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:

• UNIX: Solaris, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD
• Linux: Redhat, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, LDAP
• IP communication protocols: TCP, UDP, ICMP, SNMP, FTP, DNS
• Mass Storage: Network Appliance Filer deployment and maintenance
  
• Mail: SMTP over Exim, Qmail and some Sendmail, IMAP and POP over Courier Imap
• Web: Nginx, Apache

Languages and scripting:

• Fluent: Python, Unix Shell, Sed, Awk
• Debugging: Ruby, Perl, C, Go
• Web frameworks: Django, Smarty

Education:

UK based education:

• 10 GCSE's including English, Mathematics, Sciences and Technology (equiv. High School)
• National Certificate in Information Technology (equiv. pre-college higher education)

Employment History:

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.

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.

Started a small business, offering consulting and engineering services to businesses in the US and Europe
Clients:

• Deutsche Bank, London
  Migrating an internal critical web hosting platform from Linux to Solaris 10, and consolidating two separate platforms into a single unified entity.

• Evony, LLC, USA
  Lead systems administrator, managing and leading all technical direction for the systems administration team. Lead a team of 6 systems administrators to stabilise the infrastructure from a completely unknown and unmanaged state to a fully managed, monitored and stable state.
  Major projects designed, lead and managed:
  • Migrate from a managed hosting provider to purchased equipment with two separate co-location providers. Net cost saving of over $70,000/month with improved performance and uptime.
  • Hiring a building a systems administration team from scratch. Hired three systems administrators in geographically diverse locations, and established a system to provide 24/7 coverage.
  • Set up monitoring and metrics systems. The initial environment had no monitoring, this was set up and an on-call rotation enabled with SLA's to provide proper response times and expectations for recovery.
  • Email campaign system. Designed and created an email messaging campaign for subscribed users. The system tracked messages from creation to delivery to ISP, and provided reporting on how many emails were delivered, opened, had links clicked, and led to purchases.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

References available upon request