Elbert Lai

Joining via acquisition, I was the architect and implementor of the migration process to determine what technologies to combine or migrate and to where. It was a good opportunity to lay out the future of the development technology stack for the BU. Once that process was finished and handed off, I still maintained ownership over source code management, participated in devops standups and initiatives, and joined an innovation team to explore more product-focused initiatives. Duties there included building prototypes and delivering the results of our R&D efforts through presentations to the key stakeholders. In my various roles, I interfaced directly with senior management, the development team at large, and the product and project management teams.

I was the first SRE/DevOps hire. When I joined the organization there was literally only one EC2 instance in AWS, so I focused on aspects of the business other than ops until we needed a proper infrastructure buildout. - I ported our product into the android emulator. This was not simply a matter of launching an apk through the emulator. The company modified the AOSP code to incorporate deep OS enhancements, so thte goldfish image for the android emulator itself needed to be updated with our changes. - I built the entirety of the dev, staging, and production clusters, including monitoring and alerting, automatoin, and data security. - I enforced best practices and mentored junior staff. - I wore my IT hat when necessary: user devices, office peripherals, server room, cabling.

I was the first SRE hire, and I inherited developer-built infrastructure. My first priorities were to fix the blindspots in product monitoring, implement proper configuration management, standardize server configurations, perform a security audit (plus fix any reported vulnerabiltiies), and control the AWS provider costs. After that, I next focused on post-sales customer support. On-premise installations had long been a painful issue simply because the installation tools were brittle and only worked properly in known controlled environments. I worked with customers and post-sales installation engineers to determine their needs, then used those findings to improve the set of tools available, including giving them the ability to easily aduit an environment before attempting an installation to give a simple Go/No-Go report on whether an installation would be successful, and why not. This naturally fell into a product feedback loop to the dev team to build features that would improve the customer installation experience without compromising our security standards. Finally, I built a dashboard with Django to provide insights into the usage of the product. This directly provided answers to individuals focused on sales, post sales, and Business Insights.