Hi there, I'm Steven. When I'm not behind a keyboard, I like to be outdoors. Here's a picture I took of South Lake Tahoe!

About

I am a technologist seeking a Senior or Lead Engineering role on a Cloud Infrastructure, SRE, Platform, DevSecOps or related team. I have a broad range of experience, 5 years of which working on a Software Engineering team to make production environments more reliable, cost effective and scalable. I love leveraging code to automate away toil and understand the value of platforms that are observable, measurable and performant. I planned on making Red Canary my first 5+ year company but that got cut short by the company’s projected economic outlook. I hope to land a role at an organization that enables me to do my best work so I can make this dream my reality.
Thanks for stopping by!

Career

  • Aug 2022 – Present

    I facilitate and teach up to two online sections a semester for the Computer Science department at Butte College. This is my ‘night and weekend’ activity

  • Feb 2022 – Feb 2023

    At Red Canary, I was promoted to a role where I got to ‘greenfield’ a team of cross-functional engineers. We filled a gap between Trust and Engineering and implemented initiatives spearheded by the Directors of Corporate Security and Security Architecture, among others. We set out to be the team that would own cross-functional shared services and tooling like Terraform, networking infrastructure and authentication across the corporate and production environments. I was laid off along with 15% of the company which is likely why you’re reading this :)

  • Feb 2021 – Feb 2022

    As a Senior Production Engineer, I managed AWS resources surpassing $1m/mo including EKS clusters, EC2 Instances and more using Terraform. The team provided incident response, onboarded customers to the platform and implemented cost and security optimizations while ensuring the the systems underpinning the core product run well.

  • Jan 2019 – Mar 2021

    As an SRE at Build.com, I helped build and maintain our production CentOS environment and built a Rancher PoC with the Java Architect. We ran a lean stack that didn’t fall over frequently so oncall was refreshingly enjoyable (most of the time)

  • Jun 2018 – Jan 2019

    Between roles, I enrolled in a coding bootcamp with the goal of pursuing full stack development. The company shuttered as I was attending and the platform was shut down

  • Sep 2017 – Jun 2018

    As the DevOps Engineer at Work Truck Solutions, I built and managed all infra, build and deployment pipelines and more in Azure. I was also an oncall rotation of one and that burned me out quick. I needed a break

  • Dec 2015 – Sep 2017

    As the DevOps Specialist at Fifth Sun, I was introduced to devops, cloud infra and being oncall. I performed a migration of a LAMP stack to AWS, utilizing RDS, EC2 and set up monitoring and alerting

  • Jun 2015 – Dec 2015

    I briefly worked for a Facebook contractor as an InfraOps Admin. I worked on corporate infra and provided Tier 3 support to FTEs. Facebook did not renew the contract and the office was downsized and shut down

  • Jun 2012 – Jun 2015

    An Alibaba company, 11 Main was a premium ecommerce marketplace. I managed a team of four globally distributed helpdesk technicians and got to fly over to China to work in Alibaba HQ for a week. I learned a lot about the importance of communication in this role

  • 2012

    I moved back to Chico to be closer to family

  • May 2011 – Mar 2012

    I worked as a Sys Admin for Jason Calacanis’ companies and podcasts. I got to rack equipment at One Wilshire, configure XOS switches and FreeBSD Servers. I also appeared on This week in Startups as a Tech Advisor

  • Oct 2010 – May 2011

    I provisioned OS X and Debian based workstations for Digital Domain in Venice Beach. I worked out of the Binoculars Building and supported the making of TRON: Legacy and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, among others

  • Aug 2009 – Sep 2010

    I worked behind the Genius Bar at Apple. I gained invaluable knowledge regarding service, quality of culture and customer satisfaction. I also repaired devices and worked several overnights for product launches with people that’d grow to be lifelong friends

  • Aug 2008 – Jul 2009

    My first gig in LA was at RTS Solutions, a computer repair and MSP that sent me onsite all over LA and the surrounding areas. This paid the bills (barely) while I was getting my feet under me

  • 2008

    I moved to Los Angeles to experience the ‘big city life’

  • Aug 2007 – Jun 2008

    At Chico State, I provided support to Faculty and Staff, and imaged a lot of OS X and Windows workstations. I learned about IT operations at university scale and complex ticketing systems

  • 2007 - 2008

    I opened my own computer store in my hometown shortly after graduating from high school. I had no idea how to run a business but I really enjoyed helping people

  • 1995

    Like most folks my age, I started my adventure in computing by playing videogames. My uncle taught me how to load and run executables on floppies from a command prompt. The old days where physical media was the norm and computers had moving components

Contact

Get in touch if I would be a good fit for a role at your organization, have questions or just want to say hello 🙃

hiresteven@icloud.com