Download PDF

Summary

CK is a seasoned engineering leader with 15+ years of experience driving infrastructure strategy, maturing engineering organizations, and building/running big stuff; and his expertise spans systems/cloud architecture, SRE/InfraOps, AI/ML, robotics, and extremely high throughput big data systems, and he has led transformations of dozens of firms, large and small. Among his greater technical accomplishments are the architecting of the transportation telemetry and compliance systems across Amazon's global enterprise, building the multi-exabyte memory snapshotting for supercompute systems across all of the national labs, developing the storage for the Vatican's email systems and the vatican archives, and he has spent the last few years proudly building and mentoring the engineering organization of the fastest-growing robotics company in the world. CK has a proven track record in leading high-performing teams and his coworkers look to him for both technical clarity and human understanding. CK is an proactive and thorough communicator, with a talent for making the opaque and technical understandable by all. He has been recognized by colleagues for using that talent to navigate complex organizational challenges by bringing together stakeholders, aligning objectives, and removing obstacles to success.

Education

Sep 2003Jun 2007

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

Bachelor of Arts | Sociology

Professional History

Graymatter Robotics
Nov 2022Present

Staff Engineer

  • Led and mentored cross-functional engineering teams, driving key organizational initiatives.
  • Automated AWS-native deployments using K8s and a Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline, significantly accelerating product delivery and engineering productivity.
  • Established and standardized engineering processes, policies, and support frameworks, laying the foundation for sustainable, high-performance organizational growth.
  • Championed diversity and inclusion by actively seeking candidates from underrepresented groups.
  • Developed machine-learning-driven robot vision software and the APIs for controlling those functions.
  • Acted as a key liaison between engineering and customer-facing teams, translating complex technical requirements into actionable solutions that prioritized customer success.
  • Modernized legacy infrastructure and codebases, migrating to scalable, cloud-native architectures that reduced operational costs, increased system agility, and minimized technical debt.
Amazon Web Services
Jul 2017 OCT 2022

Cloud Infrastructure Architect (L6)

  • Designed and deployed a unified telemetry, compliance, and risk management platform for Amazon.com’s global transportation and delivery services, integrating logistics, HR, and legal systems to enable seamless, enterprise-wide governance and increase the visibility and actionability of TRC data.
  • Led large-scale cloud migrations for Fortune 500 clients, architecting secure AWS solutions that accelerated customer ROI, enhanced operational agility, and secured multimillion-dollar long-term AWS contracts.
  • Served as the technical lead and trusted advisor for enterprise clients, bridging AWS ProServe and customer teams to deliver end-to-end cloud solutions on-site across the US.
  • Partnered with customers and fostered their relationships within AWS, driving revenue through engagement.
  • Modernized proprietary and legacy systems by architecting cloud-native solutions, driving platform adoption by easing the inclusion of existing technologies.
  • Co-developed and standardized AWS CloudFormation-to-Terraform migration patterns, ensuring seamless infrastructure-as-code adoption with full functional parity.
  • Provided actionable product feedback to AWS engineering teams (S3, Redshift) based ProServe engagement experiences, driving feature improvements and solutions for end-users.
  • Served as practice manager and technical mentor for teams of architects working in engagements across the country.
Scality
May 2012Jul 2017

Sr. Systems Reliability Engineer

  • Engineered novel infrastructure-replication frameworks using VMware vSphere, SaltStack, Python, Puppet and a Scality's existing monitoring tools, reducing support issue resolution time by 65% and significantly improving service reliability for many customers.
  • Developed high-performance tools for systems analysis, data integrity validation, recovery automation, and performance optimization using Python, C++, C, and a whole --lot-- of shell scripting.
  • Directed IT and identity infrastructure operations, implementing enterprise-grade disaster recovery, asset management, and implemented robust identity management systems and zero-trust security to enhance operational soundness.
  • Architected and delivered distributed, exabyte-scale storage solutions for enterprise clients in highly diverse sectors, including national space agencies, research institutions, massive enterprise organizations, small firms, and governments, optimizing to widely-variant bleeding-edge requirements.
  • Designed metadata management and supervisory control systems for exascale storage (Ring) deployments in both GCP and AWS cloud environments, c4reating the first hybrid infrasructure for Scality's products.
  • Led a global team of 8 Systems Support and Customer Solutions Engineering groups, achieving a 20% increase in surveyed customer satisfaction during his tenure and driving substantial cost-savings.
Cloudmark
Jun 2009May 2012

Sr. Linux Systems Engineer

  • Maintained and optimized spam filtration infrastructure for leading global telecoms and ISPs, ensuring SLA compliance in systems processing vast amounts of input data.
  • Automated data center and virtual infrastructure deployments by implementing Puppet and developing custom Ruby/Python testing frameworks in a Git-driven CI/CD pipeline, reducing production incidents and boosting developer velocity.
  • Directed mission-critical border network hardware replacements with zero downtime in collaboration with major vendors.
  • Architected centralized monitoring and alerting platforms, utilizing 38,000+ tests to comprehensively monitor and secure systems.
  • Pioneered the company’s cloud transformations, integrating AWS SQS into software offerings.
  • Designed and maintained distributed storage solutions leveraging a variety of tehcnologies (GlusterFS, HDFS, Lustre, and ZFS, NetApp, and SAN fabrics).

SkillS, Stacks, AWS Services, AND STANDARDS

Interdisciplinary Communication, Conflict Resolution, Distributed Systems Architecture, Performance Engineering, Data Engineering, Capacity Planning, Systems Architecture, Serverless Architecture (AWS Lambda), Orchestration and Containerization Ops, Application Modernization, Infrastructure Migration, DevOps, Japanese, Penetration Testing, InfoSec Auditing, Supply Chain Management, Technical Writing, Enterprise Project Management, AI/ML Systems Design, Agile Development, Mentorship, Personnel Management, Leadership, Auditing, Engineering Management, Startup Development, Business Administration, Consulting, Cat-Dadding

C, C++, Qt, Rust, Cuda, Python, Ruby, Bash, Perl, TCL, CloudFormation, PHP, Javascript, Java, Go, Ada/Spark, Zig, Swift, Haskell, Typescript, Pinescript, GraphQL, LLMQL, Lua, Forth, R, *SQL (among others) 

Azure, GCP, AWS, Oracle Cloud, IBM MCMP, ServiceNow, Apache Hadoop, Salesforce, Proxmox, Okta, Active Directory, vmWare, Apache Cassandra, Databricks, Grafana, Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket), Gitlab, Github, Kubernetes, Docker, NewRelic, KVM/qemu, Cloudera, Prometheus.io, Snowflake, Redis, Apache Kafka, MacOS, Linux, Windows Server, *BSD, Cuda, PyTorch, Openstack, Commvault, IBM MQ, MinIO, Redis, MongoDB, Scality Ring, Apache Ignite/Spark, Podman, Tensorflow, MATLAB, Prism, OpenHPC, Databricks, Google Anthos, Singularity, ISTIO, Consul, Kubevirt, GitOps, Cloudera, OpenMP, podman, LxC, Packer, Terraform Cloud, CircleCI, Datadog, Puppet, Chef, Saltstack, Ansible, Vagrant, Ceph

EC2, S3, S3 Glacier, ECS, EKS, RDS, Aurora, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, EFS, EBS, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, ControlTower, Lambda, CloudFormation, IAM, WAF, VPN, Elastic Beanstalk, SQS, Fargate, Storage Gateway, API Gateway, Service Catalog, Data Pipeline, CodeCommit, Redshift, Kinesis, Kinesis Firehose, Data Firehose, Data Lake, LightSail, Neptune, CloudFront, Direct Connect, EMR, Route 53, SageMaker, Lex, Glue, KMS, ElasticCache, Step Functions, ECR, SNS, API Gateway, DataSync, AMS, RoboMaker, Elastic Transcoder, Athena, Shield, Cost Explorer, EventBridge, Athena, Cognito, Aurora DSQL, Cloud Directory, Cloud Search, CodeCatalyst, Detective, Comprehend, DataZone, Data Lifecycle Manager, Forecast, FSx, GuardDuty, Inspector, Fraud Detector, MQ, MemoryDB, QuickSight, SES, SWF, Parallel Computing Service, Backup

SOC2, PCI DSS, GDPR, FedRamp, ISO/IEC 27001, NIST 800-171, AWS Well-Architected, US EAR, POSIX