Chas Berndt

Senior DevOps Engineer in Atlanta, GA.

Summary

Experienced DevOps engineer with over a decade of experience architecting and maintaining scalable and composable systems and processes. Experience in managing requirements and integrations as well as writing software, shipping software, architecting infrastructure on-prem and on cloud with a particular focus on observability and tools/processes involved in the SDLC.

Technical Skills

Work History

Airia

DevOps Engineer

July 2024 – Present

• Designed and implemented observability for Airia and its underlying infrastructure, leveraging Azure Monitor, Azure Prometheus, self-hosted scalable Loki, and Grafana for dashboarding and alerts.
• Designed and implemented a custom Prometheus exporter to handle testing the performance and availability of Airia.
• Designed, implemented, and documented Airia's incident management process including how we swarm issues, communicate with our customers during and after an incident, and handle RCCAs.
• Made key architecture decisions regarding Airia infrastructure, ensuring simple scalability that's automated within sensible guardrails. Also made decisions on the tech stack needed to test deploying our product onto customers' infrastructure of choice.
• Constantly focused on cloud costs, which has resulted in a >20% reduction in monthly cloud spend.

VMware

Sr. Member of Technical Staff, Central Engineering

August 2017 – June 2024

• Responsible for creation, maintenance, and security of build infrastructure leveraged by thousands of engineers and associated tools such as SCM, build orchestrators, artifact repository managers, etc. Collaborate with teams on best practices implementing CI and leveraging Git effectively. Act as a mentor and trusted consultant to fellow engineers.
• Built dashboards and alerts for internal applications using Wavefront increasing insight into application health, reducing MTTR and unscheduled outages by <50%.
• Led management, documentation, and best practices for multiple internal applications including Bamboo, Bitbucket, and Artifactory.
• Designed multiple application architecture overhauls of internal applications including database migrations, storage migrations, and network cutovers.
• Automated dozens of manual processes for handling common alerts and issues encountered across internal applications as a series of Jenkins jobs which can be invoked by fellow team mates or via REST, allowing alerting to trigger clean up processes without direct involvement to on-call administrators.
• Built comprehensive reporting tools for managing Github user activity, allowing the reclamation of hundreds of license seats across multiple enterprise accounts, reducing license cost by several hundred thousand dollars a year.
• Built custom Prometheus exporter that was designed to run within build data centers to monitor for availability of dependent resources such as source control, file shares, DNS, etc. that cause builds to fail intermittently, aiming to reduce MTTR and more quickly pinpoint whether issues are isolated to one or more data centers or are common across the entire organization.

VMware

Member of Technical Staff, EUC Engineering Services

July 2014 – August 2017

• Responsible for creation, maintenance, and security of build infrastructure leveraged by thousands of engineers and associated tools such as SCM, build orchestrators, artifact repository managers, etc. Collaborate with teams on best practices implementing CI and leveraging Git effectively.
• Designed and implemented automated process to create, validate, and replace large scale deployment Windows Servers, reducing time to make changes to cluster from multiple days to <6 hours and entirely seamlessly from end users perspective.
• Build code review process for the largest repository ensuring that all code paths had coverage and SMEs were alerted to incoming changes.
• Designed process to make adhoc changes to large Windows Server clusters, reducing time to apply break-fixes and patches from multiple hours to <30 minutes.
• Drove multiple migrations to Git including repository migration, training, CI/CD pipeline cutovers from TFS, Perforce, and Subversion. Wrote custom tools where needed to ensure migrations were well tested, repeatable, and reversible.
• Standardized documentation and worked with the team to ensure they were comprehensive, searchable, and digestible to new team members.
• Evangelized standards on code review process, ensuring that changes are tested, reviewed, and approved by fellow engineers, increasing velocity and trust within the teams.

VMware

Product Management

June 2013 – July 2014

• Led technical integrations with third-party identity and security infrastructure partners.
• Invented and patented a novel approach to securely distribute mobile certificates via SCEP.
• Collaborated with customers and partners to deliver and support robust technical solutions.
• Defined and documented solution designs, workflows, and training materials to support implementation.
• Conducted research and translated customer needs into actionable requirements and project plans.

AirWatch

Quality Assurance Engineer

July 2012 – June 2013

• Managed software quality through comprehensive test planning, bug tracking, and process documentation.
• Contributed to internal knowledge sharing by building documentation and evaluating company-wide tools.
• Developed scripts and automation tools to streamline test environments and deployment workflows.
• Performed integration and security testing across various enterprise systems and mobile platforms.
• Facilitated shift from waterfall to agile by assisting with implementation and team training.

References

References available upon request.