Thomas Sparks
San Francisco, CA * tsparks@minions.com * (415) 323-5969
Resume - http://www.minions.com/resume/


Over the last 20 years I've worked in positions that required me to be versatile and adaptable. I've worked in every area of the technology stack including management. I know how to scope, manage and deliver projects on time and often under budget. If I find myself lacking a skill to complete a project, I go and learn it. If I'm missing a resource that I know exists, I'll find out how to get it.

At the end of the day I like getting things done.

Example projects:
Driving down costs with multiple vendors, up to $5m/contract
Cloud and on-prem spend planning, $20m/year savings
Procured and lit up 1MW datacenter for AI/GPU compute
Built a secure system for analyzing cloud infrastructure
Real time packet analysis systems for attack/DDoS visualization
Central configuration management and compliance infrastructure
VPN mesh between offices and Cloud infrastructure
Network and DWDM design
Designed SDN to manage over 10,000 stores
Operated Petabyte ElasticSearch cluster
Managed performance testing and CI/Build farm
Supported systems transactional volume of over 10 Billion messages per month
Supported thousands of physical machines
Supporting local and remote datacenters


Work History:
Network ArchitectContract05/2019 to Now
HashPlaneFounder05/2019 to Now
Standard CognitionDirector of Network Operations08/2018 - 05/2019
Y CombinatorSystems Engineer10/2015 - 10/2018
Norse CorporationDirector of Network Operations10/2013 - 10/2015
Cryptoseal (CloudFlare)Founder03/2011 - 10/2013
Mindshare DesignSenior Engineer11/2006 - 03/2011
UnitedLayerCTO/Senior Network Engineer11/2002 - 04/2006

 All 1099/Consulting work performed under Applied Operations LLC
 All pre-2000 work history available upon request.


Skills:
Contract & Vendor Management   Enterprise Procurement   Enterprise Budgeting
Network EngineeringDevOpsSAS/PCI
AnsibleSaltJenkins/Travis
FreeBSDRedHat/CentOSSAN/NAS
VirtualizationPostfix/SendmailApache/nginx
AWS/Azure/OCP/ColoRouting/BGP/OSPF/MPLSIPSec/SSL VPN
OpenstackProject ManagementGalaxy
FirewallsLoadbalancing
(ELB/F5/A10/Brocade)
Monitoring
JuniperCiscoRuckus
AristaBrocadeAruba
PythonDjango/Flask/gunicornPuma/Passenger/Rails
GoLangPHPcsh/bash
RedisPostgreSQLmemcached

Professional/Personal Affiliations
NANOG
FreeBSD ports creator/maintainer
FreeBSD Users group Administrator
FreeBSD arm64 user documentation contributor
My Github