Manuel Amador's résumé

I am an accomplished engineer with an exceptional career in the tech industry, practical command of well-known reliability tech, and a natural impulse to add to my talent and achievement stacks.

I prefer reliability engineering work based in Switzerland.  My current primary interest is in the financial technologies space.  I enjoy working together with conscientious, principled and intelligent colleagues who create value for each other.

Experience

Apple • computer hardware and operating systems

December 2017 — December 2021
Senior software development engineer • Switzerland

• Automated day-to-day operations / scaling / growth of extremely large-scale software services for chip design and validation.
• Designed, implementated, operated and maintained monitoring, automation, configuration management, deployment and other processes.
• Exploited a wide spectrum of technologies on a daily basis: SaltStack, StackStorm, Jenkins, Go, the Prometheus stack.

Teralytics • mobile analytics engineering

February 2017 — October 2017
DevOps engineer • Switzerland.

• Deployment and maintenance of core services infrastructure.
• Monitoring and automation.
• <NDA>

Google • online advertising / engineering firm

August 2013 — June 2016
Site reliability engineer • Bay Area / Switzerland

• Low-level / low-dependency planetary-wide job / task control: development, maintenance, and delivery (release / rollout) automation.
• BigQuery massively parallel database: delivery engineering and automation.
• <NDA>

Aditazz • construction engineering

November 2012 — August 2013
Senior development operations architect • Bay Area

• Conceived, deployed, documented and maintained uniform, fully version-controlled, multi-environment operations infrastructure.
• Supervised and maintained all equipment involved in the operations infrastructure, through the mechanisms built into the infrastructure
• Engineered, maintained and documented C++, Python and Go build infrastructure and continuous delivery for the entire software stack
• Designed, drove, documented and deployed the service-oriented Web applications delivery platform.
• Implemented automated backups for several key operations infrastructure components, entirely integrated into the operations infrastructure
• Wrote a zero-downtime Web server library in Go, currently used in rapid development and deployment of Web applications
• Wrote a Web server supervisor and proxy, currently in use for rapid local development of Web applications

StumbleUpon • recommendation engine

April 2012 — July 2012
Senior site reliability engineer • Bay Area

• Upgraded several NetApp servers by replacing them with off-the-shelf commodity ZFS on Linux servers.
• Implemented automatic ZFS replication and incremental hourly, weekly and monthly backup between geographically separate datacenters.
• Implemented ZFS on Linux data collection for OpenTSDB.
• Implemented Varnish data collection for OpenTSDB.
• Resolved, while on-call, several critical MySQL replication errors.
• Integrated the deployment of ZFS on Linux and zfs-tools into the global StumbleUpon infrastructure, through Puppet automation.
• Deployed the latest stable Bugzilla and its customized skin, fully automated through Puppet.
• Implemented rate-limiting and compatibility with pv for ZFS replication in zfs-tools.

Twilio • telecommunications API

March 2011 — February 2012
Software engineer, development operations engineer • Bay Area

• Fixed long-standing defect in production enterprise bus that had cost the company thousands of man-hours. test suite
• Developed new features and fixed compliance, both per the HTTP spec, for horizontally-scalable transcoding service.
• Participated in the Twilio Client team rollout.
• Researched and produced cross-platform cross-browser plugin for Flash-less voice over IP communications (now implemented as WebRTC).
• Rewrote build system to be compatible with Git while maintaining Subversion support.
• Developed the orchestration parts necessary to put private Github into production.
• Automated test suite creation and execution, triggered by Git pushes to Github repositories.

Skydera Inc. • cloud computing

October 2010 — March 2011
Software engineer, product developer, system administrator, SCM manager • Bay Area

• Implemented a real-time, high-performance data collection agent to aggregate collectd performance data and store it in a column store.
• Implemented a real-time scalable cloud autoscaling algorithm to manage both on-demand cloud growth and costs.
• Rewrote and re-engineered the entire analytics facet of the Skydera cloud computing management platform, making use of asynchronous JavaScript techniques, tools and charts.
• Rewrote portions of the Skydera platform.
• Implemented Git source code control system.
• Wrote tests for several key components of the Skydera platform.
• Implemented a highly-scalable asynchronous job manager and executor for cloud infrastructure provisioning.
• Managed essential infrastructure servers and services

VMOps Inc (now Cloud.com, Inc.). • cloud computing

October 2009 — October 2010
Software engineer, product developer, free software developer, community manager, support engineer, release engineer, SCM manager • Bay Area

• Contributed to the OpenStack project.
• Took the software distribution and turned it into CentOS / Red Hat / Ubuntu compatible packages.
• Developed and published the cloud-tool, a Python-based, dynamically programmed, platform-agnostic command-line tool to drive any Cloud APIs.
• Took on the process of submitting Fedora packages for inclusion of the open source CloudStack in Fedora.
• Integrated the software distribution into the automated build system.
• Redesigned the build system to be more compliant with practices in the free software world.
• Built product packages for popular Linux distributions.
• Took over the OpenSolaris distribution component.
• Troubleshot and solved a wide range of virtualization, network and hardware issues.
• Created the VMOps TechCenter, starting with the initiative, platform selection (Plone), going on to site organization, content, community policies and, finally, ending with content migration and publication.
• Documented key aspects of Cloud.com's products.
• Developed patent-pending product features.
• Provided licensing advice regarding the free software release of Cloud.com's products. Developed a tool to properly and automatically license the open-source code and tools developed at Cloud.com, using heuristics.
• Managed key components of the engineering infrastructure, including SCM, build software, and continuous integration systems.
• Set equipment up in several datacenters.
• Developed several CloudStack product tools, libraries and features.
• Worked on the source repository control system, migrating it from Subversion to Git.
• Planned and implemented the next-generation continuous integration infrastructure, from planning to roll-out.

GPLHost • virtualization and hosting

May 2007 — September 2009
Support engineer, system/network administrator, free software developer, build master, repo manager • Ecuador

• Managed over 30 Xen virtualization servers, with an average of 15 slices per physical server, together with all of the network services on the Xen servers and company-dedicated VPS instances.
• Executed hands-on remote technical support for GPLHost dedicated and Xen virtual private server customers.
• Dealt in relationships and network issues with upstream ISPs.
• Migrated CVS infrastructure to Git.
• Developed automation software to batch manage all equipment.
• Designed and deployed secure backup strategy based on Dirvish for all nodes.
• Reengineered automated deployment software for RPM-based Linux guests in Xen virtualization environments.
• Deployed WAN network monitoring and alert plan based on Nagios2.
• Wrote software to auto-deploy and configure the Munin monitoring system across the network.
• Analyzed, proposed and deployed several SEO measures to optimize SERP position, based on statistical data collected by Google Analytics and a well-informed understanding of search engine technology.
• Detected and stopped unauthorized intrusions ("hacker attacks") in real-time, then collected forensic evidence for investigative followup.
• Provided the know-how and testing for a variety of POSIX systems applications and daemons (e.g. MySQmail).
• Co-developed and enhanced the GPLHost software stack, consisting of a number of free software applications such as DTC and DTC-Xen, originally created (and to this day, mainly developed and stewarded) by Thomas Goirand.
• Ported several components of the GPLHost software stack to CentOS, including DTC-Xen and DTC.
• Automated and maintained CentOS / RPM packaging for the GPLHost software stack (including DTC, DTC-Xen and their dependencies).
• CMS.

Amautacorp S.A.

April 2007 — August 2007
Software development consultant • Ecuador

• Audited software quality, supervised, chose technology and coded ground portions for a Web 2.0-based ERP system for Amautacorp S.A.'s customers.
• Developed a script- and SCCS-based software quality metrics reporting system.

Independent contractor

July 2005 — Today
Software developer, support engineer • Ecuador

• Deployed and supported Linux servers for local companies.
• Developed WordPress-based extensions and solutions for several one-time and repeat customers, under the banner of Turbocharged.

Amautacorp S.A • Ecuador.

January 2003 — July 2005
Cofounder and shareholder
Primary responsibility: information systems and platform management, research.

• Chose and rolled out fundamental technology for the company's IT infrastructure.
• Deployed an entirely Linux-based eight-seat office for internal use using LTSP and remote desktop technologies.
• Developed in-house service with an HTTP / XML-RPC API, plus clients for the service, for secure e-commerce transactions.
• Managed a leased dedicated server facility for Web presence and e-mail.
• Co-managed a tier-1 consumer-oriented Web site running on our hardware.

Technical and professional expertise

Within the software engineering field, I command well over two decades of experience with diverse open source technologies, primarily Linux, ZFS, Go, Rust, Python, Ansible, SaltStack, Plone and Qubes OS.

My reliability engineering experiences made me acquainted with robust product design, rollout, and day-to-day operations, ranging from automation to observability, at planetary and cloud scale.

My business development experience showed me how to forge mutually-beneficial, constructive relationships.

General knowledge

Formal education

Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, campus Guayaquil

1999 — 2006
Ingeniería informática de gestión, mención marketing • Ecuador
Software engineering and management.

Languages

• English: perfect command of the language.
• Spanish: native language.
• German: Hochdeutsch at B1 level, with certificate recognized by the Swiss government.