IT Management and Architecture Expert with 14+ Years of IT & Development Engineering Experience | Top 1% on Upwork | +7000 Hours on the Platform | Leading Cloud & Development Solutions for Diverse Industries and Clients:
Hi, my name is Don. I am a fractional CTO, senior level Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect, and Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert with a strong engineering background. I'm a member of the Expert-Vetted Talent program for Upwork enterprise clients which represents the top 1% of talent on the platform, and have been pre-screened by Upworks Talent Managers and experts in my field.
I've worked with with small businesses, startups, and Fortune 500 companies like IBM and CDW, as well as leaders in national telecom, oil & gas, retail, media, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and finance industries worldwide. Meanwhile I have experience in multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, end-to-end project deliveries, DevOps, infrastructure as code, cloud engineering, application development, machine learning & LLMs, design, systems & network engineering, data engineering, and information security.
I graduated with honors (3.64 GPA) in 2012 from Information Technology and Applied Systems at Vancouver Island University. I believe in equality in the workplace and was recognized by the Salvation Army for volunteer work with marginalized groups. I was also selected to assist the Governor General of Canada early on in my career while I was employed by VIU.
I assure a strong work ethic and a high level of integrity. Your project's success matters to me.
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Common Skills / Search Keywords
✔ Executive Management:
Teams: 1 - 20 people, with multiple teams in parallel
Operations: Process oriented organizations, best practices, security minded culture, discovering/solving problems, SOP, SoW
Talent Acquisition: Hiring entire teams, introducing a tier hiring model to reduce costs
PM: Trello, Monday, Jira, Confluence, Gantt charts,
✔ Architect Skills:
Project Consultation, SoW, Architectural Diagrams, Lucid Charts, team mentorship
✔ GCP Skills:
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Terragrunt, Terratest
Data Engineering: BigQuery, Dataflow, Dataproc, Dataprep,
VMs: Compute Engine, Instance Groups
PAAS: App Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Functions
Networking: VPC Networks, Load Balancers, Cloud Armor, Cloud Networking, Cloud Routers, App Armor, GCP Firewall
SQL & NoSQL Databases: Cloud SQL, Big Query, Spanner, BigTable, Datastore / Firestore
Development: GCP Cloud API integrations, Go, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, JSON, Java, Python, Bash/Shell, SQL, NoSQL, HTML, CSS3, YAML
Firebase: Cloud Functions, Firebase Realtime Database
AI: Vertex AI, Chat Bison, Langchain, Streamlit, Cloud Vision, Document AI
Integrations: EventArc, Workflows, Cloud Workstations
Storage: Cloud Storage, Cloud Filestore
Monitoring: Stackdriver, GCP Logging
DevOps: Terraform, Kubernetes Engine, Anthos, Rafay, Ci/CD
Other: Google CLI (gcloud),, Pub/Sub (aka pubsub), IAM Security & Identity
✔ Azure Skills:
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform
Governance: Azure Active Directory, Azure IAM, Azure Policy, Domain Controllers
Data Engineering: Azure Event Grid, Azure Event Hub, Azure Synapse Analytics
PaaS: Azure App Service, Azure SQL, Azure Functions, Azure API Management, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Logic Apps
Networking: vNet, Load Balancers, Azure Firewall, Azure DNS, Azure ExpressRoute,
SQL & NoSQL Databases: Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure SQL / SQL MI, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse Analytics
DevOps: Azure DevOps
Security: Azure Key Vault
Monitoring: Azure Monitor
Disaster Recovery: Azure Site Recovery
✔ AI Skills:
Bittensor, Custom LLM, RAG Model, Langchain, Vertex AI, Azure AI architectures, ChatGPT
✔ Computer Security
ISO 27001, CIS, SOC 2, active DDoS attack response, Linux OS hardening
✔ Other Skills:
Data Engineering: ETL Pipelines, SQL, NoSQL, Data Warehousing, database design, data ingestion pipelines
Development: Backend & Frontend, Application, Systems, API
Languages: Go, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, JSON, Java, Python, Bash/Shell, SQL, NoSQL, HTML, CSS3, YAML, GCP Cloud API integrations.
AWS: AWS Instances, Elastic Block Store, Network & Security
Virtualization: VMware, Virtualbox (since 2011)
Linux: Red Hat (RHEL), Debian/Ubuntu, CentOS, Amazon Linux 2, HAProxy Load Balancing, LAMP/LEMP, Apache Nutch & Solr, Nginx, DHCP, SMTP, DNS, email servers, Bash & Python scripting, kernel updates, iptables, advanced network configuration, deployment & maintenance
Windows: Windows Server domain controllers, Active Directory, Exchange, LDAP, DNS, DHCP, SharePoint, IIS, failover clusters, virtual & bare metal environments
Networks: Cloud and enterprise routers, switches, firewalls, VPN, VPC, VLAN, LAN, mesh WiFi networks, Wireshark, Zabbix, Pandora FMS, PRTG, DDoS, Cloudflare, F5
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