Miguel Pereira

Still active in the project delivery space, the Practice Manager role has led me to interact more frequently with other arms of the organization. From pre-sales, sales & engagement, giving me a more holistic view of the end to end pipelines.

Now, also responsible for a larger team of incredibly talented engineers and architects. Helping the organization reach utilization targets, while remaining focused on my team’s well-being, career development, as well as helping them maintain a healthy work/life balance through the challenging times that the global pandemic and COVID-19 imposed on all of us.

Key accomplishments

• Lead a cross-functional team to migrate a consumer facing Windows/.NET workload from on-prem to AWS for a multimedia management client.
• Established a team dedicated to implementing highly reusable automation patterns for a technology services client/organization.

As a Lead Solutions Architect I was responsible for a small team of super-talented engineers and architects at different stages of their careers. I was involved in mentoring and helping them lay out the ground work for their career road-maps, assisting with and reviewing quarterly and annual goals, and acting as a technical advisor or hands on keyboard pair-programmer as needed. Always striving to create a safe space were they could experiment, fail and learn.

Key accomplishments

• Full infrastructure design, automation and life-cycle of a distributed, in-memory, production-grade, key-value document-store (Gemfire) in AWS.
• Led the disaster recovery design, implementation and certification initiatives for an EKS hosted application suite to meet (or exceed) RTP&O’s.
• Closely worked with the application engineering team to establish and refine sustainable containerization workflows.
• Onboarding new hires, and leading engagement simulations, ensuring that they could join the delivery cycle faster and with a more sure footing.
• Contributed to the automation, infrastructure design and instrumentation of a successful production systems migration for a major US-based airline.

I joined Onica as a Cloud Engineer with the distinct goal of gaining as much experience in the AWS space in the shortest span of time possible. I was extremely fortunate to had had the chance to work with extremely talented, driven and ambitious engineers, architects and principals across myriad practices: Architecture & Engineering, Cloud Native Development, Data Sciences, Business Development, and Project Management among others.

Key accomplishments

• Design, implement and test an EBS-snapshot based, rapid SQL Server backup and restore pipeline within AWS.
• Quickly POC’d and planned base-AMI factory pipelines for both Windows and Linux systems.
• Continually refined Jenkins pipeline automation to push instance configuration to the left.
• Early adopter of EKS (while still in beta)

Develop, maintain and monitor a microservices CI/CD pipeline.

• Leveraged AWS Cloudformation to codify infrastructure
• Built automation, testing and deployment via Jenkins pipeline
• Ansible as glue-code between layers and as a Packer provisioner
• Docker as the preferred packaging format
• System-level metrics and visualization through Cloudwatch and Grafana
• NewRelic and SysDig to provide APM and trace-level visibility
• LogEntries for log aggregation

Develop infra-as-code under AWS

• Developed Cloudformation templates to spin entire environments up and down in minutes
• Experimented with Terraform as a cross-platform infra-code alternative
• Developed reusable patterns using Ansible / Jinja and Cloudformation

Planned and executed migrations from on-prem to cloud

• Pro/Con analysis of porting products from on-prem to the cloud
• Turned a large portion of “pet” infrastructure into “cattle”
• Wrote Ansible-based Packer provisioners for Linux hosts and SysPrep for Windows
• Implemented last-mile configuration through native bash and Powershell scripting

Extensive experience managing and developing for relational databases

• Managed 1300+ databases across multiple MSSQL failover clusters
• Introduced the team to a suitable version control and release framework
• Mentored other developers in data modeling best practices
• Established the core pillars to start data mining with business intelligence in mind
• Operationalized three major client platform migrations, working closely with stakeholders from all business units

Architected the company’s MVNO program via integration with Sprint and Telcordia

Rolled out our own ERP and fully integrated it with vendors and clients

Developed, hosted and maintained a direct to consumer online retail operation

• Rack, stack & power
• OS patching, threat detection and upgrades
• Early VMWare ESX adopter
• Maintained perimeter and internal security through AD policy, network firewall and deep-packet inspection engines

Planned and supported a ²⁴⁄₇, on premises, fully staffed support call center from an IT standpoint

• Maintained and operated a cluster of Asterisk vPBX
• Developed custom reporting for call center operations
• Led the integration with the in-house CRM —