Michael Wimpee - Résumé

Employment History

Senior Engineer, Operations and Development
Emicus/US Emergency Operations Center
April 2009-

Operations engineer and software developer for startup focused on helping the public during natural disasters. Wholly responsible for systems architecture and infrastructure. Involved in all aspects of the technology choices, design and implementation.

Achievements:

Helped design and build Ruby on Rails/Java website from first check-in to production in ten weeks.
Bootstrapped production and corporate infrastructure using Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, Subversion and other open source tools.
Used EC2, S3, CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancing to ensure scalability and availability of product.
Integrated site with several third party web service APIs.
Member of FEMA grand-prize winning team at Random Hacks of Kindness #0.

Production Operations Manager
Marchex, Inc.
April 2007-April 2009

Responsible for the systems engineering and operations of all Marchex applications in production. Applications ran on hundreds of servers in multiple datacenters and handled a billion daily requests and hundreds of thousands of domains. Managed team of 2–12 system engineers. Powerful voice in choosing and advocating the technical direction of the product team.

Achievements:

Conceived and built an in-house query expansion service. Saved ~$1M annually on service expenses while providing higher revenue and more relevant results.
Filled in as senior network engineer and project manager during production IP migration.
Managed many large-scale application migrations, upgrades and build-outs.

Production Applications Team Lead/Senior Systems Administrator
Marchex, Inc.
June 2005-April 2007

Designed system solutions to improve system availability, capacity and scalability. Helped engineering team build and maintain the company's core ad serving platform. Supported the daily operations of two advertising platforms serving >500 million queries daily. Monitored product availability and resource usage. Planned system and feature upgrades. Provided technical leadership in design and administration decisions for production networks and applications. Assigned projects to team members and monitored progress.

Achievements:

Migrated main ad platform between datacenters exactly according to submitted plan—a large migration described by the CTO as "world class."
Planned and executed several downtime-free load balancer and server upgrades and migrations.
Guided operational design of company's direct navigation platform.
Helped stabilize new product and reduce alarms from more than a thousand a month to tens while increasing service check coverage.
Guitar Hero Expert Division Champ.

Systems Administrator
University of Washington
February 2004-June 2005

Administered complex computing environment in support of a large research laboratory. Automated system administration tasks to ensure system availability, consistent policy application and current security status. Leveraged OpenAFS and Kerberos to provide a secure, unified authentication and data access environment. Managed backup system for 10+ terabytes of data. Monitored resource usage and planned for scalability in an environment where computational needs and dataset size grew rapidly.

Achievements:

Created a fully automated desktop and server deployment system using Kickstart and CFengine. Within this framework, system policy and configuration changes were centralized, version controlled, and self-correcting.
Automated local caching and installation of OS patches for Linux systems with YUM.
Built and maintained a clustered genomic database designed around Clustered JDBC and PostgreSQL. The 16-node cluster improved database performance by an order of magnitude and spare CPU time was used nearly transparently for general purpose batch jobs.
Consistently completed all scheduled maintenance within announced outage window.

System Administrator/Network Technician
Sensaria/Natural Bodycare
October 2002-February 2004

Performed all network and system administration tasks for FreeBSD, Windows and Linux servers in a production environment spanning three sites. Managed MySQL databases, updated user accounts, maintained system security, wrote software in Perl and Java, coordinated backups, and provided support and training to internal and external customers.

Achievements:

Designed and deployed company's network using managed switches, Cisco routers, HSRP and VPNs
Integrated PayFuse credit card processor into company's payment pipeline using Perl.
Designed and wrote company's order processing software in Java
Maintained >99.9% uptime on all production servers
Installed network monitoring and intrusion detection to ensure network health

Unix Lab Consultant/Computer Consultant
Whitman College Department of Mathematics and Department of Technology Services
August 2000-May 2002

Provided user support and system administration in computer labs running Linux and Windows. Answered user questions and gave tutorials on Linux, Matlab, LaTeX, C++ and use of lab hardware.

Technical Skills

Software: Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Cacti, Capistrano, Cfengine, CVS, djbdns, MySQL, Memcached, Nagios, Puppet, Subversion, Unix Tools (awk, sed, etc).

Technologies: Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, ELB and CloudFront), Linux, Load balancing (LVS, BigIP, Netscaler, ELB, HAProxy).

Languages: HTML/CSS, Java, Perl, Ruby/Ruby on Rails.

Education

B.A. in Physics (minor in Chemistry)
Whitman College