MARCO NICOSIA (marco (at) escape.org)
276 Calle La Montana, Moraga, CA 94556 Cell: 650-796-2948
Availability:
Currently employed, not open to new opportunities.

OBJECTIVE:
To manage a diverse set of engineers responsible for delivering an Internet product with challenging load and uptime requirements.

SUMMARY:
  • Mission-critical ASP expertise.
  • Proven experience providing better than 99% uptime in demanding conditions.
  • Proven experience delivering product to customers on time and within budget.
  • Best-of-Breed systems architecture.
  • Expert in Unix systems administration.
  • Equipment and service provider relationship management.
  • Emphasis on internal/external teamwork and process flow.

SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE
  • OS: Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows NT/2000, SunOS, Irix, Ultrix, DomainOS
  • Veritas: Volume Manager (VxVM) and Cluster Server (VCS)
  • Software: BladeLogic, Apache, SSH, Perforce, CVS
  • Languages: Python, Perl5, C, Shell, awk/sed, Scheme, Lisp
  • Protocols: XML-RPC, TCP/IP, UDP, SMTP, NNTP
  • Storage: SAN: Hitachi 9960, 9970, 9980, 9200. Direct Attach: Sun A5200, D1000, A1000.
  • Hardware: Sun, HDS, Cisco, Digital, SGI, Sequent, Apollo, x86

EXPERIENCE:
YAHOO! GRID SERVICES
November 2006 - present
Manager, Grid Services Operations. Starting from zero, built a team of nine systems administrators and architects distributed between Santa Clara and Bangalore, India. Operations maintains large grids using several open source utility computing packages, primarily Hadoop. The team is responsible for supporting and expanding grid computing environments for both Yahoo! production processes and Research & Development.

My role is to manage service capacity, negotiate scope with new customers, justify additional headcount, recruit and retain new talent, and integrate them into the existing team. I have devised and built concensus for the following policies: software roll-out, escalation procedures, on-call rotation, ticket management SLA, and post-mortems. I organize and champion feedback to the development and product management teams and follow those changes through the product lifecycle.

July 2006 - October 2006
Member, Grid Services Team. Designed and developed a system to reliably transfer the updated contents of a data warehouse to the Yahoo! grid computing cluster and distributed file system. Implemented in Python, using XML-RPC and Berkeley DB, the system transfers hundreds of gigabytes per day, and re-populates any gaps in the data when and if it becomes available.

YAHOO! SEARCH TECHNOLOGY
November 2004 - June 2006
Manager, Search Cluster Automation and Monitoring (CAM). Built a team of three developers to address automation concerns within the search core product. Designed and co-authored System Knowledge Tracker, a configuration and state tracking system capable of recording the entire life-history of tens of thousands of nodes.

Also delivered Database Traffic Control, a project of almost 30,000 lines of Java code. DTC modified and automated an existing manual process, trimming days off of a week-long cycle and scheduling operations more optimally than the previous system.

WALMART.COM
October 2001 - October 2004
Sr. Systems Engineer. Design and develop high-end systems solutions, using elements such as multi-terabyte storage architectures, HA and clustered deployments. Provide second-level escalation support for production systems. Mentor junior staff and provide technical leadership on large-scale projects.

The Systems Engineering team is responsible for the design and deployment of the Walmart.COM production sites. Our team works with the rest of the company (engineering and business sides) to ensure that our site has sufficient capacity and maintains an adequate level of fault tolerance. Metrics available on request.

We specify all facets of new project implementations that affect the production sites. This includes overall architecture, capacity planning, product selection, third party integration, storage and computing layers. I was the single systems engineer responsible for search engine replacement and babycenter.com integration. Initial implementer of ProactiveNet 4 and 5 monitoring system, BladeLogic automation, and IronPort A60 MTAs. Engaged Keynote and Mercury Interactive services for production load testing.

VIRALON CORPORATION
June 2000 - April 2001
Manager, Technical Operations. Built a team of five who were responsible for production systems, database administration, IT and technical support. Ensured that schedules and goals were met on a consistent basis. The team successfully deployed both staging and production systems comprised of network infrastructure, firewalls, load balancers, as well as HTTP, BEA Tuxedo, and Oracle servers. Negotiated and managed relationships with all hardware and service suppliers. Worked effectively across teams to manage project planning. Assisted the Business Development team on technical sales calls.

Using Apache, HTML::Mason, Perl, BEA Tuxedo, Linux and Oracle on Sun Solaris, the Viralon team created a best-of-breed ASP service. The service provides dynamically created web content for the clients and their customers to deploy advanced marketing campaigns. Viralon's product included highly customized customer user interfaces as well as a functional client interface for initiating, controlling and monitoring campaigns.

Also as Manager of Technical Operations, I was responsible for all IT facilities and maintenance. This included Cisco-powered WAN and LAN, NT file servers, IIS and Microsoft Exchange. Our team was also responsible for all Windows desktop support and printers.

INKTOMI CORPORATION
August 1999 - December 1999
Architect, Custom Services. Technical leadership for the Custom Services team of administrators. Designer of both the Dedicated Search Cluster product and other advanced search services. Responsible for longer term technical vision, development and operation of Custom Services infrastructure. Custom systems include all Mini-Clusters, Dedicated Search Clusters, and Data Blends. Deployed services, on schedule, for clients such as Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal, AOL, and BellSouth.

As Architect, I was the primary author of an automation framework comprising more than 10,000 lines of Perl code. This product was actively used by the entire Search operations division to manage and implement practically all Inktomi search services. It was also the primary delivery vehicle for all Dedicated Search services.

April 1998 - August 1999
Portal Services Staff. Production Systems Operator for Search services. Original member of Custom Services team, responsible for Mini-Cluster product development and operation. Third member of a team that implemented and managed the large-scale (1 billion transactions per month, over 1000 nodes) general web search engines and crawlers.

The Portal Services team refined techniques for effectively administering thousands of geographically diverse Sun Solaris machines. This included all aspects of administration: hardware maintenance, OS upgrades, security, networking and application performance. We also evolved the monitoring standard to allow for a high degree of accountability for even the most demanding clients. This work included systems programming in C and Perl.

UC BERKELEY's DEPARTMENT of MOLECULAR and CELLULAR BIOLOGY
Spring 1994 - March 1998
Unix System Administrator. Sole support staff for Stanley Hall. Maintained approximately 15 SGI workstations and various others throughout the entire building. I ultimately reported to Professor Koshland (retired editor of Science) but worked for all of the professors in the building. Here is a list of my duties.

GLOBAL NETWORK NAVIGATOR
Summer 1996
Technical Staff. Originally a service of O'Reilly and Associates, GNN was a subsidiary of AOL, producing one of the Web's first successful on-line magazines. Worked as aide for an extremely overloaded Scott Silvey. Behind-the-scenes work on the GNN WWW site. Wrote CGI programs and perl scripts for site-analysis. In addition, I set up many, many WWW servers and references for them, along with installation of miscellaneous software. Participated in the planning and implementation of a major revision of the production system.

BANK of AMERICA, CORPORATE TREASURY
Summer of 1992 and 1993
Systems Administrator. General troubleshooter and problem solver for two Vice Presidents of the bank. This involved work with users and modification/creation of several utilities and applications.

MAXIS SOFTWARE
Summer 1991
Intern. Aided in completion of SimCity graphics sets to meet software publisher's deadline. Reported directly to the head artist, Richard Payne.

EDUCATION:
UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA at BERKELEY
B.A. Cognitive Science