ben house

devops engineer

About

I'm an engineer at heart that enjoys problem solving. This has led me to professional experience in technical operations roles at the enterprise scale as well as an emerging startup. I'm committed to improving the landscape of operations internally and externally through the pursuits of infrastructure automation, knowledge sharing, team culture, personal skill improvement, and experimentation. Specifically I enjoy writing command line tools, configuration management code, abstraction libraries, and the challenge that is infrastructure test code. I enjoy being involved day-to-day with incident response, developer happiness, deep-dive troubleshooting, and code review. I've had a combative history with monitoring, mainly nagios, and am interested in it's consistent improvement as a means of operator safety and stress reduction.

Country

united states

City

oakland

Industry

political organization

Skill

linux, unix, dns, shell scripting, cloud computing, puppet, red hat linux, devops, python, nagios, ruby, perl, bash, mysql, cobbler, automation, chef, high availability, scalability, amazon web services, domain name system, apache, web applications

Experience

devops engineer

democratic national committee

2019-11 - Present · 6 yrs 11 mos

staff engineer

zendesk

2015-12 - 2017-5 · 1 yr 6 mos

senior devops engineer

zendesk

2014-7 - 2015-12 · 1 yr 6 mos

devops engineer

zendesk

2013-1 - 2014-7 · 1 yr 7 mos

Learning about operating a web application while scaling out a complex infrastructure. Leveraging more open source software and picking up best practices along the way. Day-to-Day operation of Rails, Chef, AWS, Redis, Nginx, MySQL, CDN's, syslog-ng, and picking up Ruby along the way.

systems engineer

verisign

2005-6 - 2013-1 · 7 yrs 8 mos

Super cool job being a part of the Operations team responsible for maintaining TLD's such as .com, .net, .gov, .edu, as well as a.root-servers.net and j.root-servers.net. Also managed the DNS Root Zone which is terrifying. One of the coolest things we did was signing the root zone with DNSSec, followed by .com and .net, in response to the Kaminsky attack. A little puppet automation, lots of travel building out colo facilities, and learning how to run a very stable, large scale piece of internet infrastructure.