Chris Lea

Résumé

For recruiters: Thank you for your interest, but I am not looking for new opportunities at this time.

Contact Information

Chris Lea
Phoenix, AZ

Email me

https://about.me/chrislea
https://github.com/chrislea
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislealinkedin
https://twitter.com/chrislea

Statement

I am a veteran solutions and systems architect, with 20 years of experience delivering Internet products and services at scale. My technical work for the last several years has been very DevOps focused, with a strong concentration in implementing solutions with Amazon Web Services. I am currently a Principal Engineer at Marqeta in the Engineering Fundamentals Group.

My breadth of experience makes me very well suited to assimilating many varied requirements from different business units into cohesive engineering objectives, and then prioritizing those objectives for the engineers to implement.

Technical Skill Set

DevOps

  • Extensive AWS experience
  • Distributed systems architecture
  • Infrastructure-as-Code Tooling and Design, principally with Terraform
  • Container technologies including Kubernetes, Docker, Podman, EKS, and ECS
  • Various automation tools including AWS CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef and Puppet
  • Continuous integration systems including AWS Code Pipeline, AWS Code Build, Jenkins and Travis CI
  • CDN implementations including AWS CloudFront, Fastly, and CloudFlare
  • Data manipulation / query platforms such as AWS Glue, AWS Athena, and AWS Redshift

Linux System Administration

  • Expert Linux System Administrator
  • Extensive experience with Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, CentOS, Fedora and RHEL
  • RDBMS systems including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB
  • NoSQL databases including DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB and CouchDB
  • Caching systems including Redis/ValKey and Memcached
  • Security implementations including SSL/TLS, mTLS, SSH, Wireguard, OpenVPN and various open source and commercial firewall solutions
  • Service mesh implementation with Envoy
  • DNS administration with BIND, PowerDNS and Dnsmasq
  • Webservers including Nginx, Apache and Lighttpd

Programming Languages

I have written production code in

  • Python
  • Go
  • JavaScript
  • C
  • PHP
  • Bash

I am interested in

  • Rust
  • Kotlin
  • Java
  • Clojure
  • Erlang / Elixir

Certifications

Patents

Work History

Oct 2022 – Present: Marqeta

Working in the Engineering Fundamentals Group to level-up the internal CI/CD tooling and SDLC systems at Marqeta.

2019 – Sept 2022: Salesforce

I was a Director of Software Engineering at Salesforce working on the Hyperforce project, where I lead a team of approximately 15 software engineers and engineering managers. My team was responsible for:

  • Establishing Infrastructure-as-Code best practices and implementations for the overall Hyperforce Program
  • Maintaining the Terraform runtime used by all internal teams to programmatically manage Cloud Infrastructure for Hyperforce
  • Designing, implementing, and maintaining generic Terraform pipelines to assist other engineering teams with their service infrastructure management while also adhering to strict Salesforce specific security requirements
  • Creating and maintaining Terrform pipelines used program wide by engineering teams to deploy Salesforce ready Kubernetes clusters at scale
  • Authoring a bespoke Kubernetes operator that allows us to maintain security permission boundaries between hundreds of service teams running Terraform pipelines, potentially simultaneously, in a straightforward manner.
  • Evolving Terraform pipelines to allow Hyperforce expansion into additional disparate geographic regions as well as Government Specific regions inside of AWS
  • Providing end-user technical support to service teams onboarding into Hyperforce with their Cloud Computing and Terraform needs
  • Developing pipelines to enable automated container rotation and security patching across the Hyperforce platform at scale
  • Developing pipelines to assist engineering teams with AWS EKS cluster version upgrades across the Hyperforce platform at scale

2016 – 2019: NodeSource

I was a Senior Engineer as well as the Infrastructure Lead for NodeSource. We principally developed a commercial version of the popular Node.js runtime, with additional features aimed at enterprise companies. We also built Node Certified Modules, which is a proprietary version of the NPM package registry for Node that offers additional security metrics for organizations. My team was responsible for architecting, developing, and operating the systems needed by the other engineers to successfully deliver our products and services.

2013 – 2016: CTO Fahlo / Bkstg

Fahlo was an Artist Direct social network aimed at directly connecting music artists to their fans. We raised $25MM over two rounds while I was there, and featured numerous popular artists including Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, and Usher. As CTO I was ultimately responsible for all aspects of the technical efforts for the company. These included hiring engineers, solutions architecture for the platform,vendor selection, vendor integration, and various reporting efforts needed by other departments within the organization. Fahlo re-branded and changed names to Bkstg about half way through my time there.

2003 – 2013: Various Roles (mt) Media Temple

I spent a decade at Los Angeles based ISP (mt) Media Temple. We were a hosting company focused on the creative community, and developed a number of innovative new products and technologies during my tenure.

2003 – 2005: Director of Operations

During this time I was responsible for the day to day operations of the company. this included engineering planning, data center maintenance, and our support staff. This was effectively the COO position.

2005 – 2007: Director of Technology

By 2005 the company had grown considerably, and I focused on managing the engineering groups within the company. During this time we migrated our shared hosting product from a commercial offering to one that was developed fully in house, launched one of the industry’s first widespread VPS platforms, and migrated data centers twice. This was effectively the CTO role.

2007 – 2010: Solutions and Systems Architect for Virb.com

In 2007 we acqui-hired a team to build a bespoke website builder platform called Virb, which was in many ways an early version of companies like Squarespace or Wix in the market today. I was very interested in this space, so I served as the lead solutions architect for the new venture. In addition to developing the overall architecture for the platform, I implemented the DevOps tasks to bring the service to market.

2010 – 2013: VP Business Development

When we reached 2010, there were dedicated ops teams inside (mt) Media Temple who took over the day to day maintenance of Virb. At this time,I transitioned to a business development role. My responsibilities included market research for competitive analysis, analysis of new technologies and technology vendors for use in our products, and acting as a liaison with existing vendors.

2001 – 2003: Freelance Developer and Author

During this time I was a freelance application developer for a number of companies in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. I also co-authored a number of programming books on the PHP programming language.

  • Beginning PHP4 (ISBN-13: 978-0764543647)
  • Professional PHP4 XML (ISBN-13: 978-1861007216)
  • Beginning PHP4 Databases (ISBN-13: 978-1861007827)
  • PHP MySQL Website Programming: Problem – Design – Solution (ISBN-13: 978-1590591505)

1999 – 2001: Co-Founder Lucid Designs LLC

Lucid Designs was a full service web design and development group. We focused primarily on the entertainment sector, completing projects for a number of companies including:

  • The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences
  • The Country Music Association
  • Disney
  • Warner Brothers Music
  • Epitaph Records
  • Fox Searchlight Pictures
  • Sony

Education

B.S. Physics – UNC Chapel Hill

Awards and Honors

  • Golden Key National Honor Society
  • Dean’s List
  • University Honors Program
  • Undergraduate Senior Physics Award for Most Outstanding Student
  • Graduated with Distinction for Overall GPA
  • Graduated with Highest Honors for senior honors thesis “Perturbations of a Schwarzchild Black Hole in a 4th Order Formulation of Relativity”

Publications

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