Timothy M. Crider
Hands on Operations, Security, and Software Delivery Leader
Servant leader and technical coach who uplifts teams to build tools that solve complex cross-company problems. Innovative and strategic thinker who solves the problem behind the symptoms, specializing in operations, pipelines, security and observability. Mentor who develops technical expertise to improve development cycles and improve on iterations.
"With the right team and leadership, there's nothing we can't solve."
Developer Experience & Engineering Excellence
- Saved tens of millions by launching 4 IaC and DaC initiatives, shortening test cycles and empowering faster deployments
- Built observation platform for 8 billion software configurations, accelerating developer productivity with instant insight into operations pipeline.
- Automated pipeline for software development, saving $10M in operational costs.
- Ran tech stack that empowered Under Armour eCommerce to scale 2X to $500M.
- Named ADG's Innovator of the Year in 2012 for software development.
Leadership & Coaching
- Defend team's psychological safety, building positive culture with 100% talent retention.
- Lead team of 20+ with 10+ years of global remote management experience.
- Translate technical context to non-technical peers to build consensus.
Areas of Expertise: Scalable Infrastructure | Cloud Technologies | Continuous Improvement | Self-Service Capabilities | Artificial Intelligence | Software Development | Testing Strategies | Agile Methodologies | High-Performance Teams
Professional Experience
SAS
Leading AI, data science & analytics partner to 90% of Fortune 100 & affiliates | $3.2B annual revenue Cary, NC (remote)
Manager, DevOps2017 - 2024
Recruited by CTO to lead tiger team for projects in R&D, Cloud acceleration and cybersecurity pushing fundamental shifts to software development. Guide and mentor 23 developers in hybrid and remote environment. Ensure cost savings through infrastructure and process optimization. Support multi-billion dollar projects.
Key Challenges:
Infrastructure ChallengeSpearhead Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Deployment as Code (DaC)
- Paired Google Fellow and Kubernetes expert with junior engineers to ignite transformative project, driving business results and catapulting careers of eager-to-learn employees.
- Codified, containerized and launched 4 IaC and DaC initiatives to public code repositories on Google Cloud, Amazon Cloud, Azure Cloud and Viya 4 to automate complex deployments, saving tens of millions of dollars.
- Elevated developer experience, transitioning IaC into backbone of internal tools.
- Empowered developers to run billions of tests on IaC, reducing cost to failure and shortening testing cycles.
Observability Platform ChallengeUnlock “impossible” insight into massive operations pipeline development
- Built observation (O11y) platform that created promotion velocity view into development of 8B configurations of software and 4M deployable units in 2 months.
- Improved developer productivity by enabling location of software in pipeline from 45 minutes to <1 second enabling simultaneous views of hundreds of products. Expanded O11y platform cross-enterprise.
Cloud Acceleration ChallengeDrive innovation in tooling, security, pipeline, deployment and automation operations
- Stood up global Hackathon platform in under 1 month. Designed developer experience that modernized manual model into scriptable IaC components, lifting heavy ops off principal engineer. Added security with no breaches.
- Tapped to support SAS Explorer Main Stage and Main Floor demos following Hackathon success. Upskilled 2 interns in a week to run cloud infrastructure capable of supporting presentations displayed to global company.
Cybersecurity ChallengeStreamline cybersecurity pipeline and automate deployment, a CEO initiative
- Automated provisioning of hardware, saving weeks of manual labor per project with installation and configuration time reduced from 36 hours to 15 minutes and build time reduced from 3 hours to 10 minutes.
- Built one of world’s fastest analytics platforms with ingest capable of 9M data events/second and front end capable of 6M events/second that spurred cascading enterprise improvements of core technology.
- Created hybrid approach to testing using automation, reducing artifact generation time from hours to seconds.
- Developed UI to visualize meta-data alerting cross-functional teams to relevant changes prior to release.
- Accelerated deployment frequency from monthly to multiple times daily with numerous types of deployments.
Leadership ChallengeCoach team to improve on quality while offering psychological safety for culture of performance
- Earned 100% employee retention through Great Resignation and reputation as “last stop” manager known for creating satisfying roles for and retaining top, yet dissatisfied talent. Maintain 50% diverse team.
- Intervened to stop behavior in opposition to code of conduct, proving to team a value on mutual respect.
- Shared knowledge at 4 internal DevOps “UnConference” events to 250 peers.
SevOne
PE-backed monitoring & analytics for digital infrastructure network performance & experience
Manager, DevOps2016 - 2017
Built scalable infrastructure and secure end-to-end continuous integration pipeline with team of 6 DevOps engineers. Solved complex deployment problems while identifying critical problems within Telcom customers’ infrastructure.
Key Achievements:
- Automated entire build and testing pipelines, a project deemed impossible, within 2 weeks. Boosted confidence of team, driving year-long tackling of organization’s largest challenges.
- Presented strategic plan for overcoming organizational hurdles to CFO, then invited to share with CEO and C-suite. Built consensus for modernizing software lifecycle across organizational units.
- Transformed operations within 6 months based on strategic plan, restructuring engineering to 80% automated, yielding $10M in operational savings, saving $600k annually and opening opportunity to redeploy talent.
- Recovered lost core product source code, improving product performance and development timelines.
- Built self-service infrastructure portal by implementing IaC using Terraform and Ansible, enabling customer provision of services and reducing support team workload.
Under Armour
$5.7B sportswear retailer with eCommerce as fastest-growing channel
Manager, DevOps2013 - 2016
Recruited as app developer and transitioned to become sole DevOps manager for e-Commerce platform after identifying operations and testing needs. Supported doubling of e-Commerce revenue during tenure to $500M in 2016. Managed complex, consumer-facing tech stack that managed monetary transactions with strict regulations.
Key Achievements:
- Led operations to adopt Kubernetes years before GA, facilitating containerization of infrastructure for special events for eCommerce, the company’s most lucrative segment.
- Exposed and fixed bug that could have cost millions and deleted critical customer data.
- Improved uptime from three 9s to four 9s by moving on-prem virtualized hardware to AWS cloud, enabling on-demand scale, resilience components in infrastructure, and rolling deployment.
- Built sales platform empowering expected 5X revenue growth. Supported 120% mobile revenue growth through mobile eCommerce traffic (28% in 2013 to 57% in 2015).
- Reduced incident recovery and responsiveness time from hours to near-instant.
Certifications
Early Career
ADG Creative | Solutions Architect
Columbia, MD | 2011 - 2013
MGH Advertising | Systems Architect
Owings Mills, MD | 2007 - 2011
Education
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Bachelor of Science in Business Systems1997 - 2000
Cape Fear Community College
Associate Degree in Applied Sciences | Phi Theta Kappa Honors1995 - 1997
Skills
Agile MethodologiesAnsibleAutomationAWSAzureBash/Shell ScriptingCI/CD PipelinesCloud ArchitectureContainerizationDeployment as Code (DaC)Developer ExperienceDevOpsDockerGitGitHubGitHub ActionsGitLabGo/GolangGoogle CloudHigh-Performance TeamsInfrastructure as Code (IaC)JavaScript/TypeScriptJira and ConfluenceKubernetesLeadershipMentorshipNodeJSObservabilityOperationsPerformance OptimizationRemote ManagementScalable InfrastructureSecuritySoftware DeliveryTeam BuildingTechnical CoachingTerraform