Robin Lee Powell

robinleepowell@gmail.com • (650) 296-8094
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinleepowell • 2694 19th Ave, San Francisco, CA, USA

Technical Infrastructure/Software Engineering Manager

Proven Technical & Management Expertise
in a Career Spanning 20 Years

Professional Summary

Technically sophisticated management professional who maintains focus on business needs while keeping his subordinates committed and enthusiastic and completing projects quickly and reliably. Concentrates on bottom line results while formulating and implementing advanced technology and business solutions to meet a diversity of needs.

Played a central role in projects that: cut backup costs in half; reduced user wait times for large jobs by a factor of 4; reduced overall hosting costs by 30%.

Strategic manager with strong interpersonal, communication, problem solving and decision making skills. Optimistic, imaginative, hard-working self-starter. Extensive technical background encompassing all aspects of Linux and cloud systems administration, as well as extensive knowledge of software development. Able to convey complex technical requirements/data; exceed customer expectations; lead and motivate teams; achieve fiscal bottom-line results; establish and maintain strong alliances; and drive projects to successful completion.

Technical Strategic Planning / Team Leadership
Business-Focused Technical Solutions / Clear Communication
Systems Automation / Security And Compliance Management / Disaster Recovery Planning

Professional Experience

• I am the manager of a tools team that provides infrastructure to other internal teams
• As of Feb 2018, I have grown the team from 1 subordinate to 6, all while maintaining the team's quality of execution and strong focus on best practices
• My team's focus is on systems automation and configuration management; our primary internal product is Puppet backed by a home-grown CMDB, but we also provide DHCP, DNS, Kickstart, and other such "lights on" services for a very large pool of bare-metal systems in many datacenters worldwide
• My team is seen as the go-to team for internal discussions of SRE best practices, configuration management, and automation, a reputation we have worked hard to build and of which we are justly proud
• The majority of my time is spent on communication between teams; there are something like 40 distinct teams and sub-teams that use my team's services, and one of the services we provide is L3 support for our tools, so the communication process is very nearly a full time job by itself. In this aspect of my role, I have helped to grow my team's reputation for helpfulness and competence by leaps and bounds since my arrival.
• A significant chunk of my time in this role has been spent on recruiting and mentoring, where I specialize in finding high-potential junior candidates and rapidly bringing them up to our world-class standards. 3 members of my team have been in sysadmin roles for less than 2 years, and yet people are still coming to them for advice on an almost daily basis.
• As a people manager, I follow servant leader and leader-leader models: my focus is on the well-being of my team, both now and in the future, and their ability to learn and grow in their roles, rather than on short-term goals like simple retention. My feeling is that if people remember their time with me and our company fondly, then even if they move on to something else, they will provide a means to help me fill any positions that might need filling in the future.

• Hired as Senior Systems Administrator when the company was about 5 people; made Director Of Operations due to outstanding performance
• Hired additional talent to round out the operations team
• Entirely responsible for our ~40TiB of user data and ~500 AWS cloud servers (across 3 continents)
• Rebuilt our background task system to save ~$12k/month
• Transitioned the entire company's systems from leased servers to AWS, resulting in huge increases in user responsiveness (example: 5x improvement in background task startup time)
• Worked with the CTO to cut AWS costs by more than 30%
• Managed all systems-related vendor relationships; built strong relationships leading to significant discounts
• Effectively automated away the need for ~3 full-time system administrators, at vast savings
• Produced extensive documentation for internal use
• Trained all operations personnel, as well as provided extensive training for other departments on our internal tools
• Built disaster recovery plan from the ground up
• Worked extensively on security compliance (FISMA in particular)
• Built extensive web test automation in Selenium

• Was key in moving hundreds of servers from private to managed hosting, an extensive 8 month project
• Over several years, replaced a ~7 person team managing hundreds of servers with only myself and extensive automation, at vast savings
• Significantly improved backup behaviour and significantly reduced backup costs at the same time
• Managed vendor relations, particularly with our backup provider, through significant technical issues

• Personally responsible for all of the machines that ran www.furl.net (now defunct), which consisted of ~50 machines of ~6 functional types
• Part of a team managing hundreds of web search engine machines
• Single-handedly turned Furl from something that kept oncall up for hours 2 or 3 times a week to something that ran smoothly. This included extensive MySQL server optimization, query optimization, capacity planning, server buildouts, and various kinds of scripting, including using cfengine.
• Developed a system to take a machine from having no OS to being fully functional members of their cluster
• Performed near-zero-downtime software deployments
• On-call/pager duties; problem analysis and remediation

Volunteer Experience

I was the Treasurer/Secretary for the LLG for many years. I was responsible for the quarterly book-keeping and general financial management, as well as communication with other organizations.

I continue to provide both the server and network connection for the lojban.org infrastructure, at my own expense. Also, I support a wide complex of tools for a variety of projects.

Education

Bachelor Of Mathematics, University Of Waterloo, Canada