Weston Johnson

PollyEx

Engineering Manager, DevOps and SRE
Feb, 2021 — Feb, 2024

As a People Manager and Technical Lead for a team infrastructure engineers, I focused on infrastructure and DevOps excellence, while providing mentorship and guidance for professional development. I planned and executed a successful migration from Heroku to AWS with no interruption to customer experience or developer throughput.

I designed and implemented a cloud-native infrastructure with CICD pipelines, featuring ephemeral instances for developers, and zero-downtime deployments to production.

As a part of a cost savings exercise, I brought down our OpEx spend by over 30%. And to help fill in gaps, I ran our SOC 2 Type 2 security audit for the 2022 observational period.

Automox

Site Reliability Engineer
Aug, 2019 — Feb, 2021

Working with Kuberenetes at scale, servicing a customer base of 10,000s and 100,000s of endpoints.

Team lead for internal projects to scale our developer environments and CICD pipelines for hundreds of developers.

Provide our team with technical expertise and experience for the intersection of Kubernetes and AWS.

Improved our developer’s experience by writing a Kubectl plugin for viewing container logs stored in our logging infrastructure.

UCLA Health

Sr. DevOps Engineer, Research Computing
Jul, 2017 — Jan, 2019

Acting as an internal consultant for the David Geffen School of Medicine's research community to architect and implement cloud-focused computing solutions on the University of California's first HIPAA-compliant public cloud platform.

Responsible engineer for a strategic precision medicine project to sequence 150,000 patients over three years, starting with a ETL pipeline for VCF, working towards a HIPAA-compliant platform for tertiary analysis using Jupyter Notebook.

MNTN

Manager, Systems Engineering
Oct, 2015 — Mar, 2017

Manager and technical team lead for a team of 4 systems engineers responsible for infrastructure of online ad delivery, such as host provisioning and availability, Layer-7 load balancing, and DNS.

As a technical lead was responsible for technical direction, design, and availability of core infrastructure services including cluster deployment mechanisms, host provisioning systems, and monitoring metrics.

As a manager focused on interpersonal relationships within the team, along with their professional development and as their representative and advocate for the business at large. Acted as a point of contact for peers in the engineering department. Made sure that the work our team agreed to do was getting done, and within a reasonable time.

Amazon Web Services

DevOps Support Engineer
Jun, 2015 — Oct, 2015

AWS technical support providing 'white glove service' for external and internal customers including NetFlix, Amazon.com, and the US Government. The role required being an expert in AWS services such as EC2, VPC, and CloudFormation.

My short stint is regretable and due to a family emergency.

SpaceX

Systems Administrator II
Nov, 2013 — May, 2015

Lead and Responsible Engineer for replicating cloud computing services on internal networks regulated by the US Government (ITAR compliance). These services were mission critical; if they weren't reliable, our rockets didn't launch. Services included, OpenStack (to replicate AWS EC2), S3-compatible object storage, and the Atlassian suite (JIRA, Confluence, Bamboo, Stash).

Created a webapp for “DNS as a Service”, so dynamic VM provisioning had a RESTful interface for Active Directory DNS. This was before HP’s Designate was accepted by the OpenStack Foundation.

Burning Man Project

On-playa IT Manager
Seasonal, 2013 — 2015

During pre-event and post-event, I was responsponsible for setup of workstations and servers in an environment inhospitible to humans and computers alike

During the event, I was on-call for avaiablility of in-house dispatch and case management software for emergency services for a temorary city population of 70,000 people.

MNTN

Systems Administrator
Oct, 2012 — Oct, 2013

Responsible for infrastructure of online ad delivery, such as host provisioning and availability, Layer-7 load balancing, and DNS.

Managed 3,000+ host datacenter with configuration management and scripting (our IaaS vendor took care of 'racking and stacking').

Lead CICD adoption for software development teams.

Founded and lead monthly meeting where senior engineers shared and presented tips and tricks for the engineering team.

Internet Brands

Systems Administrator
Jul, 2010 — Sep, 2012

Migrated recently acquired websites, and data center hardware operations.

Parasoft

Professional Services Engineer
Nov, 2008 — Jun, 2010

SDLC consultant, and technical expert for pre and post-sales.

Parasoft

Systems Administrator, IT Manager
Oct, 2005 — Nov, 2008

People manager and tech lead for corporate IT team, focused on user and asset management.

University of Denver

Executive MBA (EMBA) • 2023 — Expected 2025

Cohort 81

AWS

AWS Certified Solutions Architect • 2016 — 2019

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate showcases knowledge and skills in AWS technology, across a wide range of AWS services. The focus of this certification is on the design of cost and performance optimized solutions, demonstrating a strong understanding of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

USENIX

Advocate Member • 2013 — Present

The USENIX Association is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, dedicated to supporting the advanced computing systems communities and furthering the reach of innovative research.

League of Professional System Administrators

Member • 2013 — 2018

The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) is a nonprofit corporation with members throughout the world. Our mission is to advance the practice of system administration; to support, recognize, educate, and encourage its practitioners; and to serve the public through education and outreach on system administration issues.

Burning Man, Black Rock Rangers

Volunteer, Shift Lead • 2010 — 2018

Black Rock Rangers are participants who volunteer a portion of their time at Burning Man in service of the safety and well-being of the Burning Man community. Rangers act as non-confrontational community mediators, providers of reliable information, facilitators of public safety (with the expectation that everyone reads the back of their ticket, of course!), and navigators of the edge of chaos.