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 Wal-Mart 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:  TODO: change this: 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 into 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 Wal-Mart, 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 stake-holders. 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

• Migrated from legacy F5 load balancers to Oracle Cloud (OCI) native solutions.
• Maintained and enhanced Host Management System supporting deployment, failover, and disaster recovery.
• Participated in incident manager on-call, where I was able to troubleshoot and minimize various production impacting incidents.

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.

Facebook – Systems Engineer (Enterprise Engineering, Traffic Team)

2018 – 2020

• Created real-time global load balancing replication system.
• Developed automated troubleshooting tools enabling company-wide self-service investigations.

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.

Twitch Interactive (Amazon) – Video DevOps Engineer

2016 – 2017

• Designed next-gen video delivery architecture.
• Built automated tooling to protect production from destabilizing changes.

Flux Factory – Software Engineer

2015 – 2016

• Delivered automation, security administration, and tooling for platform reliability.

Ariba (SAP) – Principal Software Engineer (Cloud)

2013 – 2015

• Led Tools team through migration from legacy to modern technologies.
• Balanced platform stability while innovating future-proof systems.

LiveOps – Senior Operations Tools Developer

2009 – 2013

• Built monitoring, release management, and automation tools.
• Supported Linux, database, and network operations.

Walmart Stores, Inc. – Advanced Network Engineer

1997 – 2009

• Co-founded Network Management team.
• Delivered UNIX sysadmin, database administration, compliance, and security leadership.

NorthWest Arkansas Community College – Instructor

2002 – 2003

• Taught Linux System Administration and Perl Programming courses.

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

1993 – 1997

• Delivered system administration, network security, and programming in high-security environments.

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