Sr. Operations Team Lead

July 2018 – 05/2024 (8.5yrs)

I provided top-tier hardware and Microsoft server support for Experian's data centers in North America for over 8.5 years, ensuring vulnerability remediation and maintaining overall system health. In Experian's fast-paced environment—featuring advanced, high-speed transactional databases and complex infrastructure—I navigated challenging requirements and demanding client needs.

 As a team lead, I managed the teams operational maintenance and resolved issues during the servers lifecycle.
 
 Working and managing a talented team made the experience truly rewarding. 

Served as the SME Team Lead in the following areas:

  • Met with key business stakeholders in ensuring they were receiving the resources they need to ensure a smooth client experience.
  • Collaborated with the team to automate patching and vulnerability while also developing numerous complex PowerShell scripts to automate tasks, supporting over 6000+ servers.
  • Managed HPE Operations Manager "OneView," overseeing multiple data centers and supporting all hardware generations, blade and physical servers, such as the c7000 and 12K Synergy Framework, extending into the cloud. 
  • Specialized in Microsoft OS patching and corruption repair in keeping our servers up to date on security. 
  • Created proof-of-concept environments to evaluate new vendor products for potential production use. 
  • Designed extensive Microsoft clusters for SQL and storage, tailored to specific application requirements and process to ensure uptime and stability along with strong performance under load.
  • Provided detailed root cause analysis (RCA) reports for significant outages to management and clients.
  • Managed OS server baseline standards for both Physical and VM servers maintaining consistency across the enterprise. 
  • Conducted advanced Windows support training for new technicians, preparing them for advanced roles within the company.
  • Negotiated the onboarding of a 3rd party vendor from start to finish in supporting our legacy hardware of over 26 Blade Enclosures while working with the BU's in migrating to cloud applications or performing a hardware refresh. 

NOTABLE ADDITIONAL SAVINGS:

Saved $400k by resolving an ongoing Microsoft update failure due to a bad patch release with no option for rollback.  Microsoft wanted us to rebuild the 400+ servers to resolve the issue. I was able to work through our Citrix imaging system and make the needed DISM component store repairs within the registry restoring their function. 

Saved over $120K a year by developing a storage process to remove Veritas Foundation Storage Manager dependency  from our servers without data loss.
This licensing was originally locked in due to existing dependencies. 

Skills Used

  • Microsoft Servers 2008-2022 99%
  • MS Clustering 100%
  • Active Directory / Policy 90%
  • Linux 50%
  • BladeLogic Automation 80%
  • Advanced PowerShell 98%
  • VMWare 80%
  • Root Cause Analysis 80%
  • Vulnerability Management 80%
  • Rapid-7 50%
  • Team Management 80%
  • SQL Database - High availability Group 80%
  • Power BI "Dashboards" 50%
  • Citrix 60%
  • ServiceNow 80%
  • McAfee EPO 80%
Here's a Partial List of the skills used at Experian One of my Primary roles was to lead the team in reviewing ServiceNow Tickets, Managing team resources in Jira ensuring the issues and project activity in the queue kept flowing. 
Team Dynamics: Led a fluctuating team of 7-10 Windows engineers, including employees and contractors. 
Managed the team during leadership transitions, providing technical guidance and facilitating vendor support as needed.
Contributing across various roles during over 8.5 years at Experian.