Brett Larson

Site Reliability Engineer

About Me

Hi, my name’s Brett - I’m a sysadmin / DevOps Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / NOC engineer / wanna-be programmer who lives in the Chicagoland area.

I have more than ten years of relevant experience with some of the best Managed Service providers and IT shops in the area.

My current focus is on Kubernetes, Python in the context of data science and Azure.

I am most skilled in: observability and troubleshooting complex systems.

Experience

Nielsen

nielsen.com

Site Reliability Engineer

2019 - Present

Nielsen is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides the most complete and trusted view available of consumers and markets worldwide.

  • Worked on an agile team to maintain stability for our custom-built data science platform based on industry standard open source tools.
  • Supported multiple Kubernetes environments across AWS and Azure clouds.
  • Worked closely with developers to track down bugs and commit fixes to source control.
  • Worked with data scientists to troubleshot complex data science platform issues relating to Airflow, Python, and Spark.

Rightpoint Consulting LLC

rightpoint.com

Senior DevOps / NOC Engineer

2016 - 2019

The independent customer experience agency with technology at its core.

  • Monitored cloud infrastructure using Microsoft Operations Management Suite, Application Insights, Elastic stack and New Relic tools.
  • Maintain, and support servers in Azure, AWS, Rackspace, and on-premise environments using CLI & PowerShell scripting.
  • Creating custom tailored monitoring and dashboards using Microsoft OMS to enable business / application awareness.
  • Created NOC / site reliability alerting workflows combining various monitoring endpoints into Jira Service Desk and VictorOps.
  • Utilized and re-used automation with PowerShell, Azure Functions (NodeJS) & REST APIs – committing scripts for re-use and collaboration in git.
  • Work closely with development team to support production environments of Microsoft focused CMS products such as Sitecore, utilizing tools like NewRelic APM or Microsoft AppInsights to gain deep insights into code level metrics.
  • Supported developer CI / CD tools including VSTS, TeamCity, and Octopus Deploy.
  • Leverage background in systems administration and SCCM to provide part time on-site staff augmentation support for a real estate investment management firm with $36+ billion assets under management.

SWC Technology Partners

swc.com

Consultant - Onsite-Engineering Team

2013 - 2015

SWC Technology Partners is an award-winning provider of IT solutions, bringing together the people, process and technology to deliver business value to mid-market organizations.

  • Provided 1st, 2nd and 3rd shift monitoring and consulting to various mid-market companies. Awarded employee of the month for contributions to NOC team.
  • Utilized RMM tools and scripting to automate solutions and minimize manual technician intervention.
  • Provided an escalation point of various incidents and service requests from the service desk team and within the NOC team.
  • Supported Exchange environments including highly available DAG environments.
  • Supported complex system architectures including high-availability virtual environments using VMware and Hyper-V clusters as well as virtualized workloads including Microsoft RDS, VMWare view and XenApp.
  • Worked with backup solutions including Veeam, Backup Exec and Microsoft DPM.
  • Created and implemented custom SNMP and WMI monitoring with monitoring tool Solarwinds N-Central & PRTG.
  • Assisted in a variety of projects including coordinating the RMM tool upgrades, supporting a 20+ site client’s sysadmin departure, and deploying FireEye appliances to client sites.
  • Diagnosed and resolved complex networking issues occurring on HP and Cisco switches, Cisco routers, and Palo Alto, Cisco, and Fortinet firewalls.

Education

William Rainey Harper College

A.A., Computer Science

2009 - 2011

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” ~ Mark Twain

DePaul University

Modern .NET Web Development

2019

“Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold.” – Bob Marley