Brazil

Data engineering

Development Operations

Site Reliability

Bachelor of Technology

Italo Santos

Director of Engineering

Substack

Communication

Collaboration

Problem-solving

Empathy

Leadership

Analytical skills

Cloud computing

Database management

CAD design

Python

Airflow

CircleCI

Docker

GitHub

Confluence

gRPC

REST API

PostgreSQL

Kafka

RabbitMQ

Presentation skills

Critical-thinking

Negotiation

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to identify star candidates, evaluate technical ability, and close hires

Hiring software engineers

Decision making as a software engineer or lead - how to become better at making the right choices

Making better tech choices

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

What is a successful user onboarding flow and how to achieve it?

Onboarding new users

How to successfully prepare and position yourself for a job promotion?

How to get promoted

- Work closely with the CTO to implement a platform vision, by providing clear direction and goals for the organization. This enabled us to align our efforts and focus on building a strong, unified platform that could support the needs of the entire engineering team.

- Built a product management structure on the platform team, by hiring a product manager and establishing clear product roadmaps and strategies, which enables us to better align our efforts with the needs of our customers and to focus on delivering high-quality products that met their needs. Also stepped up the transition of the infrastructure team to a platform team, by identifying key areas of opportunity and implementing measures to accelerate the transition process.

- After identify a major data analytics infrastructure problem in the organization I started to build the data platform team from scratch to address it, design the entire architecture, working closely with the teams to ensure that it met the organization's needs. The team's goal is to provide autonomy throughout a platform preserving its availability, scalability, maintainability, and safety to the entire company, to improve the quality and accuracy of our data analytics, and to make better-informed decisions based on data insights. With that, I was able to start creating a strong foundation for the organization's data-driven initiatives and to help drive better business outcomes.

- As a Director, I've worked to build strong leadership forums to discuss and decide on technical topics that impacted the entire organization. This enabled us to collaborate more effectively across teams and to make informed decisions that aligned with our overall strategic goals.

- Help the transition of the developer infrastructure team to a platform engineering team, by providing a clear vision for the team that enables a better understanding of the needs of our internal customers and prioritizes our efforts accordingly, resulting in more effective use of resources and improved product outcomes.

- As one of the technical references to the engineering teams, providing guidance and expertise on complex technical issues. I actively participated in technical discussions and helped identify best practices and new technologies, ensuring that the engineering team stayed focused on product evolution.

- Support the team on building and execute a major cost reduction plan that resulted in a 20% reduction in costs within 6 months. This involved identifying areas where we could reduce costs without sacrificing quality or customer satisfaction and implementing measures to optimize our resources and operations.

- In charge of lead a major database migration project, supporting team's plan and decisions, that involved the entire engineering team. Through careful planning and execution, we were able to split a 20TB monolith database into 6 smaller pieces without any major disruptions to service. This resulted in a significant improvement in availability, enabling our customers to access our services more reliably.

- As an interim Cybersecurity Manager, was in charge of building the security engineering team from scratch, ensuring that we had the right talent and resources to protect our organization from cyber threats. I established clear policies and procedures, working closely with the rest of the organization to ensure that everyone was aware of their roles and responsibilities when it came to cybersecurity, spinning up the Single Sign-On project to centralize all product’s authentication making a very smooth hand over to the new leadership begin a reference until the final release allowing to focus on other cybersecurity aspects

- Starts the SRE team building it from the ground up, which requires identifying the necessary skill sets, defining job roles and responsibilities, and creating a hiring plan to also scale the team to meet the growing needs of the business, doubling the size of the team within two years. This built a strong SRE culture, encouraging collaboration, and knowledge sharing which makes the team became known for its strong culture of excellence and accountability.

- As a manager, I focused on mentoring and coaching the team to help them reach their full potential providing regular feedback and support, and helping team members to identify areas for improvement which helps the team members to develop their technical skills and advance their careers. Besides that I was able to provide technical guidance and expertise to the team, serving as a reference for complex technical issues.

- Through the establishment of effective monitoring and incident response processes, the team was able to significantly reduce the number of major outages by implementing a data-driven approach to incident response and conducting regular post-mortems.

- Lead the effort to modernize the company's infrastructure to improve observability, reliability, and productivity together with the CTO, to provide a strategic plan to move 100% of the IaaS infrastructure to PaaS solution implementing a well-defined solution using Kubernetes together with Istio as a service mesh, we were able to streamline operations resulting in faster deployments and improved system performance.

- Design a comprehensive observability strategy, which included the use of monitoring tools, log analysis, and alerting systems which allowed quickly detecting and responding to issues, reducing the MTTD, as a consequence the MTTR, improving system reliability.

- As part of the first 5 members of the newly-formed SRE team, we work mainly in establishing the SRE culture, working closely with the team to promote collaboration, knowledge sharing, and ownership, setting the foundation for a strong and effective team culture.

- I played a key role in improving the incident response process, by establishing clear procedures and best practices for responding to incidents. This included identifying and addressing areas of weakness in the existing process, such as the lack of documentation and the need for more streamlined communication channels.

- Reduce the main infrastructure cost, planning a better storage segmentation to improve space savings in ~40%.
- Team principal  in new storage solution implementation, applying vendor best practices to improve the cloud solution in 2x.
- Lead migration plan of Openstack solution from current storage cluster to the new, focused in reduce the migration time and outage.
- Work close to cloud engineering team planning improvements and new solutions on storage perspective.
- Build tools to troubleshoot complex performance issues.
- Automate capacity plan reports improving managers visibility.

- Lead technical team to improve availability and stability of current storage infrastructure.
- Increase performance by 30% by balancing the capacity by applying vendor best practices.
- Research a new Petabyte storage solution purchase to keep the company growing, balance the cost/benefit and performance.
- Reduced the MTTR in major production issues, deep understanding of the entire stack with the engineering team.
- Automate repetitive and dangerous operations to improve reliability, avoid outages and keep the team speed in repetitive tasks.

Implement a replicated storage infrastructure to support backup environment using EMC Isilon and Avere Edge Filer

- Keep up and running ~20PB storage servers based in OpenSolaris + ZFS, implementing automation for disk replacement, iSCSI LUNs creation and datasets creation capacity planning, monitoring and system upgrades.
- Build and control migration process of a scale-out storage environment to linux share hosting infrastructure with more them 100 web servers and 80k web sites.
- Architect and implement a storage infrastructure solution for cloud virtualization environment using Avere FXT series and EMC Isilon solution to support more them 3k virtual machines.
- Implement SMB 3.0 solution using EMC Isilon integrated with Active Directory to support a new windows shared hosting environment.
- Build and administrating multiple object storage clusters used in a backup solution product and email logs archive using Ceph + RadosGW exposing S3 protocol.

- Support email infrastructure monitoring a 1M+ accounts environment based in Qmail + Courier.
- Migration to a new solution based on Postfix + Dovecot which improves performance and resiliency in 20%.
- Working together with development team in migration process to a new email environment based in a proprietary solution named CommuniGate.
- Implement a monitoring infrastructure to keep more them 3000 hosts and network assets using Zabbix 1.8.
- Create basic templates and scripts used to monitoring different environments.

- Lead support team with ~15 analysts which help costumers with email product configuration issues, connectivity issues and all support matters improving support analysts efficiency.
- Monitoring incoming calls to control agent's TMA less than 10 minutes to keep the queue waiting time low.

Italo Santos🇧🇷