About

Andy L. is a highly motivated and project-driven Sr. Site Reliability Engineer with a strong disdain for inefficiencies and tedious tasks. With over 17 years of relevant experience, Andy is a production firefighter and troubleshooter who prides himself on getting down to the bottom of things. He is a process and procedural sponge, able to rapidly adapt and learn new systems. Andy believes in clarity over cleverness, talent over tenure, doing over saying, leading by example, not by instruction, trust but verify, and mitigate then investigate. His favorite tools are tcpdump and Google search. Andy's specialties include Ruby, Bash, MySQL, Sinatra, Rails, Amazon AWS, EC2, ELB, S3, cloudfront, triage under pressure, automation, VoIP troubleshooting, call tracing, tool building, Nagios, Sensu, and InfluxDB. He is also proficient in PHP, MongoDB, and Search. Andy has worked as a Sr. Site Reliability Engineer at both Apple and Tesla, where he monitored, maintained, and contributed to achieving five nines availability since the service first launched. He provided detailed logs/captures and investigated production impacting service issues to engineering, external providers, or other internal teams. He also escalated link issues to service providers and tracked/updated tickets using JIRA. Additionally, he was responsible for the deployment of all production code as well as platform updates. Andy built many scripts and tools and created, refined, and improved process/deployment documentation. At Tesla, Andy monitored and managed over 15,000 Windows/Linux hosts. He created an SRE knowledge base to define clear expectations for the team and strived to bring all members up to the same level starting with juniors up to mid-level engineers. He reviewed code and style to ensure standardization and maintenance, improved monitoring checks, fixed things that were broken, improved things that didn't work well, simplified complex process flow, disentangled spaghetti code, and put common functions into libraries. He also established a standardized interview process for vetting new members which allowed the team to grow from a skeleton shift to a fully staffed department. Andy holds a Bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems, General from San Jose State University.