Curriculum Vitae

Daniel Schaaff

Professional Summary

Proven DevOps leader looking to leave his mark on the world through technology and relationships.

Professional Experience

Lead DevOps Engineer, Cordial - San Diego, CA - February 2019 to Present

Lead System Operations Engineer, Verve - Carlsbad, CA - December 2018 to February 2019

Worked to improve software delivery velocity, pay down technical debt, and align operations with product priorities.

• Migrated Clojure and Ruby based servers into Docker orchestrated by AWS ECS
• Utilized lambda to seamlessly autoscale ECS cluster instances in and out as containers scale in and out
• Implemented infrastructure as code using Terraform, replacing a mix of Puppet code, CloudFormation, and standalone scripts giving a single view into the infrastructure
• Designed and built robust continuous delivery pipelines for Clojure, Java Springboot, Golang, React and Rails based microservices, simplifying the path to production
• Modernized the Jenkins infrastructure with pipelines, web hooks, and AWS spot fleet based build agents
• Empowered developers to own their software deployments, reducing reliance on tickets with the ops team
• Built a continuous integration environment, helping developers get early feedback on code changes
• Designed and built a unified logging pipeline with Fluentd, s3, Elasticsearch, and Elastalert
• Used Docker to run scaleable integration tests in isolated environments within software delivery pipelines
• Greatly reduced AWS costs through a mixture of workload rightsizing, spot instance utilization, resource cleanup, and autoscaling
• Developed custom monitoring for a variety of resources, including database migrations and s3 objects
• Greatly improved observability through metrics, application performance monitoring, and centralized logging leading to the resolution of a number of long standing bugs
• Worked directly with software engineering teams to align ops priorities with product priorities
• Designed and deployed on call rotation and incident post mortem processes

Senior DevOps Engineer, Gimbal - San Diego, CA - May 2017 to December 2017

Worked to modernize the Gimbal build and delivery pipeline to increase velocity, reliability, and efficiency.

• Completed migration of Java microservices to Docker and ECS
• Moved from monolithic, all or nothing, deployment methodology to delivering each service independently as needed
• Cut down release and deploy cycle from a full day to under an hour greatly, increasing the speed and simplicity of delivering Gimbal applications
• Redesigned a streamlined CI/CD infrastructure utilizing Jenkins pipelines, Jenkins shared libraries, and dynamic EC2 build slaves leading to lower EC2 costs and faster build/test feedback cycles
• Implemented continuous delivery pipeline for Java and Rails projects with automatic delivery to development and staging environments based on git tags/branches with manual promotion to production environments
• Moved team from configuring AWS manually via the console to terraform code, leading to increased consistency between environments, fewer configuration errors, simple rollback plans, and clear audit trails
• Redesigned Chef cookbook management to utilize independent git repos, tagged releases, integration tests, and auto promotion to AWS OpsWorks stacks
• Modified Gimbal Manager Ruby on Rails application to accept dynamic configuration by environment variables and run in a portable Docker environment
• Automated delivery of iOS SDK releases to Cocoapods.
• Moved monitoring from basic Cloudwatch integrations to in-depth metric collection and reporting with Datadog
• Implemented a highly resilient data pipeline based on Fluentd and Elasticsearch
• Worked directly with developers to ensure infrastructure and application development operated in a lock-step manner while delivering on the product vision

DevOps and IT Operations Manager, KnuEdge - San Diego, CA - September 2014 to May 2017

Led internal IT from a cost centered, reactive orientation to a proactive role in supporting, developing, and deploying KnuEdge products and technologies.

• Led network design and buildout of two remote offices in under three months
• Led move of San Diego office and datacenter to a new location with minimal downtime and business interruption
• Led infrastructure as code initiative bringing faster change, better documentation, reusable components, and clear audit trails
• Automated the deployment of Linux and Windows across bare metal, VMWare, and AWS
• Championed culture of openness, sharing, and empathy while increasing collaboration across the company through knowledge wikis, pull requests, ChatOps, knowledge shares and an open first philosophy
• Implemented Puppet for configuration management across Linux, macOS, and Windows
• Developed both public and private Puppet modules for managing/deploying applications and services
• Designed and implemented testing pipeline for Puppet code utilizing RSpec, Bamboo, and Travis reducing faults and increasing confidence in deployments
• Automated migration from Puppet 3 to new Puppet 4 master with no interruption to services
• Developed CI pipeline for managing macOS software utilizing Munki, AutoPKG, Reposado, and Bamboo ensuring vulnerabilities were patched quickly and software remained up to date
• Designed and deployed central logging infrastructure using syslog-ng, Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana
• Deployed and managed AWS infrastructure using Terraform
• Utilized and supported LXC and Docker containers both for production services and development workflows

Network Administrator, Choose Chicago - Chicago, IL - April 2013 to September 2013

Led key initiatives as Network Administrator at Choose Chicago improving network performance, reliability, and security while providing world class support to end users.

• Implemented VLANs in a multi vendor environment isolating end user and backend server traffic into separate broadcast domains, reducing broadcast traffic in the network core by 50%
• Implemented Cisco Gateway Load Balancing Protocol providing a fully redundant default gateway to clients and servers
• Reconfigured Spanning Tree Protocol on all switches to elect the core network switch as the root bridge and optimize traffic paths
• Designed and implemented an access control list safely securing the guest WiFi VLAN
• Installed and configured SharePoint 2013 and Office Web Apps Server farms
• Designed and configured a SharePoint workflow to automate the approval process for purchasing and tracking airline tickets company wide
• Migrated web applications from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 and setup external access via HTTPS
• Migrated the Choose Chicago main office LAN to a new IP addressing scheme to address a shortage of free addresses and reconfigured routing company wide
• Installed, configured, and deployed Windows update and deployment services on the server 2012 platform to simplify the management of client machines
• Maintained a highly virtualized environment with VMware ESXi and NexSan SAN storage appliances
• Maintained WAN and LAN networks across 3 office locations
• Performed the day to day operation and maintenance of Active Directory, Exchange 2010, and other key Windows servers

Education and Certifications

Most recent certifications available on Credly

• Bachelors of Science in Network Communications Management - DeVry University
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
• Puppet Certified Professional
• CCNA