Chad Heuschober (He/Him)

Senior Manager, Storage Engineering, DigitalOcean

2020-12 — Present

Responsible for the reliability, growth, and organizational strategy all cloud storage products and engineering teams.

• Designed and implemented the multi-year cloud storage product growth strategy inclusive of intra- and extra-departmental cost modeling, business case development, and implementation planning.
• Oversaw a +140% increase in the Storage Engineering team and its successful reorganization into two product (software/devops) and two functional (reliability) engineering teams.
• Doubled Spaces (S3) and Volumes (Block) and performance and climbed to the second highest product growth rate at DigitalOcean.
• Directed investments in consistency enforcement (Temporal), internal schedulers, rebalancers, and other scale enhancements that achieved a further 80% reduction in incidents per active accounts and a greater than 75% reduction in MTTR.
• Pioneered the use of Kubernetes-on-metal (storage nodes) at DigitalOcean as a means to reduce deployment and operations-related toil, enforce global deployment consistency, and improve developer velocity.
• Increased collaboration and influence with cross-functional partners resulting in multiple cross-functional development projects, the production of self-service APIs, and the successful transition of functions to more specialized operators.

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Manager, Object Storage Engineering, DigitalOcean

2019-06 — 2020-12

Responsible for the development, operations and long-term strategy of the Spaces (S3 object storage), Backups, and Snapshots cloud storage products.

• Drove a transition to managing storage clusters via automation (Ansible) to enforce consistency and increase engineer productivity.
• Implemented new processes and organizational tools that increased focus and improved productivity for both on-call and off-call engineers by roughly 60%.
• Directed reliability improvements that effected a 50% reduction in incidents per active accounts and the elimination of what had once been a permanent status-page condition.
• Orchestrated the transition of DigitalOcean's storage products to NVMe flash resulting in significant price-performance capability enhancements as well as filling a major gap in Spaces (S3 Object) IOPS performance.
• Achieved the first storage software (Ceph) upgrade at DigitalOcean since product inception while also transitioning storage products to containerization in anticipation of a multi-year strategy to use Kubernetes for stateful, declarative, event-driven service management.

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Manager, Platform Engineering, Dell EMC

2017-04 — 2019-06

Responsible for the development and delivery of container and hypervisor compute platforms supporting the Virtustream Storage Cloud and Next-Generation Virtustream Enterprise Cloud (IaaS) as well as all major supporting datacenter services.

• Operated the Mesos-based Virtustream Storage Cloud container platform in addition to a new Openstack IaaS product and core services such as log collection, monitoring, dns, auth, smtp, ntp, certification management, message buses, key-value and secrets stores.
• Reduced engineer toil from 45% to 15% through tooling and process management.
• Orchestrated the development and adoption of the next-generation container platform based on Kubernetes and Helm within the next-generation IaaS platform and the next-generation storage cloud.
• Developed automated tooling for security compliance and audit evidence collection, reducing compliance-related toil by 85%.

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Senior Principal Software Engineer, Dell EMC

2016-10 — 2017-04

Responsible for leading the continued advancement and operations of the container platform supporting the Virtustream Storage Cloud.

• Developed automation and state systems for performing zero-dropped-connection rolling updates of the container platform.
• Drove constant improvements in monitoring, testing, reliability, durability, adoption, and usability of the container platform and services running atop it.
• Set the strategy for the next generation (Kubernetes) container platform and rallied team members under the new initiative.

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Principal Software Engineer, Dell EMC

2015-05 — 2016-10

Responsible for the availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response and capacity planning of infrastructure services and platforms.

• Lead a team of Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) responsible for the development and operations of a customized implementation of Apache Mesos for a multi-exabyte, distributed public storage cloud.
• Architected a stateful automation suite capable of bootstrapping and maintaining a PCI-compliant container platform on physical infrastructure in all global datacenters with no human interaction and a ten-minute execution window.
• Orchestrated the container platform build architecture, operations model, and user adoption strategy that resulted in a 300% increase in year over year platform adoption.
• Developed a new paradigm for reusable, testable automation with Salt and LXC that reduced test execution times by 90%.
• Implemented monitoring and service health check tooling to guarantee SLO target achievement.

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Adjunct Lecturer, CUNY School of Professional Studies

2014-08 — 2016-06

Responsible for the development and instruction of the Software Application Programming curriculum for the newly established Bachelor Degree in Information Systems.

• Created a modern application development curriculum using entirely Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
• Developed a continuous integration toolchain to provide automated assignment scoring via unit tests, integration tests, and linters in Docker sandboxes with near-instantaneous feedback given to students.
• Fostered a culture of readability, performance, and precision that prepared students for real world, multi-engineer environments.

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Software Development Manager, CUNY School of Professional Studies

2009-11 — 2015-05

Responsible for application services administration and the development of internal software solutions.

• Utilized automation to achieve a net 600% increase of the staff to supported service ratio.
• Created and administered a DevOps Mentorship program to modernize and expand the skills of IT Staff.
• Implemented The School's first CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, Git, and Salt and expanded its use to all projects within a year of initial implementation.
• Spearheaded the use of stateful automation tooling throughout all service lines and pioneered the use of immutable (containerized) infrastructure.
• Partnered with the NYC Office of Emergency Management and the Open Source Community to transform business needs into Sahana Agasti, an Open-Source Emergency Management solution that utilized geographic data to deploy staff and track shelter operations during Hurricanes Irene and Sandy.

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Database Manager, CUNY School of Professional Studies

2007-12 — 2009-11

Responsible for the design, development, and administration of all data systems.

• Lead the efforts of full-stack engineers building dynamic web applications.
• Oversaw the construction of The School's first independent datacenter.
• Developed the NYC Coastal Storm Plan Training System in partnership with the NYC Office of Emergency Management.
• Designed and implemented a plan to migrate a portion of The School's website to a CMS, reducing administrator toil by 95%.

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Bachelor of Fine Arts, Millikin University

1999-09 — 2003-05 Decatur, IL

Graduated from Millikin University (Decatur, IL) in 2003 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Musical Theatre.