Konstantin (“Kon”) Kondakov kon@kondakov.com  ☎(415) xxx-xxxx. ✉ 1016 Oakland Ave #3 , Piedmont,  CA, 94611

 

 Successfully Solving Enterprise Technology Problems and DevOps  Challenges In the Cloud

 

Positioning Enterprise for Technology Leadership:

·      30+ years of direct “hands on” Sr. Director / VP level experience in Private/Public/Tech/DevOps high traffic.

·      Sustained (15+ years) track record with production uptime in 75Tb/mo+ size traffic with 250-1000 servers.

·      10+ years of compete ownership to completion of SOC2, SOX, PCI-DSS Highest Level 1 compliance

·      Managing 7 to  25 DevOps/CloudOps engineers across globe: USA, UK, Finland, India, Australia. Very strong technically with “roll up” sleeves and “hands on” operation style.

·      Executive (VP/Sr. Director)  presence and excellent communication skills.

·      Very effective communicator to Technical Personnel, Financial  and Executive management.

·      Leading technology vision for enterprises and pragmatically solving technology (DevOps /IT / Production Operations / Compliance / Data Centers / Cloud)  problems while focusing on the big picture.

·      Developed, negotiated and managed Public (AWS, GCP, Azure) /Private Cloud/IT CAPEX/OPEX budgets.

·      Enterprise level KPIs and operations telemetry with over 3,000+ sensors

·      Led a distributed Private and Public (AWS/GCP) Cloud Operations to achieve greater than 99.99% uptime

·      Located, hired, trained, and supervised truly amazing system administrators / database engineers - database conversion project was done within several days. The previous team could not handle it over 6 months. Built a rock-solid team of those “rock star” system admins/ database engineers. Continually improved the talent and skillset of the organization with a strong sense of accountability.

·      Performed regular technology, budget and operations reviews with Engineering and Product Stakeholders.

·      Equally well managed People, Projects and Technology.

·      Transitioned the SaaS operations through a major cost reduction: A search farm of about 1,000 servers was managed just by 3 system administrators – 99.9% uptime under fully automated framework.

·      Reduced time to production rollout of lead generations campaign – from 2 weeks to 20 minutes.

·      Fully transitioned the Microsoft IT shop to GNU Linux (‘open source’): back-end and desktops.

·      Deep technical and business understanding of Site Reliability Engineering and Deployments frameworks.

 

·      Results oriented named  “I Kon Do it” by peers.

 

Professional History:

Director Cloud Operations  (2023-)

Signant Health  Blue Bell, PA  (remote) -  clinical trial medical generation company

 

Key technology position that oversees the management of Signant Health application development environment, custom-facing product hosting team, and related security and compliance activities. Directly managing 25 DevOps / CloudOps engineers across USA time zones, Finland and India. Enhancing the operations, hosting and performance of Signant’s environment, supporting over 1,000 internal developers and hundreds of customers. “Automate first” and “Automate all” philosophy.

Key technologies: Large ( 60+ AWS / Azure accounts) cloud deployment, Atlassian: BitBucket, Jira, Confluence, Linux, MS Application stack, Agile practices

 

Director DevOps  (2015-2020),   Senior Director / Global Infrastructure (2020-2023)

IDG Communications (2015-2020), Foundry (2020-2023)  an IDG company.  San Francisco, CA  (March 2020 Present) -  major technology publisher

Challenges:

o   Tons of technical debt and legacy undocumented applications

o   Hybrid cloud (VMware VCenter, AWS, GCP) challenges and unclear path for colo migration – about 500 VMs

o   Highly decentralized  engineering organization (SF, Boston, Australia, Germany,  Bangalore,  UK, etc)

o   Multiple AWS accounts without any technical and financial optimization.

Selected Achievements:

•   Ownership  of executive cadence, operational processes  and support management of world wide GCP, Amazon, 100 Tb/mo Data Centers that support IDG media properties (about 1000 domains) processing over 75Tb/mo. traffic.

·       Unified multiple AWS Accounts into a highly visible AWS IDG Organizations with best practices for cost savings (reservations, heavy use of spot-instances and cloud functions, savings plans, etc.)

·       Unified highly decentralized  world wide DevOps organizations for true 24x7 support providing 99.99% of uptime

·       Led  IaaS operations, Big Data processing, telemetry , CI/CD and product strategy for IDG’s Ansible Enterprise initiative: conversion from Puppet, operationalized continuous deployment: Kickstart /  - upscaled to Ansible Tower (AWX), variety Kubernetes POC (AWS ECS/ECR, AWS EKS, AWS Kops, GCE)

·       Managed the DevOps / Site Reliability team, DevOps contractors and DB contractors  - supporting 100 Tb/mo web traffic.

·       Responsible for over 3,000 telemetry sensors (Nagios, ELK, New Relic, Ganglia, etc)

·       Responsible for Global Security footprint (Wiz pen testing, ClamAV, Maldet). patching and security policies

·       Reported directly to Global CIO (Chief Information Officer)

 

Manager  DevOps

BabyCenter, LLC (a Johnson & Johnson company).  San Francisco, CA  (July 2014 – July 2015) -  #1 parenting and pregnancy resource. www.babycenter.com

Challenges:

o   Missing Ganglia monitoring / Lack of electronic Kanban task board

o   AWS unclear path for Raging Wire data center migration

 

Selected Achievements:

·       Launched AWS site  in restricted AWS China region: www.babycenter.cn

·       Implemented Ganglia monitoring using standard Chef 10 / 11 framework , including encrypted data bags

·       Created and owned Jira / Confluence digital Kanban task monitoring for Continuous Deployment

·       Created a few AWS tools: AWS CloudSearch, CloudFormation, CloudFront for static content serving, EC2/S3

 

Sr. Director IT / Production Operations

Certain, Inc.  San Francisco, CA  (July 2011 – July 2014) -  Global Event Management company (www.certain.com)                                                            

Challenges:

o   Old legacy on premise installed software has to be transitioned to SaaS platform

o   Completely missing monitoring, lack of continuous deployments, “buggy” releases

o   No DevOps  culture: finger pointing between development and operations\

o   Data center move is stalled for over 18 months

o   IT team did not exist: previous IT director has quit the job 2 months prior to PCI audit.

o   No policies and repeatable procedures /Nothing is automated – most configurations are different

o   A lot of  IT unplanned work (“firefighting”)

 

Selected Achievements:

·       Created global DevOps structure (US, UK, Australia) maintaining 99.5% SLA uptime

·       Created state of the art monitoring  using open source tools (Nagios, Ganglia ) and commercial packages (AlertSite)

·       Turned Jira  / Bamboo  /Confluence /Fisheye / SVN into fully functioning continuous integration suite

·       Created per metrics for DevOps team , hired and mentored (Levels SAGE III and IV) system administrators

·       Main technical authority  on PCI Level 1 (highest level) compliance

·       Migrated legacy Windows application to the Savvis hosted  SAAS solution

·       Windows Azure / Amazon AWS auto-scaling: EC2, VPC, RDS, CloudFormation - proof of concept

 

Director of Network Operations

LookSmart.  San Francisco, CA  (Dec 2010 – July 2011) -  One of  the largest web search  engines (www.looksmart.com)                 

 

Challenges:

o   The company was in desperate restructuring mode after data center move, traffic aggregation and financial challenges

o   Keeping all lights on ( processing up to 170 million requests per hour by the large server farm of about 1,000 servers) while company has reduced staff from 62 to 35 people and IT operations team was reduced from 7 to 4 people.

o   Overheating load balancer Big IP F5 3600 replaced with F5 8900 without traffic loss/ Old Edge firewalls as well

o   PCI and SOX audits

 

Selected Achievements:

·       Hired and transitioned the new team of system administrators

·       Continued seamless search operations with 50% staff reduction

·       Migrated high volume load balancers and edge routers : Citrix-> F5 , Cisco VXR->ASR

·       Brought NetApp /Hitachi SAN storage under full support and migrated 20 Tb of data

 

Earlier Career – 1986-2006

 

Director IT Operations

Banks.com.  San Francisco, CA  (April 2007 –Nov 2010) -  Web search platform  (www.banks.com / www.intersearch.com)               

 

Director of  Operations

Aligo Wireless .  San Francisco, CA  (March 2006  – December 2006) - Software maker for wireless devices (The Oregon based company Corrigo has acquired Aligo in Dec 2006  - http://www.corrigo.com/about/news/pressreleases/template_ektid1340.aspx)

 

Director of IT

Tactical TeleSolutions.  San Francisco, CA  (July 1997 – March 2006) -  B2B Lead Generation / B2B Telemarketing    

 

Network Manager/EDI Administrator

Circa, Inc.  San Francisco, CA  (September 1996  –July 1997 ) -  Design and manufacturing of leather goods

                 

IT Manager

OLMA Investment.  Moscow, Russia  (Sept 1995 –Sept 1996) -  Major Russian investment bank

                 

Software Engineer

Data Rescue Services.  San Francisco, CA  (Jan 1992 – Aug 1995) - Data recovery software company

 

Software Engineer

State University of Management.  Moscow, Russia (Sept 1989 – Jan 1992)  -Leading Russian school of  MBA programs

 

Education and Core Technologies:

Master of Science, Computer Information Systems  (diploma Cum Laude)    1995

State Academy of Management, Moscow, Russia

Computer Science                                                                               1992-1993                                                          

USF, San Francisco, CA (foreign exchange student)

 

Core technologies:

·       Cloud environments: private VM VCenter, public AWS (since 2008), GCE (since 2016) , Azure (since 2017)

·       OS:  Microsoft – all versions released between 1988-2019, Mac, Cisco IOS, RedHat  / Fedora/ CentOS / Debian/Gentoo GNU Linux

·       Continuous Deployment systems: Jira, Bamboo, Confluence, Cfengine, Jenkins, git, svn, vcs

·       Orchestration tools: Cfengine (2.x), Puppet (3.x), Chef (10x, 11x), Ansible (1.x. 2x), Ansible Tower (2.x), AWX Tower

·       Containers: Docker, ECS/ECR, Kubernetes orchestration (KOPS, EKS, ECS) , GKE

·       Scripts /Languages: bash, csh,  modified Perl/PHP scripts

·       Messaging systems:  Sendmail, PostFix, Qmail, MS Exchange, CommuniGate Pro, PostOffice

·       Databases: MS SQL,. MySQL, Informix DB, PostgreSQL

·       Infrastructure/Client-Server Applications: Active Directory,  Kerberos., Winbind,  VMware Server  /Esxi,   Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project Server, Symantec /  Veritas Backup Exec, Eclipse, MS Certificate Authority

·       Web Technologies: Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, Nginx, PKI for VeriSign / Middle tier Tomcat, Web Logic

·       Monitoring/Reporting Applications:, Nagios, Ganglia, Cacti, ELK,  Graphana, SiteScope, MRTG, Awstats, Webalizer

·       Business Applications: BMC Control-M Enterprise, E*Trade Equity Edge, Scriptor, WordPress, OpenX, OpenAds, PHPlist

·    Networking: VLAN, Routing Protocols, TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, LDAP, IMAP, POP3,  OpenVPN, SNMP, SMTP, NFS, SSH, dSSH

 

Publications

·       System Administrator magazine (www.samag.ru, www.samag-usa.com)

Public Speaker / Consultant

·       Active and permanent member of consulting groups on technology  and product reviews: Sagetap.io, GLG, Nichols Research, Greenberg Studios, Fleishman Research, etc / Consulting a few high-traffic companies: Gap, Onriva, RunTimeDesign Automation, etc.

US CITIZEN