Sean Kamath

Redwood City, CA 94061 • 503-804-8683 • kamath@mac.com

Summary

Ten years of experience in a high-pressure, deadline-driven, creative environment, engineering critical solutions while supervising a team of System Engineers, managing server, desktop and renderfarm OSes, tools, and application infrastructure.

Key Accomplishments

Designed and instantiated the system architecture for a brand-new studio in Bangalore, India.

Spearheaded the Studio's customization and successful adoption of RHEL5 and RHEL6.

Collaborated with Red Hat Engineering to debug and solve OOM-Killer and malloc issues with in-house applications; this fix resulted in a significant decrease in lost machine time.

Technical Proficiencies

Professional Experience

PDI/DreamWorks, Redwood City, CA        2006 - Present

Principal Engineer, User Generated Content (UGC) Team        July 2014 – Present

• Managed AWS IAM roles and permissions, S3 storage access, EC2 instances and OpsWorks stacks for UGC team (create.dreamworks.com and its ancillary activities).
• Created Jenkins jobs to manage and deploy code from git repository to AWS, and documented the entire workflow (requiring Windows-based git and GitHub).
• Debugged Program Manager’s changes to Ruby on Rails website, explained how to avoid errors, and documented a safer process for making changes.
• Supplied third party developers with delivery pipelines, collaborated on deployment of their code to our sites (Linux based).
• Wrote against JIRA API to identify improperly handled tickets and pull out stats on time-spent against projects, for the Supervisors of the Systems, Network, Storage, and DataCenter teams.
• Queried Oracle databases (both raw SQL and via scripts).
• Started conversion of support scripts from Perl to Go, focusing on Google APIs.
• Initial exploration of OpenShift/Docker/Swarm for in-house use (until switch to UGC).
• Queried ElasticSearch looking for patterns/statistics from DataGres data from Systems.

System Architect/Supervisor, Systems Engineering Team        May 2006 – July 2014

Supervised a team of Senior System Administrators (Windows and Linux), and acted as an ambassador to other groups (e.g. Studio Production meetings, debugging Python for R&D, etc.). As Team Technical Lead, guided Senior System Administrators in application choice and implementation, finding solutions for working around problems, and setting direction for the team.

• Won an internal Technical Achievement Award for deploying Apache TrafficServer as a caching layer in our NextGen Rendering infrastructure.
• Migrated the Studio from in-house IMAP/SMTP/Exchange to Google Apps for Business, including hands-on administration (as part of the Google Admin team).
• Migrated the Studio from LSF to MRG (Condor) (as the Supervisor of the HPC Cluster team).
• Oversaw Project-based budgeting and yearly expenditures.
• Developed a ticket management process in JIRA for both ad-hoc and project work based on Agile methods (with weekly scrums and time reporting), adopted by the larger group.
• Directed all technical aspects of team’s projects (moving from in-house configuration management to Puppet & Chef, Altiris to SCCM, GroundWork/Nagios to Zenoss, etc.).
• Managed the relocation of a major data center to a new facility with minimal downtime.
• Moved the team from RCS/CVS to SVN, then to git for source code control.
• Wrote automation scripts to pull time-tracking data out of a cloud-based app using JSON (Cube).
• Technical liaison for Red Hat, HP, NVidia, Intel and other strategic partners, including debugging issues with released and unreleased products.
• Wrote numerous scripts and programs in C/Perl/Shell, including an RPC-level ‘du’ program (making direct NFSv3 calls), Linux Daemons, utilities and other automation-centric tools.
• Migrated the non-Windows VM infrastructure from VMware to Red Hat RHEV-M.
• Directly maintained infrastructure services (SMTP (Sendmail), LDAP, DNS, DHCP, etc.).
• Created processes and procedures for deployment of hardware with a working, integrated OS.
• Created a “nuke” kickstart to erase hard drives and log the process in accordance with our Data Loss Prevention policies.

Geekoids.com, LLC, Tigard, OR        2000 - 2006

Infrastructure Engineer/Co-Founder (divested in 2006)

Provided a stable and secure blend of Sun and Intel hardware running Linux, Solaris and OpenBSD, designed and implemented all infrastructure (OpenBSD Firewalls, Solaris Web, DNS NFS, LDAP, SMTP, POP/IMAP servers).

Xerox Corporation, Wilsonville, OR        2000 - 2004

Team/Technical Lead/Supervisor, Xerox Office Group

Led a team of 7-9 people supporting the entire Color Printer Engineering Department (and manufacturing, marketing, etc.), including groups in El Segundo, CA; Webster, NY; and Welwyn Garden City, England.  Acted as Team Technical Lead, Sr. System Architect, and Supervisor.

• Worked with Facilities to completely replace computer room raised floor due to zinc whiskers contamination, with minimal downtime.
• Wrote over 2000 lines of Perl code used to update patches on Solaris systems, as well as a suite of tools to select packages used by Solaris JumpStart.
• Successfully integrated Tektronix engineering division computer systems with Xerox after acquisition (providing support for El Segundo based team).
• Responsible for all aspects of a $1.4M budget and performance reviews for employees.

Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR        1989-2000

Team/Technical Lead/Supervisor, Color Printing and Imaging Division        1996-2000

Led a team (ranging from 4-12 people) supporting the Engineering Department (all computer resources, including Oracle DBAs), and several manufacturing and marketing groups.

Senior System Administrator, Color Printing and Imaging Division        1989-1996

• Grew environment from one person supporting 132 users to six people supporting over 1000.
• Wrote a complete user management framework in Perl for NIS (several thousand lines of Perl).

Reed College, Portland, OR        1986-1989

Programmer/Junior SysAdmin, Academic Software Development Laboratory        1988-1989

Technical Assistant, Computer Maintenance Annex        1985-1987

Terminal Watcher        1986-1987

Context Corporation, Beaverton, OR        1988

Software Engineer (intern), Project Sparrow

Miscellaneous

Presented Invited Talks at USENIX LISA (2008, 2010), Linux Kernel Developers Summit (2008).

Member of the USENIX LISA Program Committee (2008).

Volunteered numerous hours at Hewitt Homeschooling, helping with their IT needs (ASPX, SQL*Server, Visual Basic, and Bitbucket).

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Physics, Reed College, Portland, OR (August 1984 - May 1989)

Additional Training: Numerous USENIX/LISA Conferences and Tutorials, Vendor Training (Puppet, Chef, JBOSS, Veritas)