Vern Burton

Personal Statement

As an experienced engineer, I seek to use my technical expertise paired with my business knowledge to drive for the best outcome of the customer. Everything we do is for our customers, and realizing that is an important step in any engineer’s career. When we attempt to mitigate risk from our activities, we are attempting to ensure that we aren’t negatively impacting the customer’s experience. Communication is the gateway to helping mitigate a lot of risk, but also to create the best outcomes for our customers. Almost 90 percent of leaders believe that risk is only going to get more complex or greater in scale. Communication is an easy way to ensure risk reduction during a time when risk is growing more complex.

Education

2016-2017
Master of Business Administration; Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota

Focus: Data Analytics

2011-2015
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science; Minnesota School of Business

Major: Networking & Security

Experience

Staff Engineer, Cloud & Platform, Best Buy April 2021 - Present

Previous Titles: Engineer II (2017-2020), Sr Engineer (2020-2021)

  • Partner with technical leaders to plan, design, and scale projects and initiatives.
  • Designed, planned, and implemented solutions for a multi-account, multi-region AWS architecture
  • Planned and implemented foundational pieces of a rehosting and refactoring project.
  • Mentored engineers through skill development and designing goal-oriented behaviors.

DevOps Engineer - Contract, Best Buy February 2016 - June 2017

  • Worked with responsible downstream partners to plan, implement and test a physical to virtual migration of an application.
  • Architected and implemented an API Gateway to serve as authentication and authorization layer for the previously mentioned application.
  • Created visualizations and dashboards to mentor real-time understanding of the current state of the environment

DevOps Engineer, Sportsdigita May 2015 - February 2016

  • Updated development processes to maximize availability while support ensuring the ability to drive value.
  • Developed system automation to standardize environments and enabled next generation planning of the platform
  • Mentored engineers through listening and encouraging

Sr. Device Cloud Engineer, Digi International Inc. October 2014 - May 2015

  • Proactively monitoring cloud implementation and working on ensuring maximum up-time of front-end and data durability of the back-end.
  • Used of Puppet as configuration management, and using r10k to deploy multiple environments that allows for maximum flexibility for testing to ensure that configurations are working before they hit a stage or production environment.
  • UseD of Freight and Capistrano tool-sets for deployments and task automation to ensure that group doesn’t work on repetitive tasks too much.
  • Working with Development group to ensure all releases go out smoothly to ensure minimal or no downtime to a solution.
  • Use of Bamboo for building artifacts so that multiple environments can be deployed with a single artifacts in a near identical manner.
  • Working with Cassandra which includes backups, and planning for the future so that we can grow at any scale that would be needed.
  • I have started to bring in a RACI matrix to bring an understanding across teams, and to bring accountability to each team so that we can understand what each does and this allows for easier resolution as everyone knows what they do.

Systems Engineer, Olson February 2014 - October 2014

  • I was responsible for designing, implementing, and maintain hosting environments that met or exceeded client expectations.
  • I maintained a full suite of Atlassian products (Jira, Bamboo, Stash, FishEye) to the most current versions and implementing a read-only authentication depending on Active Directory.
  • Worked with key people in the organization to update the current SDLC to work for all parts of the organization.
  • Worked to consolidate all development efforts into a single version control system.
  • Worked on implementing a cluster to create a vast array of metrics that the organization can track.
  • Created deployment automation to ensure that deployments were able to occur when they were requested.
  • Ensured that all systems met or exceeded requirements required by SSAE 16 Type II audit as well as internal Sarbanes-Oxley controls.

Linux Systems Administrator, Kaplan University - School of Professional and Continuing Education March 2013 - February 2014

  • I was responsible for management of Linux assets in a number of environments.
  • Managed Cisco CSS as well as Cisco ASA.
  • I was responsible for the continued development of the current platform to provide more visibility in the data, as well as the performance of all data that was to pass through the systems on a daily basis.
  • I work with other departments to ensure all assets that worked with my machines will operate at peak performance.
  • I worked with enabling a log shipping solution like Splunk that allows for more timely response for issues, it allows issues with be tracked before enough clients can report issues, and minimizing downtime. This solution depended on open source software so it had no licensing costs helping the organization to save money.
  • I implemented Puppet in a master/client setup to minimize the amount of time spent managing a server’s day to day requirements and more time on strengthening the environment and creating solutions and automation where it was needed.
  • I was responsible for creation and maintenance of Perl and Python scripts that were used for deployment of code to multiple machines in multiple environments, as well as for backups.
  • Ensured that all systems met or exceeded Sarbanes-Oxley requirements required by publicly traded organizations.

Technical Experience

Open Source
Test Kitchen: Worked with members to review life cycle hooks lexicon which allowed for customers to inject behaviors at supported points.

Cinc: Assist with various development tasks regarding the repacking of

Tools
Chef: Created site cookbooks and various other cookbooks to automate configuration management

Ansible: Created playbooks to take services out of the load balancer and check healh-check of various applications.

Elasticsearch/Kibana/Logstash: Used docker to better replicate production configurations and developed pipelines in Logstash to accelerate event ingestion as well as ruby scripts to test event formatting

Jenkins: created Jenkinsfiles to automatically test chef cookbooks using Test-Kitchen & Inspec as well as testing gems that developed

Programming Languages
Ruby: Created custom gems leveraging various SDKs (AWS, Infoblox, Venafi, ServiceNow) to facilitate process automation and standardized management.

Go: Created sign-in portals that ensured that users are properly authenticated.

Python: Used freight to create deployment pipelines.

PHP: Developed and scaled e-commerce sites using Magento

Basic knowledge of Java, Groovy, Powershell, R