lae's notebook

Musee Ullah

arbeiter@lae.is
https://lae.is
Github
United States (Central)

Objective

A senior systems administration and/or Rust/Python programming role with a focus on systems/deployment automation and/or tools development.

Employment

COVER Corporation - Tokyo, JP (Remote)

An entertainment company specializing in experiences via virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Japanese-English Translator (Contract) - April 2020, ongoing

Provided localization, subtitling and translation checking services for multimedia content and company press releases.

Fressets, Inc. - Tokyo, JP (Remote)

A fintech company with a focus on blockchain infrastructure and security.

Senior Infrastructure Engineer (Contract) - July 2019 to January 2020

  • introduced a continuous deployment workflow using Terraform and Terraform Cloud, making deployment environments self-documenting and reproducible.
  • devised workflows for creating Salt formulae and Terraform modules to help simplify deployment tasks during in-house application development.
  • developed an Ansible role for deploying and maintaining coin daemons.

FireEye, Inc. - Milpitas, CA

A cybersecurity company with a renown background in malware detection.

Senior Research Infrastructure Engineer - January 2018 to July 2018

Research Infrastructure Engineer (Lead) - March 2015 to December 2017

  • led a team of 3 DevOps engineers, mentoring them on topics like writing well defined Ansible roles and managing distributed database/VM/storage clusters
  • provided infrastructure services to researchers and R&D teams, e.g. planning and deployment of malware analysis services
  • wrote a small tool in Rust to simplify controlling servers via IPMI
  • implemented system lifecycle automation processes with a template-based PXE server for provisioning bare metal systems, including FireEye's appliance OS (saving researchers hundreds of hours of manual setup), and Ansible for configuration management and software deployment
  • deployed and managed a continuous integration environment around Drone CI
  • re-architected an internal Django application around minimal Docker images
  • deployed (several involved writing open-sourced Ansible roles) and managed distributed systems such as Ceph, Cassandra, Elasticsearch and internal FireEye systems, as well as highly available Proxmox virtualization clusters (on top of which we maintain services like GitHub Enterprise and NetBox)
  • managed inventory and hardware for a fleet of ~1000 servers
  • architected and deployed monitoring environment around Prometheus

Sleepy Giant Entertainment - Chicago, IL

A game infrastructure development company.

Systems Engineer - July 2013 to September 2014

  • orchestrated servers with Chef and other automation utilities
  • worked with several Amazon Web Services, including RDS, VPC, Beanstalk
  • replaced part of SG's development cycle with Docker (Jenkins CI)
  • wrote various scripts in Python, Ruby and Bash
  • was responsible for the security audit after the Heartbleed PSA

HostGator.Com, LLC - Austin, TX

A shared web hosting company who also offers dedicated servers/VMs.

Systems Monitoring - December 2011 to July 2012

  • monitored >4500 machines remotely (SoftLayer) using Zabbix/ZMonitor
  • dealt with user abuse, compromised clients, broken configurations, and other resource usage issues
  • handled network abuse/issues by either firewall or escalating to SL (UDP/SYN floods, Slowloris)
  • sole assistant from the monitoring team during HG's architecture migration (32->64bit)
  • wrote public announcements on the network status forums for extended downtime issues.

Systems Administrator - June 2011 to July 2012

  • was primarily help desk support, handling website/database/application errors and issues, backups/restorations, triage, software upgrades and installations.
  • Filed internal bug reports and wrote documentation for company wikis and knowledgebase.

Contracted Roles

  • batee.com - redesigned website using Bootstrap; moved editing process from disparate HTML files to Jekyll static site generation

Volunteering

  • Simple Mona (2014-2015) - sole administrator of this pool for the Monacoin cryptocurrency - development halted
    • involved administrating a RabbitMQ cluster, developing in Python (Flask), and querying in Postgres
    • i18n support, added Japanese translation (by me and a couple native speakers)
  • Knights of Reason - primary contact for technical issues, server owner/co-admin, forum moderator. (server documentation)
  • The Bike Project of Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, IL, 8/2010-2/2011) - bike mechanic and technologist, e.g. repurposed old laptops with Debian for use at the shop.

Projects / One-Offs

  • Proxmox Ansible Role - A role for deploying and configuring complete Proxmox virtualization clusters.
  • NetBox Ansible Role - A role for deploying and configuring the NetBox Django application.
  • ZMonitor - cli dashboard for Zabbix written in Ruby.
  • Wagnaria - fansubbing organisation tool written in bottle.py/Python and AngularJS (copy of it in production).
  • SIF Tracker - per-user leaderboard tracking web application written in Flask/Python, with some backend bits in Ruby

Familiarities / Preferences

distros: arch linux, centos, debian, coreos, ubuntu (16+)
lang: bash, python, rust, ruby, markdown, json
apps: nginx, postgresql, mysql, etherpad, chef, aegisub
workflow: ansible, git, vim, i3wm, remmina, lxc, vagrant/virtualbox/qemu-kvm, bash (x2)

Education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 2010 -- 2011 - East Asian Languages and Cultures
De Anza College - 2016 -- 2019 - Systems Programming
Western Governor's University - 2020 -- 2022 - BS Computer Science