Jason E. Gress

Spring Grove, IL 60081

(847) 533-3109

jasong at ccgr.org

Education & Certifications:

University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, IL 2002–May 2005

  • I have been awarded a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science on May 7th, 2005 with a 3.21 GPA.

Technology Campus at CLC Grayslake, IL 1994–1996

  • Participated in a Business Data Processing program.
  • Completed a 2-year vocational training course in the COBOL programming language.

A+ Certified Technician

Skills:

Operating Systems – Use, Configuration, Deployment, Troubleshooting, and Administration skills in:

  • UNIX/Linux; very familiar with RedHat/CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, Gentoo, and Arch Linux distributions.
  • Very skilled with the KVM and Xen virtualization platforms, as well as oVirt and Openstack; familiar with VMWare Server.
  • Familiar with Docker/Kubernetes container platforms.
  • Very familiar with Linux filesystems, ACLs, and LVM.
  • Very familiar with Microsoft Windows, both modern and legacy versions.
  • Familiar with Apple Macintosh systems.
  • Very familiar with Linux desktops, including configuring for remote access.
  • Can administer common applications for each platform, including MS Office, and Outlook.

Networking Environments:

  • Very familiar with Linux/UNIX and Microsoft Windows networking.
  • Very familiar with TCP/IP protocol details.
  • Understand interoperability between heterogeneous networks (Mac, Windows, and Linux/UNIX.)
  • Familiar with Mac OS networking, including TCP/IP and SMB.

Storage Systems:

  • Very familiar with the Ceph distributed block storage system.
  • Very familiar with the iSCSI block level protocol on Linux, on both the initiator and target levels, utilizing Open-iSCSI, iSCSI Enterprise Target, and SCST.
  • Very familiar with various Linux/UNIX network filesystems, including NFSv3, NFSv4, and GFS.
  • Very familiar with RAID and block-level storage systems, like MDRAID, DRBD, and hardware equivalents.

Database Administration:

  • Familiar with Aerospike Database configuration, management, and storage infrastructure requirements.
  • Competent understanding of Oracle Database storage infrastructure requirements.
  • Familiar with MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL, particularly on the Linux platform.
  • Competent understanding of MySQL DB administration, including disk space management, memory management, and performance tuning.
  • Also had exposure to Microsoft SQL Server.

Programming Languages:

  • Very familiar with C, C++, Java, Python, HTML.
  • Familiar with C#, VB .NET, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle/SQL, PostgreSQL, MIPS Assembly, Fortran, and COBOL.
  • Fair understanding of BASIC, Perl and PHP.
  • Familiar with the development environments Vi (UNIX), Eclipse/MyEclipse, along with MS Visual Studio.
  • Familiarity with Git and Subversion (SVN) source control systems.

Other Notable Skills:

  • Skilled with various Linux Open Source clustering and high availability software, including Heartbeat, Pacemaker, Corosync, MDRAID, and DRBD.
  • Familiar with IBM SVC, NetAPP, and many storage concepts, along with some administration skills.
  • Familiar with Cisco Call Manager phone system administration, as well as TeleVantage.
  • Skilled at considering the ‘whole picture’ – looking at the impact of code or platform modifications on all areas of the infrastructure or code base that I am familiar with.
  • Very skilled with hardware/software diagnosis, troubleshooting, and repair on desktops, laptops, and servers.
  • Excellent, and patient, customer communication skills.

Professional Experience:

Charles Schwab Chicago, IL January 2022-December 2024

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

  • Contributed critical System Administration skills to the Trading Save DevOps and Aerospike Support teams.
  • Socialized and successfully implemented best practices with the teams, like infrastucture as code, code reuse, single source of truth, committing to git, automate everything, and code reviews.
  • Subject Matter Expert (SME) on automation and configuration consistency.
  • Wrote and refactored many Bash shell, Ansible, and Python scripts.
  • Rearchitected and deployed new Aerospike server patching process, making it auto-resume with much less room for human error.
  • Led server patching and security maintenance.
  • Deployed new Aerospike database clusters, while making sure the hardware and software configuration follows industry best practices.
  • Supported a large number of existing Aerospike server clusters, including maintaining the operating system and hardware.

Accertify, Inc./American Express Itasca, IL September 2014-December 2021

Senior Linux Administrator

  • Received several awards based on my work, including involvement in an office move and a new data center deployment.
  • Was instrumental in the deployment of a complete new data center in the Netherlands. This included OS deployments, storage infrastructure, networking layout, and more. This was a top to bottom redesign, moving our platform towards more consistency and stability. A team of two, of which I was a part, completed this whole deployment in 3 weeks.
  • Manage a fully open source Linux based environment from top to bottom. Only the databases are not open source.
  • Wrote automation for deploying new operating systems to bare metal Dell hardware via the iDRAC, utilizing primarily RedHat and similar OSs (RedHat, CentOS, Scientific, Oracle Enterprise).
  • Deployed configurations utilizing Ansible for configuration management.
  • Have experience with a cutting edge storage solution cluster utilizing the Ceph distributed object, block, and filesystem storage platform.
  • Deployed a new high availability SFTP cluster for customer uploads. Utilized the CephFS distributed storage platform for clustered storage.
  • Have extensive experience deploying servers running Oracle 11-19g databases. This includes system, software, and storage provisioning. Was instrumental in a massive database modernization effort including all flash storage for maximum performance and reliability.
  • Wrote custom automation for internal and customer use, utilizing bash and Python. Uses include various system administration tasks, as well as a rather extensive SFTP management system for a client.
  • Extensive experience with the latest hardware, particularly flash-based storage, including SSDs, FusionIO, and NVMe.
  • Additional experience working with NFS as well as iSCSI via the SCST target.
  • Designed and deployed new flash-based storage clusters, utilizing Pacemaker, Corosync, DRBD, and NFS.
  • Support and manage an Openstack virtual infrastructure of approximately to 600 virtual machines.
  • Managed a virtual infrastructure of approximately 500 virtual machines (a majority of which are now on Openstack) with a combination of libvirt based KVM and oVirt, which is the open source basis of RedHat’s RedHat Enterprise Virtualization platform.
  • Works with new and growing Kubernetes/Docker infrastructure.

Sears Holdings Corporation Hoffman Estates, IL April 2011-September 2014

Lead Systems Engineer

  • I was promoted once within my first year at Sears Holdings to a Lead Systems Engineer from a Systems Engineer because of my excellent work engineering and implementing many improvements to their Xen Cloud infrastructure. I have also received four CIO Direct Report Awards and one CIO Award for my performance in other areas. I was given an additional role of Solutions Architect for Open Source Cloud.
  • Designed, prototyped, and implemented into production an iSCSI high-availability cluster, using standard server hardware, utilizing Linux, Heartbeat, iSCSI Enterprise Target, DRBD, and other Open Source tools, which we call storage gateways. These gateways present storage over iSCSI, feature site to site replication, and also feature high-availability automatic failover.
  • Developed complete automation for the aforementioned storage gateways, which use various scripting languages, including bash and Python. Tasks automated include disk provisioning, removal, and expansion, as well as configuring site to site replication.
  • Developed automated scripts and an API to encompass all necessary components to facilitate Xen host to host live migration, utilizing the disks on the storage gateways, while architecting the API to be extendable to other storage platforms using a simple object oriented inheritance model. This was written in Python.
  • I was able to present my architecture clearly and effectively to a large technical audience, including to the CTO, after which it was approved. There are now approximately 400 Xen hosts getting their disks from the storage gateway infrastructure.
  • I was intimately involved in developing the next Cloud version, which is currently in production with over 100 hosts. We switched over to the KVM hypervisor, running on the Ubuntu LTS platform. This also includes storage architecture changes, utilizing IBM’s SVC. Other changes include rearchitecting the networking architecture for the next Cloud version to include separate automated VLAN allocation, VM migrations between large host pools, and more.
  • I developed (and maintained/improved) an automated provisioning API for the SVC, since IBM did not supply one. This system is written in Python, and utilizes Pacemaker and Corosync for high-availability failover. This system manages automated LUN creation/deletion, disk to host mappings, disaster recovery automation including creating Global Mirror volumes, and more. It also facilitates VM Live Migration with automatic, behind the scenes SVC and host reconfiguration on the fly to completely automate complex tasks repeatably and seamlessly.
  • Perform day to day maintenance and support for the whole Cloud infrastructure, including over 700 Xen hosts and over 7,000 virtual machines for the Sears private Cloud.
  • Performed day to day Linux system administration for the Sun/Linux support team until I was tapped to join the Cloud team for my strong Xen experience.

MTC Performance, Inc. Schaumburg, IL Aug. 2008-April 2011

Network and Systems Administrator

  • Singlehandedly managed and ran nearly the entire IT infrastructure of MTC Performance, including Windows and Mac OS X desktops, Windows, Linux, and Apple servers, phone sytems, and production systems including Apache/PHP and Java/JBoss application platforms.
  • Developed and maintained the JBoss platform for our proprietary web based application service, which includes spiffs.com.
  • Implemented a fault tolerant failover configuration and deployment for Apache Web Server 2.0 and JBoss 4.3 utilizing heartbeat and mod_jk in both system integration testing and production environments.
  • Maintained and added new sites, utilizing SSL and virtual hosts, to the existing Apache/PHP platform.
  • Architected and implemented a Xen Virtual Machine migration for older hardware and VMWare Server VMs.
  • Responsible for maintaining domain purchases and renewals, production DNS, and SSL certificates.
  • Utilized heartbeat and DRDB for load balancing and failover for Apache servers and NFS servers.
  • Performed SVN code merges, configuration updates, and version upgrades, as well as new internal and production code deployments.
  • Maintained the tape backup solution using ARCserve using a Quantum LTO4 tape backup device.
  • Administered a Windows 2000 based Active Directory domain, including users, computers, and DNS.
  • Integrated authentication between all Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 and CentOS 5.0 Linux servers and the Active Directory domain controller for shared authentication.
  • Took part in upgrading from the legacy Televantage phone system to a Cisco phone systrem.
  • Maintained a Cisco phone system with a 10 person call center, utilizing Cisco Unified Call Manager, Cisco Call Manager, and Unity Messaging, including managing over 50 800 phone numbers, as well as multiple IVRs (or Automated Attendants).
  • Deployed, upgraded, and maintained network DNS, NTP, NFSv3 and NFSv4, and FTP/SFTP.
  • Implemented and utilize Hudson Continuous Integration server.
  • Wrote and debugged scripts for automating tasks written in bash, PHP, or Ant, and integrated them into Hudson, utilizing SSH keys for network transparency and one click maintenance.
  • Maintained and wrote new network monitoring scripts and plugins in bash for use with the open source Nagios infrastructure monitoring solution.
  • Helped the office and production systems maintain PCI compliance.
  • Supported end users in day to day support needs for desktop, laptop, and mobile devices.

ProGress Systems Inc. Lake Villa, IL Aug. 2002-2015

Consultant, Technical Analyst, Co-Owner

  • Performed consulting, including enhancing a client’s proprietary programming language extension, VNPL.
  • My wife and I owned and completely managed ProGress Systems Inc.
  • Perform contracted services, including software development in C++ and VB .NET.
  • Determine customer needs and build, configure, and manage systems and networks.
  • Setup and manage infrastructure for ourselves and our clients.
  • Configured, administered and secured a Debian Linux web and mail server.
  • Build custom websites per the customer’s specifications.

Kingstree Trading, LLC Chicago, IL Oct. 2006-May. 2007

Software Developer

  • Made substantial usability and feature improvements to an existing proprietary multi-exchange gateway which connects to the CME, CBOT, and others.
  • Developed all applications using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 on the Windows platform using C++, MFC, STL, and the Win32 API.
  • Substantially improved ease of configuration and maintenance of the server and risk management components by adding a network hosted XML configuration utilizing Code Synthesis’ XSD open source XML library.
  • Added and fixed functionality for the risk management component that allows account managers to prohibit additional orders, cancel all working orders in the book, or force the user to ‘get flat’ as well as improved user management.
  • Added Cancel/Replace w/IFM functionality to the CME gateway, including recertifying the server application with CME’s AutoCert application, as well as making all necessary modifications to the client application and to the interface API for automated trading applications.
  • Profiled gateway server performance with the GlowCode profiling tool.
  • Setup, installed and configured completely, including proprietary components, a RedHat Enterprise Application Server 3 ES + Reuters RMDS 6 data feed test bed.

Follett Software Company McHenry, IL July 2005-June 2006

Software Developer I

  • Helped develop world-class Library, Textbook, Media and Asset management software on the Java J2EE platform using the JRocket JVM.
  • Developed web-based, database driven technologies on Windows using JSP Java Server Pages, HTML, JavaScript, Struts, XDocklet, and XML on JBoss, Apache, Tomcat, and JDBC/Microsoft SQL Server.
  • Developed using the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment.
  • Worked with thirty-five other developers and ten professional testers in an Extreme Programming environment.
  • Worked within required automated testing infrastructure, including writing and helping others write valuable unit tests on low-level production code as well as automated ‘acceptance’ tests for GUI front end testing using JUnit and HTTPUnit.
  • Worked with testers and customer representatives to help fine-tune application requirements and to help properly define the scope of a given task as well as take part in making the software the best it can possibly be.

TEK Systems Rolling Meadows, IL Mar. 1999-Nov. 2004

Technical Support Analyst

  • Various technical support positions, including Help desk and Level 2/3 Desktop support.
  • Supported many users on PC and Mac platforms.
  • Supported many PC and Mac applications, including Microsoft Office, Outlook/Entourage, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access, and others.
  • Responsible for system configurations, network connectivity, remote connectivity via Dial-up and VPN, as well as troubleshooting system configuration and performance issues.
  • Full details on TEK Systems experience available upon request.

References:

Available Upon Request.