Rick Davis

DevOps - Principal Engineer (Nov 2022 – May 2023)

• Co-founded the Sensitive Operations team to enhance security and efficiency for sensitive infrastructure and onboarding new blockchain validators.
• Developed due diligence guidelines for evaluating blockchain networks, and automated cost reporting processes for tracking infrastructure sprawl and optimizing server usage.
• Optimized blockchain API access architecture, troubleshooting and remediation of performance issues, and developed data models for standardized configuration & simplified automation.
• Led security incident discovery, assessment, remediation, and post-mortem analysis in collaboration with SecOps.

Sr Engineering Manager - Blockchain Automation (Oct 2021 – Nov 2022)

• Led automation of deployment, configuration, and maintenance of 60+ blockchain networks on 13 cloud/COLO providers, spanning 1,300+ servers.
• Led architecture and design for COLO/cloud environment onboarding and optimized Ansible role designs.
• Interview process optimizations, hired 10 engineers, and provided coaching to successfully promote 5 engineers.
• Revamped team workflows in JIRA and collaborated with cross-functional teams to align roadmap and OKRs with organizational objectives.
• Developed custom Python analytics to monitor spare capacity & developed roadmap for infrastructure consolidation.
• Developed operational dashboards for time series analysis of infrastructure metrics & application logs with DataDog.

Director of DevOps (Feb 2020 – Oct 2021)

• Led a team of DevOps engineers to design, develop, and deliver server and network infrastructure automation solutions for strategic Enterprise, Telco, and Service Provider customers in EMEA.
• Qualified sales opportunities and presented Dell Technologies solutions to customers, driving technical discussions to understand requirements and develop automation pipelines.
• Spearheaded initiative to develop Terraform modules for automated configuration and deployment of Dell servers via Redfish REST APIs.
• Led the automated installation and configuration of the Folding@Home project in coordination with strategic partners willing to donate idle computing resources for COVID-19 research.

Advisory Systems Engineer (Oct 2018 – Feb 2020)

• Advised and mentored internal teams and customers on DevOps best practices in IaaS/CaaS, Hybrid Cloud, and Telco/Service Provider/HPC/Big Data environments.
• Designed and managed lab environment for the development and demonstration of server and network automation solutions to internal teams and customers.

DevOps Manager, Verizon Connect (May 2016 – Oct 2018)

• Led the creation of the first DevOps team in Telematics. Hired, trained, coached, and mentored team of 8+ employees and contractors to drive DevOps transformation initiatives and build a container-based infrastructure platform.
• Designed and built Telematics Container Cloud Platform (TCCP), a multi-site/Active-Active containerized internal cloud platform with eBGP Clos architecture, Consul DNS service discovery, Docker Swarm, and ceph distributed storage. 100% uptime over 1.5+ years, reducing deploy cycles from 30 days to 8 hours.
• Designed and managed large-scale Splunk and Dynatrace AppMon deployments for log aggregation and application performance monitoring.
• Represented Verizon Connect on OpenSwitch TSC under Linux Foundation. Presented at Open Networking Summit NA 2018.
• Designed and built the Verizon Connect Innovation Lab — ML, AI/computer vision, embedded devices (Raspberry Pi/Arduino), 3D printing — resulting in patents and multiple business opportunities.
• Established fully automated End-to-End network and server infrastructure provisioning and OS/software configuration using Ansible. Leveraged GitLab & GitLab-CI for code/issue/project/CI/CD management.

Architecture & Design, OnCue by Verizon (Jun 2014 – Mar 2016)

• Infrastructure architecture and design of nationwide OTT & IPTV video streaming service — 1000+ edge locations, 40+ POPs, 20+ content ingest/encoding data centers, 15+ Pbps throughput.
• Server, storage, and network hardware evaluation and vendor comparisons resulting in $80M cost savings.
• Drove adoption of Dell/Force10 Open Networking and vendor pricing negotiations resulting in significant cost savings and simplified architecture.
• Architecture and design of network, systems, and logical application infrastructure supporting OnCue Mobile, OnCue Home, and FiOS IPTV. Planning and tracking of $200M+ CAPEX budget.
• Ansible automation of ceph cluster deployment and Linux login authentication via AD/LDAP.
• Built and managed team of Systems Administrators across 75+ data centers for go90 and FiOS IPTV products.

Manager of Infrastructure, Redbox Instant by Verizon (Jun 2012 – Jun 2014)

• Design and build of infrastructure systems in support of nationwide OTT video delivery platform.
• Coordinated vendor engagements to assess & optimize JBoss application performance issues resulting in $20,000+/month cloud cost savings.
• Maintained target 99.9% infrastructure uptime.
• Hiring, training, coaching, and professional development of team members.

Architecture, Design & Development, Verizon (May 2007 – Jun 2012)

• Designed and implemented OTT video streaming solution to stream select FiOS TV channels to iOS/Android devices.
• Designed and implemented Verizon Media Manager Online — 1.5PB Hadoop/HDFS cluster enabling customers to store personal media in the cloud and view on any device.
• Research and evaluation of video encoding solutions resulting in over $9M cost savings. Developed vendor partnerships and negotiated lab funding saving over $200,000.
• Designed and developed vSNAP — 3-tier distributed application for analysis of web server performance & usage metrics across 28+ data center locations.
• Developed custom SharePoint sites and dashboards consolidating inventory, trouble ticketing, change management, and monitoring data, significantly reducing MTTR.
• Java & MS.NET memory dump analysis & code fixes — faster MTTR than MS Support.