Avleen Vig
Personal Summary, Accomplishments and Objective:
An experienced Systems Engineer with over 18 years demonstrated
experience.
Versed in the development, installation, maintenance and growth
of large-scale infrastructures for Internet services.
I have spoken at many technical conferences in recent years, several of which
are available on YouTube.
My github repo is at https://github.com/avleen.
For fun I once wrote a web server in bash, it's my highest starred project.
I am seeking a challenging role in the Systems Engineering field, where I can actively deal with architecture and development of large and small scale systems.
Professional skills:
Well versed in the installation, configuration and administration of:
Languages and scripting:
Education:
UK based education:
Employment History:
August 2010 - : | Etsy, Inc |
Brooklyn, NY |
Staff Operations Engineer
Primarily tasked with designing, implementing and maintaining a highly
scalable infrastructure. Worked closely with developers on existing and new
products to ensure they were as stable and reliable as possible to decrease
visible downtime. Responsible for the day-to-day operation of a cluster of
web servers, and all other infrastructure required to run the Etsy
website.
In 2011, I ran the Operations side of a large project to build out Etsy's
own payments system which launched in January 2012. Subsequently I ran
another large project to provide business continuity and disaster recovery
between multiple data centers, working closely with developers to ensure
systems were able to work in multi-master, or master-slave configurations.
In 2012 I ran a project which migrated us from Splunk to ELK, and introduced
Elasticsearch into the Etsy environment. This in turn lead to significant
growth in logging and tooling we were able to develop on top of the logging
platform. We contributed back several times to the ELK projects, both in
code and public speaking on how to scale the stack.
Currently I am a senior engineer on the monitoring team, which is responsible
for creating platforms for monitoring, metrics and logging for the larger
engineering organisation to use.
January 2009 - August 2010: | Woo Media, Inc |
Portland, Oregon and London, UK |
Senior Systems Administrator
Worked with a team of two other systems administrators to grow and manage
the server and application infrastructure for a fast growing startup.
Responsible for every aspect of the system life cycle from provisioning,
installation and deployment, to monitoring, maintenance and retirement.
Deployed Puppet for configuration management which reduced the number of
deployment related errors to almost zero and significantly improved the
ability of the team to managed a fast growing set of servers.
Took a number of performance improvement measures - replacing lighttpd with
nginx, tuning the interface to the django application tier and improving the
database pooling mechanisms to overall improve the load capacity without
increasing costs or manageability of the system.
August 2008 - Present: | Silverwraith Ltd |
Portland, Oregon and London, UK |
Started a small business, offering consulting and engineering services to
businesses in the US and Europe
Clients:
August 2005 - August 2008: | Google, Inc |
1600 Amphitheater Pkwy | |
Mountain View | |
CA, USA, 94043 |
Systems Administrator
Responsible for creating and maintaining software used by data centre techs
worldwide. These were written in Python (Django framework), using MySQL
backend databases in high-availability master-slave configurations.
Installed and maintained clusters of tens of thousands of Linux servers
around the world.
Developed and implemented the Hardware Operations group's first release
engineering procedures based on ITIL/ISO20000 specifications. This was
presented at the LISA conference in 2007.
Assisted Datacenter Technicians with troubleshooting complex hardware and
software problems in very large server clusters.
Leadership: Mentored and helped 10 juniors systems administrators grow to
promotion. Responsible for time and project management, as well as
escalations from this staff.
Worked closely with other development groups to integrate software with
hardware.
2002 - July 2005: | Earthlink, Inc |
2547 Bradley Street | |
Pasadena | |
CA, USA, 91107 |
Technical Team Lead (March 2005 - July 2005)
Promoted to Technical Team Lead in 2005. Responsible for overseeing all
technical decisions regarding EarthLink's production systems. This includes
new deployments, escalations of problems, providing third-tier support along
side senior systems administrators. Also responsible for the development of
new technical policies within the production operations team. As part of
their work, the Technical Team Leads worked with management to restructure
the production systems operations group to provide better support of
systems.
Unix Systems Administrator (April 2002 - March 2005)
Unix Systems Administrator on the Graveyard (night/3rd) shift. Responsible
for the daily maintenance of high-availability customer-visible systems.
Regularly performing hardware maintenance on equipment from a variety of
vendors. All hardware maintenance is performed by Systems Admins, with
vendors rarely called for assistance, building up a thorough understanding
of software and hardware components. Most scheduled outages are performed on
this shift, and so exposure to software and hardware for maintenance is very
high. Also responsible for end-to-end start, planning and completion of
outages of all scales and visibilities. Completely managing medium-scale
projects of systems configuration updates, new software deployments, and
infrastructure planning with customer visibility up to 5 million accounts,
and over 10 million individual users. Created and maintained a technical
documentation library based around DocBook XML to centralize the
department's technical information.
June 2000 - October 2001: | Internet Vision Ltd |
60 Albert Court | |
Prince Consort Road | |
London, UK, SW7 2BE |
Information Security Officer, Systems Administrator
The primary contact for security related, both internal to the company and
from clients. Developed and maintained security policies and procedures for
the company. Stayed abreast of developments in Information Security to
ensure stability of internal servers as well as providing consultancy to
clients. Acted as the Single Point Of Contact for the Systems department,
meeting with management daily to report on the status of the department and
discuss the company's requirements upon it. Managed a farm of over 30 Unix
based servers as a general Systems Administrator for the company and
clients. Audited all client servers prior to deployment into a live
environment.
Trained with RIPE (www.ripe.net)
to act as part of a Local Internet Registrar, with the responsibility of
assigning large IP blocks to customers.
April 1999 - June 2000: | Hitachi Credit Plc |
3-4 Wallbrook Business Centre | |
Hounslow | |
London, UK, TW4 6NW |
IT Support Technician, Security Lead
Acted as the first point of contact for all computer-related problems both
hardware and software related. Lead security efforts on Network, Server, and
workstation fronts.
Maintained router security between 3 corporate sites over a private WAN,
monitored and maintained the IDS. Frequently communicated with and worked
with major ISP's to trace security threats.
January 1996 - December 1998: | UKChat Ltd |
2 Bedser Close | |
London, UK, SE11 5BE |
Security Officer, Producer, UK Computing Forum.
Responsibilities included managing a Microsoft Chat Server on a technical
level, managing email accounts, writing new articles for UKChat's Website.
Also installed and configured Windows NT4.0 Server and Workstation.
Maintained these along with a small LAN running MS Exchange 5.5. Provided
1st and 2nd line support to all end users including the general public on
problems with their systems, programs, networks and Internet connectivity
and mostly, network security. Dealt with all matters on computer and
Internet security.
Personal Interests:
I enjoy reading literature, listening to music from around the world. I take
a keen interest in new technologies and keep myself apprised of new problems
and solutions in the IT industry.
Personal Details:
Name: | Avleen Vig |
Email: | avleen@silverwraith.com |
References available upon request