Accomplished technical leader, systems engineer, and technology generalist
with broad experience across numerous operating systems, development
environments, and organizations (enterprise, startup, and open source).
A recognized problem solver with the ability to quickly evaluate
solutions, find the pros & cons, and deliver something optimal within
the constraints. What fulfills me at work the most is satisfying end users.
- July 2022-present
- Software Engineer - Engineering Leadership
- Meta
- On the Linux Kernel Team my primary effort is to improve their engineering discipline, and work with their tools team to help better automate their rollout and monitoring.
- 2015-June 2022
- Principal Engineer - Office of the CTO
- VMware Inc.
- Principal Engineer at VMware is the highest role on the Member
of Technical Staff ladder. My current role at VMware is a bit of
a "swiss army knife" where I self-identify challenges across the
company and help teams tackle them. As a technology generalist
I have been able to jump in and help across all our Business Groups,
Business Units, and IT/Security with guidance on strategy, architecture,
and implementation.
- I personally feel it is key for senior technical talent to remain
well connected with the actual implementation details of anything
they are architecting. My "side projects" continue to include
several changesets & code reviews across all facets of ESXi.
I am often leveraged by VMware's Engineering Leadership, and the
Mergers & Acquisitions team, to perform due diligence on acquisition
targets. I have a proven track record of being able to quickly ramp up
on complex products, services, and solutions, and draw conclusions
about quality, usability, and performance to estimate the necessary
investment for success. This piece of my role extends back to 2011 and
earlier.
The Principal Engineer & Fellow community at VMware is a group of
approximately 40 engineers in which I've held a leadership position
since my promotion in 2013. I've worked extensively with the CTO,
R&D EVPs and Fellows, along with strategic partners in HR, to
broadening the community and have them be more engaged at a business
and strategy level. PEs at VMware are roughly VP level individual
contributors and as such have a wide purview with significant
responsibility for mentoring, strategy, architecture and implementation
of product, solutions, services and processes.
- 2013-2015
- Principal Engineer - VMware Security, Engineering, Compliance and Response (vSECR)
- VMware Inc.
-
I focused on extending the reach of Product Security, I became the
escalation point, doing deep risk assessments and being the interface
with Business Unit's General Managers and top line executive staff
as the need arose. I am well connected across the BlackHat/DEFCON
researcher community, and with several large penetration testing
firms.
In our Open Source efforts, I was the driving force around processes
for consumption, the mechanism for open sourcing our own code, and
streamlining the process for making contributions to open source
packages. As I stepped away from this role we created a team of 30+
to handle the Open Source work.
- 2011-2013
- Sr. Staff Engineer - Product Security
- VMware Inc.
- Extensive work in threat modeling, risk assessment, and driving
change in development processes. A wide reaching role interacting with
everybody from executive staff to engineers in the trenches. Most
important achievements in this role were ensuring that security
concerns were addressed pre-release rather than becoming expensive
to fix post-release; this entailed training Quality Engineering,
Continuing Product Development, and Core Engineering to have the
ability to spot and prioritize these issues appropriately. In
many cases this required hands-on assessment and influence to ensure
the right thing happened for a given issue.
I was a key driver for the VMware Secure Development Lifecycle (vSDL)
process and its integration in to VMware's standard development processes
across all VMware products and services. A distinct evolution from the
prior Product Security Policy (PSP) owned by the security team originally
in Continued Product Development before the formation of Platform Security
in core R&D.
- 2009-2011
- Sr. Staff Engineer - ESX Server/VMkernel
- VMware Inc.
- I worked on improvements across the VMkernel, looking for more
performance and quality improvements, consolidating several
per-component implementations of functonality in to a core functionality
of the kernel for all components to leverage.
This was also when we evaluated a pNFS implementation, allowing me
to leverage both my storage and networking background, but I was
tasked with a leadership position in Product Security prior to the
implementation being completed. After I left the project, the market
shifted, and the work was abandoned.
Member of the Architecture Review Board. Consulting on architecture,
design, and implementation across the VMkernel.
- 2006-2009
- Staff Engineer - ESX Server/VMkernel
- VMware Inc.
- One of the leads on a team re-architecting and re-implementing
the legacy storage stack in the VMkernel into what is known as
the Pluggable Storage Architecture. A project that allowed EMC's
PowerPath to run on ESX, and not just VMware's multipathing.
I also lead the re-design of the VMkernel multipathing module, and
developed a lockless hot-path, a significant improvement over the legacy
implementation.
Through the course of the vSphere 4.0 release I lead a virtual team
and successfully cut the cycles per IO approximately in half when compared
to the previous ESX release; most of the cycle savings came from outside
of the storage code base.
- October 2004-2006
- Senior Software Engineer - ESX Server Storage/VMkernel
- VMware Inc.
- I was responsible for porting SAS (Serial-Attached-SCSI)
drivers from Linux to the VMkernel. Adding support for new Fibre Channel
arrays. General improvements to the entire IO stack from the virtual
devices exposed to the guest OS, through the core storage stack, multipathing,
the Linux emulation layer and physical drivers. During this time I first
developed an asynchronous model for the LSILogic virtual device to pass IOs
between the guest and the kernel.
- September 2002-October 2004
- Senior Clustered Storage Engineer
- Addamark Technologies (aka SenSage Inc)
- I worked on a filesystem-based database for the
Log Management System (LMS), implementing such features as backup
and restore to ensure a 100% uptime server.
Ported the LMS, a large C++ application, from Linux/x86 to
Solaris/SPARC. While working with the product several performance
bottlenecks were idenitified and significant improvements were
implemented.
- June 2000-September 2002
- Senior Software Engineer
- Inktomi Corporation
- In the Content Network Solutions Group my key role was as an
expert in UNIX kernels, software portability and performance.
I was tasked with porting Traffic Server, a high performance, transparent,
caching web proxy, to VxWorks on MIPS, as well as completing the port
from Solaris to Linux. The Linux port had some performance challenges
so I evaluated a kernel module that "batched" syscalls and saw
good results in the lab just as the 2.4 kernel improved syscall
performance. Traffic Server was also where I came up with the idea
of using ACK pacing to do TCP bandwidth shaping from the client-side
of a connection, and worked with a small team to implement it.
- June 1999-June 2000
- Member of Technical Staff
- Cygnus Solutions Canada Ltd.
- As a GDB Engineer I was responsible for adding support for new
target hardware to GDB. This entailed looking at chip specifications
and making appropriate modifications and additions within the GDB
source code to enable proper display and setting of registers, memory
and breakpoints.
- 1988-June 1999
- Research and Development
- QNX Software Systems Ltd.
- Ten years of accumulating realtime, embedded systems experience, and
being part of the implementation of a POSIX compliant operating system.