| +1 973 534 0657 max.euston@gmail.com http://max.euston.net/ |
Max Euston |
Travel: Global Location: Open |
Senior technology expert specializing in robust infrastructure design, highly resilient operations, and automation processes. Adept at creating, expanding, and rebuilding technology organizations to address business requirements in a global economy while maintaining a dynamic balance between growth, cost control, and stability.
| Operational Automation Strategic Planning Information Security |
Cross-silo Partnerships Team Development Process/System Integration |
Scalable Architecture High Performance HA/BC/DR |
| WePay (JPMorgan Chase) - Palo Alto, CA Head of Engineering - DevOps |
2019 - present |
Vision and Strategy
- Articulated and evangalized DevOps practices, while leveraging latent hunger to advance the JPMC Payment Platform organization.
- Defined target state for Service Level Objective (SLO) based observability
- Built support for Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in Product roadmap.
- Targets defined based on extensive history and experience with on-prem and cloud-native operations.
Transformation (Operational)
- Integrated a lean incident/problem management function with larger (ITIL/SNOW) process controls.
- Built an Observability stack to support stepwise-call-path SLOs/SLIs.
- Tracking of both functional and latency dimensions.
- Mean Incident Impact Return to Operations (RTO) measured of ~12 minutes.
- Strengthened respose teams via a targeted engagement model, as opposed to a “call the world” circus.
- Migrate customers from legacy to current API via multiple drivers:
- Motivation (feature availability and performance/scalability).
- Provided client SDK (friction reduction).
- Translation layer (for “long tail” laggards).
- Advanced from data-center mentality (maintenance windows) to internet-availability (live updates) and scope:
- 24x7x265 availability for large-scale operations (GoFundMe, TouchBistro, FreshBooks, QuickAccept)
Transformation (Organizational)
- Inspired legacy teams towards engagement and action via value stories. (influence w/o authority).
- Grew from a foundational budget (shared/unallocated) to an allocated (at useful granularity) model.
- Achieved the highest audit result (Strong) while advancing a late-state startup into a highly regulated environment (PCI DSS; KYC/AML).
- Major restructure of application stack to utilize core back-end processors and systems of record.
- Leverage expertise of a cloud-first, “always on” acquisition to advance operational capabilities of larger organization’s payments division.
- Replaced ineffective (and counter-productive) internal metrics to drive a heavy bias twards customer value.
- Partner with Product Owners to enhance the overall customer experience beyond basic feature lists.
- “Shift left” on system design, component selection, security, and projected project P&L.
- Included experiential measures (NFRs) of resiliency and performance in value definition.
Leadership
- Values-based model (mutual respect; active engagement) and a healthy organizational culture (blameless; no-friction information flow; non-zero-sum-game view).
- Continually develop and support others to be leaders of managers for “force multiplier” impact, in addition to building their (and my own) succession planning.
- Judicious use of authority as a last-resort tie breaker.
- Strong strategic mindset, with a core talent for working within operational ambiguity and highly dynamic situations.
- Maintain a strong organizational foundation with high retention, tenure, and notable rejoin rate.
Scope of Responsibility/Authority
- ~$100M budget; ~100ppl distributed/hybrid org.
- Owner and Decision Maker for the majority (~50) of WePay's vendor relationships.
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Elastic, Oracle, Sendgrid, Twilio, PagerDuty
| Credit Suisse - New York City, NY Vice President - Group CTO |
2011 - 2018 |
Leadership
- Lead functions for multi-year automation and efficiency projects with >$10M CapEx/OpEx budgets.
- Built and nurtured continuous partnerships at multiple levels, throughout the organization and across the globe.
- Directed line management of 6 global infrastructure operations teams (50 total staff) of DBAs, Web Admins, and MS-Windows/Unix/Linux SAs
Global Monitoring Restructure and Integration
- Conceptualized and managed design of a system to consolidate capabilities from multiple isolated automation/monitoring projects into a single enterprise-wide adaptable model.
- Architected a new pattern for process and connection level metrics, which provides APM-type capabilities for processes of all types (not just JVM- or .Net- based applications).
- Marketed this distributed system that supports live, historic, health, configuration, trending, and capacity functions.
Efficiencies/Stability/Security
- Centralized inventory management to support LCM, automation, and transparent billing.
- Initiated and managed operational audit tooling to uncover compliance breaches by database and service calls across production/non-production borders.
- Completely managed the migration of the primary global SMS notification system from SMPP to HTTP and SSL.
- Project management and tracking of the global replacement of all SHA-1 certificates and use of legacy CAs.
| Prudential Financial - Newark, NJ Director/Systems Architect - E-Commerce |
1999 - 2011 |
Growth
- Grew E-Commerce Systems from a manually managed department providing a patchwork set of services into a “best of breed” group as the primary service provider for all businesses units.
- Expanded Prod/Staging environments with QA/Int/Dev/Tst. Enabled business units to discover hidden dependencies earlier in the SDLC, and simultaneously reduces errors, cost, and time to market. Full self-service functionality for immediate turnaround.
Cost Savings
- Realized significant growth (>30%/year) in productivity while concurrently reducing cost through standardization, automation, and efficient allocation of resources. This occurred during drastic corporate cutbacks (>25% staff reductions through divestitures/outsourcing/off-shoring) in preparation for conversion from a mutual to a stock company.
- Divested functions that were duplicated in other groups (e.g. e-mail/DNS/network/extranet/proxy/firewall)
- Implemented an ISO-approved PKI (private CA) for X.509 (SSL) certificates to support encrypted server-server communication and preproduction application testing. This reduced the need for commercial certificate licenses by >1500 annually, saving $2M over 5 years.
Operational Automation
- Lead designer of E-Commerce Global Internet Infrastructure, handling investment, retirement, financial, and PCI transactions in addition to standard business services.
- Designed and implemented multiple systems and processes that allow for a more cost-effective utilization of: Operations (Tier-1); offshore (Tier-2); and Engineering (Tier-3) resources. Original servers were manually managed and very labor intensive, requiring high-level engineers for daily operational issues.
- Designed and implemented a global monitoring/alerting infrastructure to support appliance-type devices in addition to standard servers. Expanded the design to support a system of ‘triggers’ for automated response to predefined exceptional conditions.
- Created a packaging/versioning/build process that replaced manual updates with a fully automated, multisite deployment/validation system that handles all aspects of server/application configuration.
Interpersonal Skills
- Technical lead for 20 architecture/engineering/operational staff (domestic and international) supporting the global e-commerce environment. The use of a forthright management style with a substantial technical background was used to build trusted and respectful relationships.
- Built strong inter-departmental alliances at multiple levels (upward, downward and lateral). Able to “get things done” effectively and efficiently while maintaining standards-compliant processes and aggressive SLAs. Key player in standards development where direct responsibility exists, and also where it doesn't.
- The business-partner feedback to this style has been overwhelmingly positive due to a calculated relationship model. Employees are supported/rewarded/recognized for outstanding customer (internal) support. Positioning of Corporate Technology's offerings as a service (instead of a product) has benefited both client (business unit) and vendor (corporate).
- With an ability to “pick apart” vendor products and services at the lowest technical level, there is little value left for marketing. This has resulted in contract modifications from moderate (e.g. removal of per-CPU licensing) to severe (e.g. total removal of charges).