Casey Ransom

#

Senior Devops Engineer,  Elevate Labs (Mindsnacks)

September 2023 —  Present   9 months

Reduced build time and increased robustness of CI processes for backend services and mobile app deployments.

• As the first operations position hire in the company, brought mail delivery standards up to current best practices.
• Streamlined the process of software dependency management to unify toolchains used in development and CI, using Nix.
• Transitioned monitoring to Datadog for backend service monitoring, including deep monitoring for Postgresql to discover unoptomized queries and tune databases.

#

Infrastructure Engineer,  Holdings, Inc

December 2022 —  March 2023   3 months

Planned and built infrastructure from the ground up for a promising startup.

• Built and deployed a fully autoscaling CI and CD system using BuildKite, Terraform, and NixOS using fully baked AMI disk images.
• Deployed single sign on authentication across the org to minimize account sprawl maintenance and ease user management. Integrations included Cloudflare and AWS with granular permissions for both technical and non technical staff.

#

Infrastructure And Backend Principal Engineer,  Daily Kos

January 2017 —  December 2022   6 years

Worked in a small team to improve an AWS based infrastructure by lowering costs and improving stability.

• Converted an Ubuntu Chef/Capistrano based deployment system over to a NixOS based system using the Hydra CI server. Lowered ASG scale-out times from 10 minutes to less than 1 minute while eliminating outages from failed deployments and severely dropping costs by fully utilizing spot instances.
• Migrated developers (macOS environment, Ruby and NodeJS) from a manual Homebrew setup to a fully managed, declarative and repeatable development environment with Nix.
• Used a mix of Terraform and other in-house scripts, standardized staging and production environments previously managed by hand.
• Continual tuning and performance tuning of backend systems (Varnish/Nginx/Autoscaling Groups) to maximize resource usage on the backend while minimizing request latency.

#

Chief Skeptic,  Referential Labs

October 2016 —  November 2017   a year

Referential Labs assisted clients who were unable to support a full time operations staff to make educated decisions about infrastructure planning, deployment, and maintenance. I supported clients on an as-needed basis around scalable, highly available infrastructure.

• Planned, deployed, and supplied documentation for a centralized logging system to accelerate problem resolution in a multi-tenant, containerized environment.
• Performance analysis of deployed instances and recommended changes to optimize cost of evironments.
• Recommended possible vendors and technologies to use for low cost, robust business operations.

#

Senior Network Engineer,  Lookout Mobile Security

January 2015 —  October 2016   2 years

Leveraging my network skills to join the physical data center and the cloud, I also applied my background towards Linux automation and delivering other highly scalable, globally available services.

• Heavily involved in infrastructure automation which was the basis for our Jenkins, Gerrit, Conjur, Elastic Search, etc deployments.
• Maintained and eventually migrated the Juniper (EX, SRX, MX) powered data center into the AWS cloud.
• Designed and implemented high availability, open source, Linux based routing, firewalling, and VPN solutions to interconnect cloud environments and the data center. Using AWS APIs, bash, and Ansible scripting, deployments would automatically build VPC VPNs and configure BGP associations without manual intervention.
• Evaluated competing cloud solutions to filter out unsuitable candidates due to imposed network constraints.
• Implemented a central authentication service from Conjur that tied together PAM and LDAP based logins into Active Directory for a single identity between servers and other services.
• On-call responsibilities and final point of escalation for data platform services.
• Thanks to Lookout's open source policies, contributed back to the OSS community as much work as possible. Several modules and packages have been contributed to the NixOS project.

#

Senior Network Engineer,  Jive Software

October 2013 —  December 2014   a year

Maintained and scaled network infrastructure for US and EU data centers, as well as developed network automation tools to empower the NOC to perform regular maintenance.

• Network automation using ruby and the Juniper XML API enabling the NOC and other junior administrators to perform VPN resets and change VLANs on network ports in a safe, restricted manner.
• Designed and implemented a configuration backup system in Ruby for our Juniper, F5, and Cisco devices pushing configurations directly to a version control system to track changes across the environment.
• Deployed netflow collection across all layer 3 devices for better understanding of traffic flow and growth patterns and to assist in security audits.
• Troubleshot and remediated scaling issues with 10,000+ plus servers in a mixed bare-metal and VMware based environment.
• Deployed a BGP anycast network for services deployed in multiple data centers for HA and DR purposes.

#

Network Engineer,  Mozilla Corporation

January 2012 —  October 2013   2 years

Built and maintained our own MPLS network between US and EU data centers and streamlined network operations with JunOS scripting and OSS technologies.

• Deployed netflow and sflow collectors in a Juniper environment for performance and security analysis.
• Consolidated data centers and deployed an MPLS ring allowing high speed, redundant access between data centers.
• Wrote JunOS automation scripts to extend functionality of the Juniper configuration syntax on SRX firewalls using Slax
• Designed and implemented network wide log and metric collection via ELK (Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana). Centralized metrics collection (SNMP) was deprecated and each machine sent metrics via the logging channel and stored in Graphite

#

Senior Network Engineer,  Tivo

April 2009 —  December 2011   3 years

Major design and hardware refreshes brought cost savings and greater infrastructure flexibility to the Tivo network.

• Reduced network complexity by streamlining network paths, removing needlessly redundant firewalls. Converted from multiple Cisco 6500s, in both the office and production environment), to Juniper EX switches which reduced cabling cost while adding great bandwidth availability and flexibility.
• Refreshed Aruba wireless infrastructure with Trapeze networks which included geolocation ability to better restrict network access and troubleshoot coverage issues by users.
• Designed and deployed a redundant site to site IPSEC VPN infrastructure using BGP anycast to Tivo business partners. The VPNs could survive complete data center outages and since Tivo made extensive use of RFC1918 space, used multiple routing tables and Arin allocated address space to avoid IP conflicts.

#

Senior Network Engineer,  Omniture (now Adobe)

September 2006 —  April 2009   3 years

Scaled and maintained a large, highly available network serving 50,000 customers out of 4 data centers in 2 countries.

• Chatops before it was in vogue. RT (ticketing) and Nagios were controllable via IRC for visibility into day to day operations.
• Rebuilt monitoring infrastructure built on Nagios which included integrated metrics collection, automatic discovery of services per host, deployed redundantly to ensure that a single host failing over night would still page.
• Deployed DNS and BGP based high availability for east and west coast data centers for 99.999% availability.

#

Network Support Engineer,  iNoc, Inc

September 2004 —  September 2006   2 years

First and second level escalations for networking monitoring center serving hundreds of customers with diverse environments.

• Provided TAC services for Marconi Networks and Flexlight Networks. Second level support for regional ISPs, including Cable providers.
• Ticketed and tracked outages in a 24x7 environment.

#

Systems Administrator,  Bonded Fibers Midwest

April 1999 —  January 2009   10 years

General administration for FreeBSD and Windows systems in an office environment

• Built and maintained network hardware, Windows based file servers, and FreeBSD mail (IMAP/SMTP) servers for a small group of corporate users.

#

Computer Science, Bachelor

2000  —  2004   4 years

University of Wisconsin

• Operating Systems Development
• Networking Development
• Information Technology Security
• Algorithm Analysis

#

Using random forests to model cold stun syndrome events in sea turtles in North Carolina , Journal of Fish and Wildlife Management

Published on: Dec 01, 2020

As a coauthor, I leveraged my skills in data gathering and data exploration to facilitate statistical modeling of sea turtle cold-stunning events based on oceanic and meteorological patterns. The research's goal was to determine if weather patterns could more accurately predict the likelihood and size of cold stun syndrome events.