Geoff Winans

Objective
To make money so I can eat and have healthcare.

More seriously; I am a driven, professional database engineer. I aim to lead a team towards shared goals while prioritizing the professional growth and well-being of individuals within the organization. I'm eager to apply my unique blend of technical proficiency and leadership philosophy to drive innovation, efficiency, and positive organizational culture.

Skills
  • MySQL/PostgreSQL/Spanner/AlloyDB/Redis/ElasticSearch
    • Performance Tuning
    • Infrastructure planning
    • Capacity planning
    • Monitoring/Alerting
    • General schema design
    • Backups and durability planning(where necessary)
  • Systems Administration
    • Various flavors incuding RHEL, CentOS, Debian (Ubuntu Server)
    • Scripting with BASH, Python
    • GCP and AWS cloud management
    • Terraform
    • Light experience with SignalFX/Splunk, DataDog
Experience

Dave, Inc (Dave.com) Database Reliability Engineer - Apr 2023 - Current

  • Project Planning
  • Set documentation standards via style guides
  • Built all documentation for Database Engineering
  • Monitoring / On-Call duties for all things database
  • Projects:
    • Self-service documentation
    • Read-Write splitting
    • Data migration / fix / backfill tooling
    • Automated migrations w/ pt-osc
    • ProxySQL
    • PoC Distributed DBs

Recharge Senior DBA - November 2021 - February 2023

  • Project Planning and Onboarding
  • Monitoring / On-Call duties for all things database
  • Onboarded Elasticcloud, Redis, Firestore
  • Project documentation standards
    • End goal: Be able to point anyone to the documentation for self-service
    • Rebuilt most of the documentation to an improved model/standard
    • Documents were updated for clarity and process

CVS / CareMarkRX Advisor DBA - May 2018 - November 2021

  • MariaDB/MySQL Team Lead
  • Currently on-boarding MySQL to replace MariaDB
  • Capacity planning, monitoring, infrastructure improvement

ADESAMySQL DBA / SysAdmin - March 2016 to May 2018

  • Management of MySQL infrastructure
  • Overall infrastructure planning for high-availability
  • Automation via SaltStack

CWIE, LLC Systems Engineer - Jan 2015 to March 2016

  • Management and upgrading of legacy systems
  • Planning and implementing upgrades of infrastructure
  • Implementation of new Puppet Profiles for various applications
  • Virtualizing physical servers (both legacy and more recent systems)
  • Management of Dev, QA and Production environment
  • Maintainance of many applications through their life-cycle

Iridium Satellite MySQL DBA - Mar 2014 to Dec 2014

  • Manage 6 node MySQL Enterprise Cluster
  • Upgraded existing cluster from 7.2.8 to 7.3.3
  • Manage various other MySQL instances outside the cluster
  • Planning replacement of MySQL Enterprise Cluster with MySQL/Galera Cluster
    • For cost reduction and simplification of operational complexity

Unicorn Media, Inc MySQL DBA / Sys Admin - Jan 2012 to Jan 2014

  • Managed the MySQL infrastructure from top to bottom
  • Led an upgrade drive from 5.1 (Windows) to 5.6 on Linux
  • Performance tuned the environment to greater than 10k Queries Per Second per host
  • Managed backups, including moving from manual, mysqldump-based to XtraDB/Amazon Glacier
  • Began process of implementing Riak as a query string caching engine
  • Implemented Nginx as a caching point between our IIS-based Origin servers and CDN end-point. This solved critical performance issues

PayPal, Inc MySQL DBA - Oct 2011 to Dec 2011

  • Spent most of the time there waiting on access to be granted so I could begin actually working
  • Began documenting the entirely undocumented MySQL environment

Blue Gecko, Inc MySQL DBA - Jan 2011 to Aug 2011

  • Managed the MySQL Database infrastructure for various clients. Primarily MySQL with some exposure to Oracle and PGSQL.

GoDaddy, Inc MySQL DBA / Linux Admin - Jan 2007 to Jan 2011

  • Managed the large database infrastructure, both customer-facing and internal
  • Servers each hosted between 8 and 16 instances of MySQL
  • Managed promotion of slaves to masters when a master would fail, planned capacity expansion
  • Maintained multiple automation tools (PHP) for handling AUP/TOS violations against customers
Hobbies
MySQL, Linux (Desktop, Servers), World Domination, VMWare ESXi, Automation (Ansible), IaC (Terraform, Pulumi), GCP, AWS, CloudSQL, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis. Oh, and a little world domination for funsies.
References
Available on request