Matthew Crook

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.

• Continue responsibilities of Lead position, with being technical lead and subject matter expert in broad range of areas and technologies that cover the entire lifecycle of the development and deployment processes.
• Lead cross-functional teams, mentor junior, mid, and senior engineers, and drive best practices within the organization to design high-availability, fault-tolerant, and cost-effective cloud architectures across AWS and Google Cloud Platform with continuous improvement and efficiency ensuring the security and compliance of systems in dynamic production environments.

• Key contributor and Team/ Tech Lead in planning, designing, architecting, and rollout 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 Networking architecture.

• 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.

• Responsible for owning creation, maintenance, and being subject matter expert in lower level networking.

  • 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; 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).

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

• 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 SRE key initiatives of implementing better quality gate checks to enhance sustainability and data integrity.

• Was able to lead a small SRE team, where responsibilities could range from:

  • Optimizing existing infrastructure.
  • 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.
  • Resolving incidents within internal SLAs, and defining SLOs with focus on customer value and risk reduction.

• 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.

• 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%.
• Contributed to and led new feature implementations in both Front-End and Back-End including a custom invoicing tool/service, revamp and modernization of User Account Settings page, and "Dark Mode" for the entire application.
• Cleared backlog of known bugs for web scraper and abundance 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).

• Promoted from Income Tracking Services Manager, and took over management of Redirection of BMG deals.

  • 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. Key project 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, resulting in substantial performance royalty payout increase.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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.

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.

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.

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

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:

• Subnetting and CIDR Notation
• Networking
• IP Forwarding
• Kubernetes and Certificate Management: Cert Manager
• Kubernetes Pod/ Node Networking
• AI, Generative AI, and LLM Fundamentals
• Envoy In the Service Mesh
• Understanding Istio's Networking APIs
• Leadership: A Team Is Only As Good As Its Leader
• Core Principals of SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) and SRE vs DevOps