sdmouton@devops.christmas

Shaun Mouton

SUMMARY

As I grow in my engineering career, I find that my passions and strengths lie in a few overlapping areas: communication, process improvement, and building learning organizations. I help teams improve communication and cross-domain collaboration by identifying shared pain points and solving them together. I focus on improving developer feedback loops, streamlining artifact promotion processes, and evangelizing stable and secure engineering patterns to improve operational reliability. I bring extensive experience in improving knowledge transfer, so context and knowledge is shared between teams.

Languages

Ruby, Python, Java, Go, Rust, Bash.

Tools

Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Azure, AWS, Docker, K8s.

EXPERIENCE

Mastercard — Principal Software Development Engineer

Jan 2021 - Present

Describe and inform platform strategy at the enterprise level for new initiatives and maintenance work related to CI/CD, Configuration as Code, and Performance Engineering.
Drive improvements for build & release engineering work: design, deliver, and secure common pipelines and workflows for delivering code written across the enterprise from sandbox to production environments.
Own automation frameworks platforms, their usability, and consult to expand their use.

ID.me — Platform Architect

June 2020 - Dec 2020

Guided team of 40 engineers on how to scale their Rails application to handle active user spikes of over 300x compared to its designed capacity.
Advised leadership on modern operational, security, and software engineering patterns.

Chef — Sr. Customer Reliability Engineer

2017 - 2021

Restructured US-based team of 7 support staff providing 24x7x365 support, augmenting with 5 offshore staff to provide follow-the-sun support with minimal staffing cost increase.
Built common processes for supporting customers, documenting solutions, and escalating issues to engineering.
Built common tooling for improving customer outcomes via standardized log collection and statistical analysis.
Built a recommendation library based on the above results which directed customers to right-size their deployments and decreased configuration-related downtime.

Kasasa — Senior Cloud Systems Engineer

2016 - 2017

Designed & implemented processes for migrating datacenter applications to AWS using Puppet and Terraform.
Consolidated bespoke multi-vendor networking stack to Juniper and untangled application logic from network rules.
Mentored engineers in agile software development and devops practices.

W2O Group — Devops Engineer

2015 - 2016

Drove a 20% reduction in hosting spend by migrating applications from manually managed colocated provider infrastructure to Chef-managed AWS, and moving Wordpress site hosting to managed Wordpress.
Developed an internally-managed Elasticsearch platform with segregation for petabyte-scale data warehousing, public-facing application search, and internal development use.

City of Austin — Sr. Systems Engineer

2011 - 2015

Championed the effort to shift to agile software development methodologies, devops philosophies, common CI pipelines, and configuration as code.
Mentored engineers and department leadership on agile software development, devops practices, healthy infrastructure management and software development patterns.

Conferences, SIGs, etc

I speak at conferences and write content for the community in areas related to my professional areas of focus. You can find a selection of my work here: https://moutons.github.io/speaker-info/

I am an active participant in my professional community. I am a co-chair of DevOpsDays Austin as of 2023, have been an organizer since 2020, and have volunteered with the conference since 2014. I co-founded the Austin Puppet User Group in 2013. I have been a volunteer or organizer for the Austin DevOps meetup and Cloud Austin meetup since 2012.

EDUCATION

The Evergreen State College, Olympia WA

2004 - 2008

Evening and weekend study focusing on Computational Linguistics, 4 credits shy of a degree as I lost my consulting business when markets tightened in 2008