Michael Berger, MBA, CISSP

DevOps & Infrastructure Engineer • Backend Engineer • Full-stack Engineer • Knoxville, TN, US

Cybersecurity

Cloud Computing

Docker

Mentoring

Risk Management

Compliance

Policy Analysis

Databases

Labor Relations

Team Building

Python

Git

Qualtrics

Team Management

Management

Network Security

Software Engineering

Kubernetes

OSINT

Security Algorithms

Cybersecurity frameworks

SecDevOps

Penetration Testing

Leadership

Systems Engineering

Available for hire fromNegotiable

Contracts

Cloud Cost Optimizer, Cybersecurity Innovator, and Servant Leader with Expertise in Scaling Technology and Building Efficient Systems

Highly motivated, innovative technology leader with extensive experience in technology leadership, cloud strategy, and cybersecurity. Proven leader in building technology teams, systems, and processes, with a customer-centric and operational mindset. Experienced in leading internationally distributed teams and developing processes that exceed expectations. Skilled in driving cloud and technical strategies, and developing technical roadmaps for engineering and operations. Enjoys evaluating technology, IT strategy, and researching emerging spaces. Part early experimenter, part evaluator, educator, and evangelist for the introduction and use of emerging technologies across multiple clients and verticals. Passionate about information security, innovation, and open source software. Holds an MBA with interests in entrepreneurship and business strategy. Specialties: Business Strategy, Leadership, Open Source Software, Information Security.

Projects

AWS Infrastructure Optimization

Objective: Led a cross-functional team of engineers to optimize AWS infrastructure, focusing on cost reduction, performance improvements, and scalability for a growing platform with tens of millions of active users. Key Achievements: Cost Reduction: Reduced AWS spend by 30% over a 6-month period by identifying and eliminating underutilized resources, implementing EC2 instance rightsizing, and optimizing S3 storage tiers. Auto-Scaling Efficiency: Deployed auto-scaling configurations across EC2, Lambda, and Aurora services, resulting in a 20% reduction in operational overhead and improving scalability during high-demand events. Service Uptime: Improved service uptime by 99.98% through proactive monitoring, alerting, and automated failover strategies, ensuring high availability for all critical systems. Performance Tuning: Fine-tuned AWS Lambda functions to reduce average execution time by 40%, improving the end-user experience during peak traffic times.See More

Database Query Optimization for Read-only Replicas

Objective: Implemented query optimization and query-limiting strategies to address performance degradation issues in AWS Aurora PostgreSQL read-only replicas, enhancing the overall performance and reliability of the database layer. Key Achievements: Query Optimization: Worked with database engineers to identify and optimize the top 10 most frequently running queries, reducing query execution time by 40% on average. Query Limiting: Introduced rate-limiting and query prioritization techniques, ensuring that read-only replicas could handle high traffic without performance degradation. This resulted in a 50% reduction in read replica overload. Stability Improvements: Prevented service disruptions caused by long-running queries, improving overall database reliability and contributing to a 99.99% uptime of the production databases. Monitoring & Alerts: Implemented real-time query monitoring and alerting, reducing the time taken to identify and mitigate performance issues by 30%.See More

Global AWS Aurora PostgreSQL Deployment

Objective: Designed and deployed a multi-region, highly available AWS Aurora PostgreSQL solution to support a global e-commerce platform, ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and minimal latency across multiple regions. Key Achievements: Global Architecture: Deployed a multi-region failover architecture with Aurora Global Databases, ensuring zero downtime during maintenance and region failover events. Latency Reduction: Reduced database read latency by 35% by optimizing cross-region replication strategies and leveraging Aurora's global database capabilities. Scalability & High Availability: Engineered automatic scaling configurations to handle spikes in user traffic, resulting in a 20% improvement in query response times during peak usage periods. Uptime Commitment: Achieved a 99.99% uptime SLA, ensuring consistent availability of critical data across the globe with geographically distributed replicas. Disaster Recovery Testing: Conducted quarterly disaster recovery (DR) simulations, confirming the system's ability to failover and restore operations within 15 minutes, well within the business continuity goals.See More

Incident Response Automation

Objective: Spearheaded the design and implementation of automated incident response workflows to increase efficiency and decrease response times during security events, ensuring a more proactive security posture for the organization. Key Achievements: Automation Efficiency: Automated 90% of manual incident response tasks, reducing response time from an average of 3 hours to just 15 minutes during security events. Threat Detection & Mitigation: Leveraged Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools to improve mean time to detect (MTTD) by 50%, while implementing automated playbooks that reduced the mean time to remediate (MTTR) by 40%. Cross-Department Collaboration: Collaborated with SOC (Security Operations Center) teams to integrate threat intelligence feeds into the automation system, resulting in a 25% increase in the accuracy of threat detection. Incident Reporting: Developed a comprehensive reporting mechanism that provided real-time dashboards and post-incident analysis, resulting in a 35% improvement in incident resolution documentation.See More

Internal Security Tool Development

Objective: Led the creation of an internal security scanning tool to identify vulnerabilities across the organization’s infrastructure and application stack, enhancing the security posture and reducing external penetration testing findings. Key Achievements: Tool Development: Developed a custom security scanning tool that integrated with CI/CD pipelines, enabling automated security checks at every stage of the development lifecycle. This tool reduced security scan times by 70%. Vulnerability Mitigation: Identified and remediated over 500 critical vulnerabilities in production systems within the first quarter of deployment, significantly improving the organization’s security posture. Security Metrics: Established key security metrics to track and report on vulnerability trends, which resulted in a 20% decrease in external penetration testing findings over the course of a year. Security Awareness: Conducted internal training sessions that increased developer adoption of secure coding practices, resulting in a 50% reduction in vulnerability-related bugs introduced during new feature development.See More

Advanced Threat Detection and Prevention System Implementation

Objective: Spearheaded the design and implementation of an advanced threat detection and prevention system to proactively identify and block sophisticated cyber threats, including advanced persistent threats (APTs), malware, and insider threats, before they could impact critical systems. Key Achievements: Threat Detection Enhancements: Implemented a next-gen Intrusion Detection System (IDS) integrated with Machine Learning (ML)-based anomaly detection tools, leading to a 60% improvement in identifying advanced threats that traditional systems could not detect. Threat Intelligence Collaboration: Collaborated with external cybersecurity partners to incorporate real-time threat intelligence feeds, enabling the system to automatically detect new attack signatures and tactics. This reduced the time to detect emerging threats by 45%. Automated Threat Blocking: Deployed an automated response system that, upon detection of suspicious activities, could isolate compromised devices and prevent lateral movement within the network. This automation reduced the time to mitigate threats by 50%, ensuring minimal damage from active threats. Proactive Malware Defense: Established a real-time malware analysis lab for zero-day malware detection, which resulted in identifying and blocking 10+ sophisticated malware attacks before they spread to production systems. Incident Reporting and Forensics: Developed an incident reporting framework that streamlined data collection during a security event, improving incident forensics by 35% and reducing investigation times. Employee Engagement: Conducted targeted training for security teams, helping them better understand the behavior of advanced threats. This led to a 25% increase in the team's speed to identify and mitigate new threat vectors during simulated attacks.See More

Work History

Senior Manager, SRE, Cloud and Security

AdobeHands on leader, providing technical expertise and leadership to a growing SRE/infrastructure team. Responsible for growing the team from 2 SREs to 11, including internationally distributed team members. Mentoring and coaching engineers to help them reach their full potential and improve their performance Matured processes by defining and implementing an SRE framework that developed SRE practices and all tenets of SRE. Provide vision and leadership to enable the execution of best-in-class engineering and operations practices which help improve reliability of Frame.io and build new features and services to improve business service reliability and customer experience. Develop practice to accelerate the evolution of the core platform and its infrastructure. Optimize systems for up time, performance, and reliability based on the data gathered by observability tools. Automate day to day functions such as deployment, rollbacks, build of code and provisioning infrastructure, failovers etc. Use Kubernetes, containers, and cloud native tools to provide efficiencies for day-to-day reliability of the platform. Apply engineering mindset and development skills to operations to improve the overall observability, reliability and security of infrastructure and develop proactive incident detection, response, and remediation. Interface directly with executive and senior staff members within the organization to discuss and assess compliance with policies, standards, and procedures, suggest opportunities for improvement. Implemented SAST and DAST enhancing application security by proactively identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities\ Collaborated with development teams to enforce secure coding practices, improving overall security posture while minimizing operational risk. Responsible for governance, risk, and compliance for frame.io product and coordinating with various development teams throughout the

Manager, Cloud Operations and Delivery

Burwood GroupFull-time EmployeeAug 2019 - May 2020 • 10 mosDeveloped vision, strategy, and execution for the Cloud Operations team, managing Agile projects and ticket work while coaching team members. Managed relationships with customers, ensuring success in cloud strategy and migration projects across Google Cloud, AWS, and MS Azure. Provided cloud security assessments and DevSecOps consulting, ensuring compliance and security measures were integrated into project delivery. Engaged in business development and pre-sales activities, identifying opportunities for collaboration and partnership in cloud security initiatives. Manage, evolve, and coach a team of Cloud and DevOps Engineers and Architects, responsible for the delivery of customer projects.

Senior Manager, Software Engineering, Rackspace Private Cloud

RackspaceFull-time EmployeeJun 2017 - Jun 2019 • 2 yrs 1 moLed a team of remote and office-based software engineers and SREs to provide tooling and support for Rackspace Private Cloud products. Established change control processes for customer environments and collaborated with external partners to enhance security measures across products. Brought in to bring order to chaos and provide positive change and standardization to the entire customer fleet of customer private clouds. Overarching goal of the Fleet Management Team was to build and maintain mission-critical infrastructure and tooling, as a platform, and enable Rackspace to manage customer clouds more effectively and efficiently. This is done through creating new engineering processes and automating environments to decrease human interaction, designing for security, reliability, and scale. Institute a change control process for customer environments which did not exist prior. Worked cross team, and cross division, to develop product security plans including SDLC, PCI Compliance, product road mapping. Deployed internal tooling to provide insight into the performance and status of customer private clouds.

Engineering Manager/Director

Peak HostingFull-time EmployeeJul 2016 - Jun 2017 • 1 yr Senior level technology leader reporting directly to the President. Responsible for all aspects of Engineering, strategically and tactically. Co-lead for company Information Security initiatives including ISO 27001 certification. Experience in management of technical teams and projects from planning to execution, research and platform development, and security. Helped to shape the company’s technology decisions around infrastructure, process, procedure, and security. Managing multi-disciplined and multinational teams, projects, and products. Direct responsibility to lead a remote team of senior level Windows, Linux, and storage System Engineers, senior level Security Engineers, and senior level Network Engineers. Provide leadership, architectural oversight, and technology expertise to a cross-functional team charged with service reliability, performance, and automation Developed Mission/Vision statement, Goals and Objectives, Metrics and KPIs, Action Plans and Roadmaps Identified manpower requirements/projections, skillsets, interests and needs Built a culture of empowerment and delivery by implementing systems to sustain production environments Ensuring the department meets engineering and operational requirements for all projects Designing infrastructure and automation for scalability, reliability, and resiliency Directly manage and career development of an expanding team of Engineers Cost and Infrastructure containment Vendor management including contract negotiation, master service agreements, and statement of work agreements among others.

Education

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Bachelor of Science (BS), Nuclear Medicine

Lincoln Memorial University

MBA, Management, Leadership, Strategy

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