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As part of the platform team at Apptio and IBM, I assisted in maintaining 4 9s of reliability for the Apptio family of Saas products which included customer data ingest and processing. The platform encompassed most of the resources consumed by services, including networking, storage, compute, monitoring, customer AuthN, and patching. My primary focus was the networking aspects of the platform, architecting and managing the Global Transit Network which securely connected 3 cloud providers, 7+ regions, and over 100 accounts. Over 4 years of managing the network there were less than 4 outages, each less than 15 minutes.
I graduated Oregon State University with a BS in Computer Science with a focus on security.
While in school, I worked Kannact as an IT specialist where I setup and managed employee computer resources, including office network, employee laptops, and active directory.
I worked at Apptio for 5 years, where I helped managed our platform security first with physical data centers and later AWS, GCP, Azure and more. Through that entire time I performed security and analysis operations, including designing, maintaining, and replacing pieces of infrastructure. A distinct example is the Pinfederate deployment, which managed product catalog authentication against internal and customer identity stores, which I took from a legacy “testing” deployment to a fully CI/CD managed, redundant-region deployment with monitoring, dashboards, and documentation.
In my 2 years at IBM I continued these duties, with additional exploration into mainframe security.
Beyond platform level experience, I also have extension software engineering skills across a variety of languages. I have knowledge and experience with of both high-level application security and core cryptography primitives. I apply the red team mindset to all my work and strive to implement solutions that consider security from the beginning.
Thank you for the consideration!
Buzzwords of experience: terraform/terragrunt, kubernetes, virtualization, cloud networking, gitops, Cisco/forti*
My name is Brendan Byers, and I am applying for the Senior Software Engineer - NAAS position. I live in Seattle, and have been working as a Site Reliability Engineer at Apptio (Now IBM) for over 4 years. My responsabilities have been focused on platform networking, cluster management and core service support. I am applying to Cloudflare because I have always admired it’s purpose, and want to apply my networking skills to a new challenge.
At Apptio I am currently in charge of our internal networks, which handles internal and egress traffic across our 7 regions. Before that, we had a presence in 5 datacenters, where I performed physical and virtual administrative tasks on both servers and networking equipment. When we decommissioned our DCs, I migrated our existing network architecture to the cloud, with the ability to span multiple cloud providers and regions.
Before Apptio, I worked with databases as a developer during my time at Open Dental, where I interacted primarily with MySQL using C#. I’ve gained more DB administrative skills at Apptio, where I help manage thousands of customer databases, both at the service and platform level primarily consisting of Postgres and MongoDB.
Outside of work, my main hobbies include retro Gameboy modding, my homelab, and ,usic. Lately I’ve been working on creating my own Gameboy cartridges, creating both the hardware and software for a ROM cart. My goal is to finish the hardware then create a modern Gameboy be played on real hardware. In my homelab, I am in the process of expanding across mutliple node-regions, and continually adding additional public and private services to use, like bookmarking and task automation.
My responsibilities mainly focus on cloud networking, cluster management and core service support. I am applying for a new challenge and to invest my time in something I am passionate about.
Before Apptio, I worked with databases as a developer during my time at Open Dental, where I interacted primarily with MySQL using C#. I’ve gained more DB administrative skills at Apptio, where I help manage thousands of customer databases, both at the service and platform level primarily consisting of Postgres and MongoDB. I also manage a number of service databases as part of my personal homelab.
While at Apptio I managed our physical datacenter presence, where I visited our regional DCs and performed administrative tasks on both servers and networking equipment. When we decommissioned our DCs, I also assisted in migrating existing services to the cloud without interruption, in addition to the physical shutdown and cleanup.
I currently work as an SRE L7 on the Platform Engineering team. I help manage the Kubernetes clusters the rest of the service teams in the org utilize. I also am the head network engineer for our commercial and gov environments, enabling cross region, account, and cloud provider communication.
At my current position I work with the platform team, with a primary focus on the commercial network underlying the service platform. The most user-facing system I have dealt with is our SSO deployment, which manages the authentication and authorization for all customers. Because it is integral to every single customer’s experience, it was important to design it in such a way to provide global reliability and made it resistant to interruptions, including maintenance or outages. I successfully architected the new system, and migrated customers from the existing solution to the new system without any down time.
At my previous position, I worked as a developer for Open Dental, and frequently worked on aspects of the program that customers directly interacted with, including the insurance code and billing system, User-facing GUI and authentication. My biggest user-facing feature was the tooth visualization code, where I combined disparate graphics code modules into one, and drastically improved responsiveness using clean data structures and simple algorithms.
I currently manage the core production network for Apptio, which is based in 7 different regions across multiple cloud providers, servicing thousands of business customers daily. Along with the core network, I also help manage the platform utilized by the rest of the company. We have multiple Kubernetes clusters in each region, some fully managed and some on EKS. As part of the team originally tasked with moving platform from managed DCs to managed cloud providers, I worked on all aspects of our platform including networking, cluster deployment and upgrades and monitoring. It is all managed through infrastructure as code, so I am comfortable with fully deploying service stacks via terraform.
I worked as an SRE II platform engineer, part of the “Automation and Finops” group of products. While there I worked on many high-impact projects, including:
I’m highly capable with Kubernetes as well as a variety of programming languages such as Golang, Python, and C, and have experience in general development operations and infrastructure.
