Dana M. Diederich

Objective

I am seeking a hands-on, team-oriented role at a stable, technologically innovative company where we will be able to facilitate evolutionary and revolutionary adoption of various technologies, intended to produce consistently growing operational return on investment.

• I am passionate about improving operational processes and flows via the collaborative approach of design and architecture. Fundamentally, I am a programmer with decades of hands-on operational experience, ranging from all kinds of Linux system administration to databases to strong networking skills.
• Collaboratively designing and shipping high availability is my forte. Through many and diverse focus areas, LiveOps achieved 99.99% availability in Q4 2011. The VP of Operations at the time, Gary Slater, stated that my work was the single largest factor behind that achievement.
• Above all, I seek to understand, assimilate and process all of the issues, big and small, that stand in the way of efficient and smooth operations, using that analysis to design elegant integration solutions. Shipping that automation so my co-workers can get their work done is job one.

Achievements

• 99.99% availability Q4 2011:  There were many facets to this achievement
  
  
  • Exceptional monitoring coverage of the entire production platform.
  • Innovative release management and automation.
  • Structural reduction of single points of failures in various critical paths.
  • Long-term and deep architectural work with various Engineering areas.
  • Day to day focus on nearly every operational facet of the platform.
• World-class Monitoring:  John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, was so impressed with what our team created that he sent a team of senior engineers, under NDA, to examine the monitoring system we built at Walmart Stores, Inc., to consider licensing it.
• The 'Go To' person for real-time incident management:  If something is on fire, I am frequently the person who is asked to manage the incident.
• Regulatory/PCI/SOX/HIPAA lead:  As regulatory lead at multiple companies, I've learned how to balance the competing needs of making an organization secure, meeting regulatory requirements and keeping operations and development agile and efficient.
• Team Building:  Making sure the people I work with have what they need is critical. This important work isn't done as their manager, but as their co-worker, confidant and friend.
• Efficiency Always:  The solutions I design and the software I am responsible for almost never show up in 'top' on production servers. Over four years, while the platform volume went up three-fold, resources used by my automation has stayed flat.

Character

• Innovative:  At LiveOps, the existing graphing infrastructure was old and fallen out of date, making it very difficult to add any new metrics. Over a week, I found, analyzed, piloted, tested and started graphing a dozen highly useful operational metrics using Graphite. A few months later, efficiently using existing hardware resources, we were minutely graphing tens of thousands of metrics.
• Driven:  I will work through any obstacles or challenges that arise during the pursuit of a strategic or tactical objective. At Walmart, we needed to deploy our management systems into all of the remote sites. Due to some arcane and undocumented systems restrictions, the first two rollout attempts were not successful. We tried another method to write the software and it rolled out completely and without incident. It has served monitoring and management needs flawlessly ever since.
• Customer Focused:  One of the key benefits I bring to any organization is customer focus. I consider any person or organization I come in contact and can assist a potential customer. At LiveOps, our senior release engineer was becoming overwhelmed with many different kinds of weekly software releases, so I permanently took over a portion of them, using that hands-on experience to architect and design a cutting edge release system. I also served as backup for the primary Linux sysadmins, DBAs and Network Engineers when people were either busy or out of the office.
• Humility:  All too often, senior operations people don't feel it necessary to sit down and work with many people in their area and company, including the fresh college hires. One of my core beliefs is that automation is best designed after spending time working with the stakeholders. Whatever tools ego builds will not be long useful or long lasting.

Skill Areas

Professional Experience

Oracle – Principal Applications Engineer

2021 – 2025 | Cloud Infrastructure, Load Balancer Migration and Incident Management

• Maintained and enhanced Host Management System supporting deployment, failover, and disaster recovery.
• Spearheaded the migration of legacy F5 load balancers to Oracle Cloud (OCI) native solutions, building consensus across numerous teams that initially lacked internal desire for the project.
• Served as a critical liaison between disparate teams who were disinclined to interact, facilitating essential communication, engagement and negotiation among junior, senior, and management-level personnel to drive project success.
• Oversaw incident manager on-call rotation, taking ownership to identify root causes and effectively delegating tasks in unfamiliar technical domains, approaching incidents with humility and Socratic questioning.
• Demonstrated strong emotional intelligence by framing technical directions as suggestions and carefully reading team tonalities to foster collaboration during high-stress incidents.
• Some technologies used: BigIP F5 Load Balancer, OCI/Oracle Cloud, Linux, git, Docker, REST, JSON

Lumos Labs – DevOps Engineer

2020 – 2021 | AWS Infrastructure and Automation

• Built Environment Manager for on-demand AWS environments (create, suspend, snapshot, restore).
• Improved developer productivity and reduced AWS costs.
• Mediated deeply held technical disputes between factions advocating for different technology stacks, consistently emphasizing consensus and consistency over specific technical choices.
• Successfully calmed teams with strained inter-team dynamics enabling them to resume collaboration in virtual meetings and smoothing over tensions through effective conflict resolution and interpersonal communication in a fully remote environment.
• Engaged in extensive discussions with managers on larger strategic questions and organizational directions, acting as a key liaison for alignment.
• Some technologies used: Vault/Secret Management, AWS, Kubernetes, EKS, Python, Prometheus, Terraform, Pulumi, Jenkins, Linux, git, Docker, REST, JSON, YAML

Facebook – Systems Engineer (Enterprise Engineering, Traffic Team)

2018 – 2020

• Developed automated troubleshooting tools enabling company-wide self-service investigations.
• Created a global DNS replication system, collaborating with a geographically distant and initially difficult team by adopting a humble, grateful, and low-key approach to overcome initial resistance and passive-aggressive communications.
• Demonstrated high emotional intelligence and empathy by effectively managing personal emotions to build rapport and achieve project success, ultimately earning positive professional reviews from the challenging team.
• Communicated frequently with managers regarding strategic questions and organizational directions, serving as an effective liaison.
• Some technologies used: BigIP F5 Load Balancer, Terraform, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Linux, git, Docker, REST, JSON, YAML, DNS

Orbital Insight – DevOps Engineer

2017 – 2018 | Startup Environment

• Led Kubernetes proofs of concept and initiated company-wide migration.
• Modernized monitoring infrastructure from static to dynamic configs.
• Accelerated the Kubernetes adoption timeline by privately demonstrating its power to other developers, addressing their pain points, and effectively influencing management decisions to prioritize the project for substantial cost savings and improved developer deployment velocity.
• Some technologies used: Vault/Secret Management, AWS, Kubernetes, GPU Management, Python, Golang, MongoDB, Prometheus, Terraform, Jenkins, Linux, git, Docker, REST, JSON, YAML

Twitch Interactive (Amazon) – Video DevOps Engineer

2016 – 2017

• Designed and delivered SafeChange, a service protecting resources from impacting changes by ensuring safety checks (e.g., no traffic, sufficient capacity) are met before modifications, promoting technical bravery and comfort with change.
• Helped design and derive next generation operational architecture.
• Was instrumental in migrating vulnerable organizational secrets into the new, secure, organizationally approved secrets store.
• Some technologies used: Vault/Secret Management, AWS, Python, Perl, MongoDB, Prometheus, Puppet, Terraform, Jenkins, Linux, git, Docker, REST, JSON, YAML

Flux Factory – Software Engineer

2015 – 2016

• Delivered automation, security administration, and tooling for platform reliability.
• Allowed much faster builds and deployments by scaling struggling Jenkins infrastructure to multiple servers and utilized Docker for automated Selenium testing.
• Some technologies used: Golang, Perl, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Linux, git, Jenkins, Docker, Selenium, REST, JSON, YAML, MongoDB, Postgres, Google Cloud/GCP

Ariba (SAP) – Principal Software Engineer (Cloud)

2013 – 2015

• Balanced platform stability while innovating future-proof systems.
• Served as technical leader for the Tools team, successfully balancing support for antiquated, legacy systems with strategic migration to newer, mainstream technologies.
• Fostered team cohesion and morale through unconventional, self-funded team-building exercises, creating shared adversarial experiences (e.g., Halloween Fright Night) to build connectedness among colleagues.
• Assisted other teams tactically and strategically across a wide variety of operational areas and topics, demonstrating broad collaborative support.
• Some technologies used: Perl, Java, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, Apache, IRC, git, LDAP, REST, JSON, YAML, REST, OpenVPN, LDAP, MongoDB, Chef

LiveOps – Senior Operations Tools Developer

2009 – 2013

• Proactively identified and resolved unexpected database query amplification with a Ruby on Rails developer through a humble, educational, insightful, and empathetic approach, preventing conflict and strengthening inter-team collaboration.
• Acted as a liaison to improve testing accuracy by collaborating with senior application engineers to modify the database export sanitization process, preventing similar issues in the future.
• Enhanced release processes at LiveOps to enable faster and safer deployments, including creating a system to release code updates to thousands of servers in minutes.
• My primary job was to lend technical support to any other areas in Operations that needs it, including Network Engineering, Linux System Administration, Release, DBA and others.
• When there weren't pressing operational issues at hand, my go-to focus areas were monitoring and automation. The existing Nagios infrastructure was aging and very out of date. Over 12 months, I constructed a custom agent based monitoring system built with many standard technologies that had excellent and flexible configuration, correlation and escalation capabilities.
• Some technologies used: Perl, C, Java, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, MySQL, Apache, Cisco Routers, Cisco Switches, Routing, BGP, OSPF, BigIP F5 Load Balancers, IRC, git, svn, Ruby on Rails, Nagios, Graphite, JSON, YAML, OpenVPN, LDAP, REST, MongoDB, Puppet

Walmart Stores, Inc. – Advanced Network Engineer

1997 – 2009

• Co-founded Network Management team.
• Served as the primary liaison between management and the Network Management team, effectively communicating priorities and concerns, and obtaining strategic information from leadership.
• Initiated and championed the adoption of full-time remote work for a team member, years before this became common in the industry, successfully negotiating against strict corporate policies and demonstrating the viability of hybrid work models across the division.
• Fostered a strong sense of team ownership and empowered team members by delegating the design of a replacement for a critical, custom-built management system, guiding them through independent prototyping and collaborative design.
• Designed, implemented and won cross team adoption of an automated daily task list application that simplified reporting, fostered team accountability, and significantly increased individual and team productivity, which was organically adopted by other teams.
• Cultivated empathy and customer focus by instituting mandatory help desk rotations for team members, leading to valuable insights and improvements for internal customers.
• Provided permission and encouragement to team members to fail safely through experimentation, fostering a learning environment and a sense of ownership, as exemplified by encouraging a young engineer to take lead on a high visibility web project.
• Co-founded the Network Management team and led its efforts to automate management of over 150,000 network devices globally.
• Mentored and trained other young people on the programming team, delegating day-to-day and project work to manage expanding responsibilities.
• Some technologies used: Perl, C, Java, HTML, JavaScript, Linux, HPUX, Solaris, AIX, MySQL, Apache, Cisco Routers, Cisco Switches, Cisco Access Points, Routing, BGP, OSPF, Cisco Load Balancers, IRC, git, cvs, MQ Series, DB2, SNMP, ICMP, TCP/IP, DHCP/BOOTP, DNS, Frame Relay, MultiCast, SMBv2, HP Open View, HP ITO IT Operations, NerveCenter, Satellite, NetScout, VNC, Early Machine Learning

Northwest Arkansas Community College – Instructor

2002 – 2003

• Taught Linux System Administration and Perl Programming courses.
• Some technologies used: Linux, UML(User Mode Linux, early virtualization), Perl, Security

U.S. Air Force – Senior Airman, Computer Programmer

1993 – 1997

• Grew into additional leadership roles, effectively managing the data center and assisting a civilian network administrator with Unix servers, allowing him to focus on his strengths.
• Trained and delegated tasks to other young team members to manage expanding responsibilities, demonstrating early leadership and delegation abilities.
• Delivered system administration, network security, and programming in high-security environments, functioning as a broad spectrum technical expert.
• Some technologies used: C, Perl, Linux, Solaris, SCO Unix, AOS/VS, Banyan Vines, Cisco Routers, Cisco Hubs, Cisco Switches, Routing, BGP, OSPF, HP Open View, Squid Cache, HTML, JavaScript

Formal Education, newest to oldest

• OCI Architect Associate (2024)
• Neo4j training
• Puppet training
• System Management Arts In Charge (SMARTS)
• Java training
• HP OpenView training, multiple sections
• Advanced Cisco Configuration
• HP IT Operations, multiple sections
• JavaScript training
• Franklin Covey, multiple sections
• Military technical training, computer programming, at Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi, Mississippi
• Military basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas
• Minor in music composition and conducting from the same
• Most of a Computer Science BS from The California State Polytechnic University in Pomona California
• Completed secondary education at Leffingwell High School, Norwalk, California

References Available Upon Request