Where I frequent online

JR Quick Facts

He goes by JR @ Work
Father of 2 + 1 very furry Husky Son
Seasoned DevOps Engineer turned Business Leader
Proud of his people-first mentality
Experienced Manager & Team Leader
HUGE Security Nut
Hacking, app security, reverse engineering
Recreational Interests: Camping, desert racing, LEGOs

Recent Accomplishments

As a Sr Manager / Director (2019 - Present)

Moving into a Director position at Onica allowed me to interface with partners like AWS and build relationships with leaders in the industry. Attended events such as re:Invent to network with others allowing me to be a representative of the Onica brand. I would meet potential customers at our booth to discuss the product and help support customers with their needs.

Team Lead Monthly Review - Monthly reporting to Internal Engineering leadership of team and customer status. Escalations, project challenges, any negative sentiment reported to leadership to get ahead of any customer challenges.
Better resource alignment - Enhanced resource planning and prioritization process for discovery, design, implementation, and future improvements for our customers. A proper backlog and milestone breakdown were created for each customer.
Engineer Onboarding Program - Pioneered the first technical onboarding program at Onica as part of our managed services team. Empowering engineers to start delivering using our hand-picked DevOps toolset. This allowed engineers to be effective by their second week at delivering usable artifacts for our DevOps managed customers.
Collections of reuseable artifacts - Developed collections of reusable artifacts to reduce the lead time of developed modules. Repositories of Terraform and cloud formation resources to empower DevOps engineers to deliver faster and more consistently. As time goes on our resources are hardened over time to adhere to security or compliance requirements.

It is not the artifact itself that is valuable, but more the culture to constantly improve, transform, and leverage eachothers wins and losses in a code centric way.

Team Growth / Organization

Global Team Expansion - Expanded our team across the globe through hires and acquisitions. Involved with talent acquisition team to improve the hiring and technical validation of new employees. Created a process and triggers for team split and hiring. Identified communication requirements and processes for ensuring a smooth transition to new team leads and engineers performing the delivery.

Career Development - Helped define career progression to guide engineers through their career journey. Aligning engineers to the work that they felt valued for as well as being driven passionately allows them to flourish in the best ways possible for the business. A happy and motivated engineer will be far more valuable than a half worker collecting a check.

Resource management POC - Created POC for resource management across teams later adopted by the company as a whole to define the gold standard of resource management and alignment for future teams. This tool allowed us to align our teams of various skillsets with customer projects that would require the depth and breadth of expertise the cloud/consultation requires.

Later on, expanded this program with the expanse of Rackspace to define a learning pathway to up-skill needed workforce through a 90 day period. Defined objectives and outcomes are needed to ensure the engineers exhibit the proper behaviors and skills necessary to be effective on the job.

As a Lead Cloud Architect 2017 - 2019

Awards

2017 Employee of the Year, Sturdy Networks
2019 Shaping How the World Innovates, Onica

Application Onboarding Standardization - Developed a standardization of onboarding and monitoring processes allowing any DevOps engineer who receives the monitors to be effective and efficient in their recovery. Runbooks and detailed documentation were created as a result of these efforts. This consistent process allowed us to scale to 50 engineers and 6+ teams and maintain the same excellence in delivery.

Enterprise and Strategic customers - Led a team of individuals supporting 10+ customers as well as multiple strategic enterprise customers as the primary Architect. Supported customers with over 9k VMs in the cloud and developed automations to streamline the time it took to support more applications without adding more headcount. Empowered many customers along their journey to adopting the cloud or maximizing its potential for dev teams.

Customer Facing Engineering Contact - Acted as a product owner for customers, translating their business goals/objectives to specific outcomes defined in various Jira project backlogs. Met with customers every week to report status and blockers. Met monthly with customers on higher-level milestones and priority alignments as well as strategize for the future.

Won multiple company awards - During the first few years at our company, I have won multiple awards from “Employee of the Year”, as well as the “Shaping how the world innovates” award from our company. While these are not industry-recognized awards, being recognized by the company is, in my opinion, a greater feat.