Kyle Leaders

Technical Engineering Leader

I'm an experienced technology leader with a passion for people and delivering value to customers. I strongly believe healthy teams, with built-in continuous improvement processes, will evolve to meet any challenge.

At Avvo I run the Data Engineering and Infrastructure teams. My teams are organized around customer service and delivering value in short cycle times. I was adamant that we do this by focusing on Product development best practices like creating MVPs, and shortening the feedback cycle.

I'm seeking challenging opportunities to grow teams and build great products. I love mentoring managers and engineers, since I view personal development as one of my core values.

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager

Avvo, Inc.

May 2012 - Now

I'm in charge of Infrastructure and Data Engineering at Avvo. My teams are responsible for AWS, Hadoop, Docker (Rancher), MySQL, and Postgres. My team owns deployment data ingestion, ETL, internal tooling, as well as shared core services. My teams are cohesive and multi-disciplinary, composed of DevOps/SREs, Data Engineers, and Full Stack Developers.

  • In one year, my teams:
    • Reduced laptop-to-production times for new services from over 2 weeks to under 15 minutes.
    • Minimized webservice deployment times from 40 minutes to under 5 with a 95% average success rate
    • Scaled deployments per day from under 1 to over 20
    • Supported the explosion of microservices from 6 to over 40 in production.
  • Manage a $5 million dollar budget
  • Currently leading the project to rearchitect our big data pipeline using AWS Serverless technology
  • Implemented a new diskless micros-OS based PXE booting architecture in order to bring Cloud-like flexibility to our data center
  • I Lead the creation of our declarative Platform as a Service deployment model to allow quick microservice development

Linux Systems Administrator

McGraw-Hill Center for Digital Innovation

February 2008 - May 2012

  • Designed and built 2 separate scaling cloud architectures for web applications required to support millions of users
  • Chief consultant for cloud architecture proof of concepts for several divisions of McGraw-Hill including Standard and Poors
  • Responsible for the maintenance of 36 physical servers, and 2 different scalable cloud architectures
  • Responsible for several sites that each receive 2 million or more hits per day
  • On call 24 hours a day for emergency and crisis management
  • Set up and maintain cloud and physical architecture using Chef for configuration management

Professional Services Engineer

The Planet Internet Services

July 2006 - December 2007

  • Created several web based tools to remotely administer servers more quickly
  • The highest level technical escalation for all customer issues
  • Meet with management to discuss customer support issues and advise on policy changes
  • Oversee and troubleshoot the Automated Provisioning system
  • Monitor and report daily on current orders, ensuring that they are delivered in a timely manner