Experience

Senior Systems Engineer / Tech Lead

Cloudflare, 2017 - present

  • Served in various roles on the DevTools team at Cloudflare; I started as a systems engineer on the team, became Tech Lead, and then Engineering Manager, and then moved back to an individual contributor role as Tech Lead again.
  • Mentored teammates; helped engineers from other teams troubleshoot issues in their development workflows and builds; taught onboarding sessions for new engineers; gave presentations about projects I’d worked on, including engineering- and company-wide meetings; served as part of on-call rotation for our team.
  • Helped build and maintain a broad portfolio of tools and applications, all centered around providing a platform for other Cloudflare engineers to ship software and be productive, including: Git repository server, CI/CD system, Docker registry, development tools, testing environments.
  • Developed tooling and automation to operate and support these systems (observability, alerts, automation, deployments, build agent lifecycle management) and built applications to help other teams use our services (e.g., self-service build configuration).
    (Go, Python, Salt, Terraform, Prometheus, nginx, Debian Linux, Kubernetes)
  • Planned and executed multiple service migrations, upgrades, and other maintenance.
  • Created a testing & development environment framework based around VMs and containers running on Kubernetes. Crafted VM images, as well as tooling for engineers to configure and interact with test environment instances. Developed docs and ran training sessions. (Kubevirt & Kubernetes, GNU Make, Debian Linux, Salt, systemd)
  • Responsible for all aspects of the build agents used in our CI/CD sytem – automated VM image builds, and created tools for managing the lifecycle of build agents. Improved our process for testing and rolling out new agent images. (QEMU, Docker, Kubevirt, Linuxkit, TeamCity, Debian Linux, GNU Make, chroot, systemd, Python, Bash, … )
  • Created a TeamCity metrics exporter - a service that queried the TeamCity REST API to calculate and expose metrics to Prometheus. Provided better observability for our build system, gave us alerts for things like users waiting too long for their builds. (Go, Prometheus, Kubernetes, TeamCity)
  • Developed chat bot plugins to improve our incident management process. (Python, ErrBot, various third-party APIs - Google Chat, PagerDuty, Jira)

Senior Software Engineer

The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 - 2017

  • Technical lead for Web & Contract Services in ITS Applications, a team which built and maintained a variety of websites and services for large audiences and user bases, both on and off campus.
  • Built an off-campus emergency website for the university, ensuring a stable web presence for the university and allowing multiple departments to communicate with the university community in the event of a severe IT outage or physical emergency. (Puppet, Apache, Drupal, Varnish, cloud servers).
  • Designed and built a web hosting infrastructure for the university’s new Drupal-powered main website. (Puppet, Apache, Varnish, memcached, PHP)
  • Maintained a GMail sign-up portal - used Google APIs and campus directory services to allow campus users to sign up for new GMail accounts. Took ownership of vendor-developed code and provided on-going support and enhancements. (PHP, Apache, LDAP, OpenAM)
  • Maintained and administered several university-wide services, including a large WordPress Multisite instance. Developed scripts, plugins, tools, and documentation in support of these services. (PHP, Python, Puppet, Apache, Tomcat, Linux, LDAP)
  • Introduced a chatbot to the team’s Jabber room, providing JIRA issue lookup, service outage alerts, deployment notifications, bus arrival times. (Hubot, NodeJS, CoffeeScript, Docker, RSS, capmetro.org)

Firmware Engineer and Verification Engineer

IBM Microelectronics & IBM Power Systems

  • Designed, developed, and tested C++ firmware applications on an embedded Linux platform.
  • Created several tools to increase team efficiency, including a tool for hardware test automation and patch-level management (Python, PyGTK) and an IBM Sametime instant messaging plugin (Java).
  • Designed and developed test suites for chip-level and unit-level pre-silicon verification and simulation of PowerPC based chips, including XBox 360 processor and Cell processor.
  • Fully automated our team’s daily model builds. Developed scripts and tools, educated colleagues on build process and use of scripts.

Education

  • Master Science in Information Studies, School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin
    • Coursework focused on Usability, User Experience (UX), Human-Computer Interaction, Digital Libraries, and Information Architecture.
  • Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University
    • Specialization in Computer Engineering. Minor in Mathematics.

Other Interests

  • Bicycles - Pre-COVID, I would bike to work every day. Because I work from home now, I shoot for one long-ish ride every week. I have a folding bike that I sometimes take on vacation.
  • More computers - I like to experiment with self-hosted apps (currently running FreshRSS, Paperless-NGX, Linkding, HomeAssistant, SearXNG). And I try to find better ways to operate and manage those - like using Prometheus for metrics and alerting, trying to manage it all with Ansible, etc.

This resume is also available online at https://larcher.spoon.cx
Larry Archer – [email protected]