Matthew Crook

Lead DevOps Engineer | Cloud Systems, Networking, and Infrastructure
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linkedin.com/in/mattcrook11
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matt-crook.com
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matt.crook11@gmail.com
I have a passion for DevOps and Infrastructure, and have gained experience working across the entire stack as a Full-Stack Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), and DevOps Engineer in multiple rapidly changing and demanding environments. Regularly working in large enterprise scale ecosystems, I am familiar with complexity and ambiguity. In addition to traditional SRE and DevOps responsibilities, I have worked on, managed, and become a subject matter expert on projects relating to a wide array of additional various topics including Networking, MLOps, Edge and Edge Computing, and Security. I'm an engineer who's passionately curious about emerging technology, while solidly focused on fundamental principles. As a former athlete and musician, I'm extremely driven; holding myself, my team, and the software I write to the highest standards.

Education

Belmont University

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Bachelor’s Degree Business Administration and Music Business
Aug 2010 - May 2015

Nashville Software School

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Jan 2020 - Jun 2020

Six-month intensive, full-time, hands-on, fast-moving and rigorous study of software engineering. Emphasis is placed on building database driven applications, and working with other students while immersed in new and challenging material.

Skills

  • Networking
  • Terraform
  • Kubernetes
  • Istio Service Mesh
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • AWS
  • Team Leadership
  • MLOps
  • AIOPs
  • Helm
  • CI/CD
  • Edge Computing
  • Fastly
  • Cloudflare
  • CDN
  • Infrastructure Security
  • Certificates
  • TLS
  • mTLS
  • Vault
  • Kubeflow
  • Docker
  • Bash Scripting
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • Git
  • Golang
  • Project Management
  • Business Objectives
  • Communication
  • Public Speaking

Work Experience

Target

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Lead DevOps Engineer
Aug 2021 - Current
  • Key contributor and Team Lead in planning, designing, architecting, and rollout to multiple environments of multi-region/ multi-cluster Service Mesh within large Kubernetes Ecosystem:

    • Networking architecture of the Service Mesh network topology.
    • Ensuring the reliability and redundancy of Service Mesh, as well as the security through building a first-of-its-kind Certificate architecture (PKI) which implements and automates TLS and mTLS Certificates.
  • Tech Lead in modernizing Edge architecture, which includes:

    • Designing and building a new API Gateway with integration into Service Mesh Edge and Ingress functionality.
    • Network Edge functionality involving secure networking and routing in and out of VPCs and multiple Clouds (AWS and GCP).
    • Networking and distributed Edge involving various CDN providers (Cloudflare and Fastly) using caching, configuring WAF and WAF rules, and utilizing custom Varnish (VCL) for advanced CDN functionality.
  • Use MLOps guiding principles to work with large department of stakeholders in Machine Learning to deploy ML models and create model pipelines, as well as ensure the underlying networking was stable and secure.

    • Tools/ technologies include Kubeflow and VertexAI.
  • Responsible for owning creation, maintenance, and mastery of lower level networking which includes:

    • Cluster to cluster communication, cloud to cloud communication, intra network communication, VPC, VPN, security of domains and DNS, as well as network and Cloud Ingress and Egress networking, and Certificate management (TLS and mTLS).
  • Main point of contact and Lead for working with stakeholders with regards to 3rd party vendor integrations; which includes determining project feasibility, timeline, requirements, planning, communication, and technical implementation.

  • Work closely with SRE to ensure reliability of infrastructure and proper capturing of necessary metrics (4 Golden Signals) by building monitoring, alerting, and logging around infrastructure resources.

    • Partake in on-call rotations and resolving production outages and incidents.

Built Technologies

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Site Reliability Engineer
Sep 2020 - Aug 2021
  • Planned, developed, and created automated tooling infrastructure for end-to-end tests and procedures.

    • Modernized API and Service testing with an "API Driven Development" mentality to complete, and as part of, the SRE key initiatives of implementing quality gate checks better quality gate checks to enhance sustainability and data integrity across all apps and services in all environments.
  • Was able to lead a small SRE team, where responsibilities could range from optimizing existing infrastructure to supporting removing technical debt and preventing future incidents, tracking core metrics and solving bottlenecks proactively, building and/ or improving tools and features that refine or enhance sustainability, monitoring, and logging, and resolving incidents within internal SLAs, and defining SLOs with focus on customer value and risk reduction.

  • Built and/or enhanced developer and DevOps tooling and features that refine or improve continuity and speed of product development and delivery.

  • Optimized existing and new infrastructure for large micro-services architecture to support removing technical debt, preventing future incidents, and resolving RCAs with focus on customer value and risk reduction as well as defining SLO's. With focus on revenue producing key transactions which must be always available.

  • Worked with various Engineering teams to decouple dependencies, eliminate toil, and assist in the creation of fully automated immutable infrastructure based on the team's needs.

RootNote

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Full Stack Software Engineer
Jul 2020 - Oct 2020
  • Participated and consulted in sprint planning, design, storyboarding, and deployment of all new features, architecture decisions, and system design.

  • Assisted in making systems more resilient, reliable, and scalable in a fast paced start-up environment, as well as increased application's test coverage by 40%.

  • Led new feature implementation(s) Including:

    • A custom invoicing tool/service - fully integrated with PayPal API, Google, and Gmail for easy payment and Invoicing.
    • Fully re-designed and implemented a complete revamp and modernization of User Account Settings page.
    • Planned, architected, and implemented other key features and add ons, including a "Dark Mode" for the entire application.
  • Cleared backlog of known bugs for web scraper and multitude of API integrations.

  • Refactored client side Javascript to better manage state and increase performance, as well as for optimization of code and code re-usability (DRY).

BMG - The New Music Company

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Data Analyst - Income Tracking Analytics
Oct 2018 - Jan 2020
  • Promoted from Income Tracking Services Manager, and took over management of redirection of BMG deals by building a thorough plan to implement with high attention to detail. Increased automation of process, therefore increasing number of notices sent and yearly income received as a result of redirection from $800k to over $1.5 million.

  • Acted as Project Manager in working with developers for multiple projects from inception to implementation and roll out.

    • Project(s) included improving and automating the Live Performance Tool, negating manual input or intervention. This improvement in automation provided a massive increase from 40 setlists submitted in 2017, to 410 submitted in 2018.
  • Successfully wrote scripts and used third party services to call the various API’s, extracting data to better access song meta-data for specific departmental needs.

  • Took initiative to learn Python for the purposes of writing various scripts for ETL, data ingestion and transformation, data analysis, and statistical purposes.

  • Worked with large amounts of data to regularly access, manipulate, and extract data from database systems like Hadoop, using software like Tableau, and open- source SQL engines like Apache Hive and Impala, as well as query assistants like Hue.

  • Continued to work closely with, and was lead analyst on multiple projects with creative management on potential deals by performing pipeline analysis to determine the value of specific artist, entity, or catalog for advance, purchase, or acquisition.

BMG - The New Music Company

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Income Tracking Services Manager
Oct 2016 - Oct 2018
  • Managed projects and worked closely with creative management by performing pipeline analysis and business forecasting to determine the value of specific artist, entity, or catalog for advance, purchase, or acquisition.
  • Assisted in redirection of BMG deals by building a thorough plan to implement with high attention to detail.
  • Worked regularly with large amounts of data to access, manipulate, and extract from database systems like Hadoop, using software visualization tools like Tableau.
  • Managed Live Performance Tool to register setlists with the US PROs, and forwarded set lists of foreign performances to BMG affiliates and sub publishers.
  • Performed radio tracking, master recording tracking, mechanical and streaming tracking, redirection tracking, and analysis for songs that have BMG interest using BMG’s radio airplay API, Nielson driver files, Mechanicals API, and custom build tools.

Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI)

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Business Operations Analyst
May 2016 - Sep 2016

The Holland Group, Inc

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Junior Project Manager
May 2014 - Apr 2016

Volunteering

PyTennessee 2020

Feb 2020 - Feb 2020

PyTn is hosted at Nashville School of Law and is is a yearly regional Python conference that is a developer-focused Python conference with talk topics running the gamut between beginner and advanced, and from web development to data science and machine learning. I was responsible for possibly the most important part of the conference--giving the speakers the help they needed and keeping the conference moving smoothly. I participated in helping in set-up, tear down, checking guests in, and moving items as necessary.

Music City Code 2019

May 2019 - May 2019

The Music City Tech conference is held at Nossi College of Art in Nashville, TN and is a conference that caters to developers and touches on all aspects of software and website development. The Conference is focused on quality over quantity, with three sub-conferences: Music City Code, Music City Agile, and Music City Data. As a volunteer, I was responsible for set-up before the conference and checking guests in, as well as catering to the speakers, making sure they had what they needed for their talks, getting them set up for their talks, as well as any duty necessary to make sure the conference ran as smoothly as possible.

DevOpsDays 2021

Aug 2021 - Aug 2021

Worked closely with community chair to to recruit speakers, volunteers, and visitors for the conference.

Podcasts, Interviews, and Articles

Jan 2020 - Jan 2020

Future Sync Conference

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Podcast/Interview
May 2020 - May 2020

Nashville Software School

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Podcast/Interview
Jun 2020 - Jun 2020

Website Blog Posts

Refer to my website (https://matt-crook.com/blog) for blog posts covering a multitude of topics ranging from technical to non-technical articles. The technical posts being topics directly related to Software Engineering (more specifically DevOps and SRE). And "non technical" posts being everything else; from leadership, soft skills, coding bootcamp and more. Some examples of posts include: