Max Euston

Strategic Technology Leader

Senior technology leader and expert specializing in robust infrastructure design, highly reliable/robust/resilient operations, and operational automation. Adept at building, growing, and redefining technology organizations to address business requirements in a global economy while maintaining a dynamic balance between growth, cost control, and stability. Motivator and mentor to drive and support a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

• Broad and deep experience across Architecture/Engineering/Operation towers in Plan/Build/Run organizational structures, while having pioneered horizontal and modern (DevOps/SRE) operational practices.
• Innately comfortable evangelizing as a change agent (from evolutionary through disruptive).
• Proven ability to calmly manage highly complex, multifaceted, fast-paced and high-pressure environments.
• Motivate and lead by example. Inspire and reward quality and excellence. Promote an environment that fosters a search for “the elegant solution” and “best of breed” results, while recognizing pragmatic waypoints to support that goal.
• Honesty/Transparency/Integrity/Mutual Respect. Recognize and nurture individual drivers and diverse perspectives. Generate long-lasting growth and success on a secure foundation.
• Effective mediator and polished presenter. Able to promote productive discussions between the broadest technical and business audiences while dynamically translating between those domains.
• Subject matter expert in numerous fields. Able to analyze and discuss from detail to “big picture”.

Professional Experience

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.
  • Business flow based full stack implementation of the "Four Golden Signals" to support proper error budget management and predictive (pre-incident) impact identification.
  • Mean Incident Impact Return to Operations (RTO) measure of ~12 minutes. Improvement of time to (detect, triage, mitigate, and remediate).
  • Strengthened on-call respose teams via a targeted engagement model, as opposed to a “call the world” circus.
  • Full SDLC feedback cycle from blameless post-mortem all the way back to/through Product, Design, Engineering.
  • Championed non-functional requirements to become a first order feature along in product definition and architectural reviews.
• 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)
  • Fractional deployment utilizing Canary, Feature-flags, and fault tolerance via traffic shaping.

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).
• Builder of organizations and teams while fostering mentorship and a healthy culture of mutual cooperation and collaboration, technical and professional excellence, and pride of ownership.
• Continually develop and guide others to be leaders of managers for “force multiplier” impact, in addition to building their (and my own) career growth along with proactive 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; ~200ppl distributed/hybrid org.
• Owner and Decision Maker for the majority (~50) of division's vendor relationships.
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Elastic, Oracle, Sendgrid, Twilio, PagerDuty

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 planning and management 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.

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).