrastructure audit and change management plan to enable, and supervised execution through planned IT lifecycle changes and software release cycles. Results: Achieved a 53% reduction in related operating expenses related to AWS bills within 6 months, and saved $840K annualized. Tech Stack: AWS, RHEL, ELK, Stackdriver, Cloudformation, Apache, NGINX, Ansible, Java, Tomcat, Git, Redis, Jenkins, Atlassian Bamboo, JIRA, Cloudability, sysdig. Show less

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  Epic Games

  Apr 2015 - Apr 2016

  IT Director

  Led a department of 20 supporting a rapidly growing globally distributed user base growing from 700 - 2000 people across more than 10 locations over 12 months. Championed and executed a transformation increasing transparency to both exec stakeholder team and satisfaction to end-users, organizing a group initially reacting 100% to user-support and outage responses, into three focused teams oriented towards providing best-in class service and user support, maintaining existing IT infrastructure and service commitments, and developing new solutions for the business. Managed the implementation of an IT program framework, showing the impact of prioritization decisions to optimize global project resources and secure executive support for a phased staffing plan aimed at doubling team size over 18 months with a yearly growth forecast of 50%. Project: Developed & executed a technology modernization strategy for IT globally, to reduce up-front and recurring costs and shrink launch times, enabling the completion of several concurrent stalled/at-risk global studio launches on schedule. Quickly replaced unmaintainable, fragile legacy systems in favor of single-vendor hyperconverged platform, allowing a simpler, more streamlined change matrix, and creating a pattern of defining a lifecycle events calendar and staff headcount impact assessment prior to purchase and deployment.Tech Stack: AWS, VPC; Cisco ACS, UCS; VPN, Nutanix, Isilon, Ansible, Terraform, KACE, JIRA, ServiceNow, Google Suite, Smartsheets. Show less

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  Quantum Spatial

  Jun 2016 - Nov 2017

  Director of Technology

  Managed a global IT team of 11, supporting 500+ staff and 4PB data across nine offices. Developed and executed tech strategy, reconciled budgets per new PE ownership to reduce net costs 40% year over year. Integrated remote staff from seven companies into a round-the-clock global shared-service team. Increased transparency & accountability through regularly presenting KPI's of improvement, quality and performance metrics to exec team. Managed program for DoD/Defense Security Services NISPOM regulated Closed Area for secure government contracts work. Project: Developed & executed fleet management plan to modernize >650 critical systems, prioritizing underperforming assets and infrastructure risk of data or service loss. Results: Completed 20% of workstation refreshes 9-12 months ahead of schedule, mitigated data loss risks by adding>1.5PB storage, migrated multiple mission-critical storage systems and replaced critical server infrastructure at 9 offices, transitioning to new Nutanix installations.Tech Stack: AWS, ServiceNow, Zendesk, Nutanix, Meraki, Isilon, Netapp, ZFS, Active Directory, DFS, Linux, GPU Compute, Google Suite, Smartsheets. Show less

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  Epic Games

  Jan 2018 - Dec 2018

  Information Technology Architect

  1-year contract to lead program management and IT architecture for new studio builds & launches during the rapid growth enabled by Fortnite. Rapidly applied organizational and process improvements to show progress and results, as well as design+document+build full solutions for production AV and IT teams across multiple projects. Project: Led the completion of five major global studio launches & expansions including Shanghai, Suzhou, Montreal, and SF Bay Area Larkspur HQ . Accelerated new deployments more than 4x above legacy pace of fully in-house work, executed within project budgets for all OPEX + CAPEX, ensured commissioning plans enabled the business to execute staff growth, mergers, and acquisitions on schedule. Developed global Enterprise IT & AV infrastructure design for both new studio launches and global retrofit schedule, including technical documentation and reporting throughout project lifecycle. Tech Stack: AWS, VPC, WorkSpaces DaaS, Active Directory, VPN, Routing, Teradici, Thin Clients, Nutanix, ASA Firewall, QSC AV, Google Suite, MS Office, Gliffy, Lucidchart, SketchUp, JIRA, Slack, MS Project, Smartsheets. Show less

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  Project Archer

  Apr 2020 - Apr 2024

  Director of Information Technology
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  Walmart Global Tech

  Apr 2020 - Apr 2024

  Senior Manager, Systems and Infrastructure Engineering

  Director of IT @ Project Archer, an Augmented Reality startup with Store No. 8 (a disruptive-tech incubator division within Walmart), and Senior Manager, Systems Infrastructure and Engineering within Walmart Global Tech. I spearheaded the launch of Project Archer as a 100% cloud-native business, leading a department that supported staff growth from 5 to >75 staff over four years. My role included supporting all in-house IT infrastructure, services, and support, cloud infrastructure, and Build/Release EngineeringProject: I developed the cloud and network service architecture, supporting devices at our HQ location to Azure and GCP clouds, all back-end systems including latency-critical CV (computer vision) and speech processing systems, returning data in realtime to augment AR overlays. I expanded this to an store-wide Wifi 6E network covering >150,000 sqft of performant, low-latency wireless networking at a Walmart Supercenter, facilitating demos and filming for CES'24 of our applications, as well as continual user-acceptance testing with both associates and customers. Tech Stack: Microsoft Azure + O365, Google GCP + Workspaces, Github, Meraki, Juniper MiST, Cisco, Cradlepoint, IPSEC VPN, MPLS, Wifi Wireless Planning + Analysis, 5G Fixed + Mobile, AR Headsets (Hololens 2, Magicleap 2, Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest Pro), Windows 10 + 11, MacOS, Jamf, Intune, Apple Business Manager, Datadog, Terraform, Github Actions, Artifactory Show less