Greg Herlein

San Francisco, CA
gherlein@herlein.com
github.com/gherlein
+1-415-368-7546

Summary of Qualifications

  • 15+ years senior Engineering Leadership experience in all stages of the product lifecycle
  • Proven track record leading large Engineering organizations (100+ Engineers)
  • Significant experience driving automation and DevOps, distributed systems, cloud migration
  • Strong technical expertise in Linux, networking, control systems, embedded systems
  • Deep hands-on experience with software development, automated testing, networking
  • Proven ability to work closely with customers both deploying and supporting products
  • Reputation for building globally distributed teams “that don’t break”
  • Agile Expert - scrum, kanban and scrumban – adept at maximizing feature velocity

Work History

Amazon AWS - Principal Evangelist, Amazon Chime SDK (12/2020 to Present)

The Amazon Chime SDK is a real-time communications components that developers can use to quickly add messaging, audio, video, telephony, and screen sharing capabilities to their web or mobile applications. The service launched in 2019.

  • Forming the core Developer Evangelism function for this new service
    • Writing blogs and sample applications to demonstrate “the art of the possible”
    • Building strategic plans for all Product Evangelism
    • Public speaking and direct customer interaction to promote the product
  • Previously: one year leading two teams of Solution Architects helping AWS customers modernize

Cisco - Director Software Engineering, CX Cloud (11/2014 to 12/2020)

  • Led transformation team of ~100 Engineers refactoring software to move to AWS
    • Solution split across multiple customer sites and AWS
    • Tech stack: AWS Aurora, Kafka, lambda, S3, ELK, java moving to golang
    • Teams split across several US offices, Bangalore and Chennai India, remotes
  • One year leading teams consulting for Rakuten Mobile, a cloud-based 5G network
    • Designed and built an “observability” layer using logs, metrics, SNMP traps
    • Deployed onto IPv6 Kubernetes clusters leveraging ElasticSearch and Prometheus
    • Tech stack: OpenStack, Kubernetes (k8s), Cisco NSO, ELK
    • Teams split across Japan, India, Europe and multiple US offices and remotes
  • Two years as Principal Architect for a group of over 600 Engineers
    • Migrated traditional Enterprise software to cloud-native DevOps-based SaaS
    • Drove organization to develop all new software in AWS and Cisco’s OpenStack cloud
    • Software included tools to configure, diagnose, and support customer networks
    • Hired and managed a team of ~20 Senior Solution Architects mapped across the org
    • Tech stack: terraform, ansible, helm, docker, k8s, Prometheus, Kafka, Cassandra, Java
    • Teams split across US offices, Bangalore and Chennai India, Vienna Austria, remotes
  • Two years leading a 150+ Engineer team that built and operated a streaming video SaaS
    • Tech stack: On-prem VMWare, AWS, terraform, ELK, Sensu, Java
    • Teams split across US offices, Bangalore India, UK and Jerusalem Israel, remotes

Cognitive Networks - Vice President, Engineering (9/2013 - 11/2014)

  • Product: SaaS-based Smart TV automated content recognition (ACR) system
  • Rebuilt team from initial 6 hires to over 20 Software and DevOps Engineers
  • Scaled from 200K to 4M+ monitored TVs generating petabytes/month of detailed viewer data
  • Fully automated all deployments, shifted focus to SLA/SLO and measuring performance
  • Improved up-time from low 90% to better than 99.95% within months
  • Tech stack: AWS, AWS RDS MySQL, AWS Redshift, AWS EC2, python, C, embedded systems
  • Tech stack included software embedded in Smart TVs, significant vendor interaction and testin

Fogbridge Corporation - Founder and Principal Engineer (4/2006 - 11/2014)

  • Consultant for AWS development/migration and mobile development
  • Customers were small and large companies: Technicolor, THX, Brightsign/Roku
  • Wrote and shipped two iOS educational games: MultiAlien and SatDef
  • Company was full time employment in 2013-2014 and my “side job” otherwise

Rackspace - Director, Product and Software Development (5/2012 - 4/2013)

  • Managed a team of ~100 Engineers spread across multiple time zones
  • Responsible for the Rackspace Cloud Console, Cloud Monitoring, iOS/Android mobile apps
  • Tech Stack: OpenStack cloud, Python, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, multiple GUI technologies

Technicolor - Vice President Engineering, Technicolor Fellow (4/2004 - 5/2012)

  • Product: large-scale video advertising SaaS offering using IPTV technology for in-store delivery
  • Managed a team of ~100 Engineers in both the US and China
  • Solution generated over $1B in revenue during my eight-year tenure
  • System deployed in over 5000 retail stores as well as data centers, then moved to cloud
  • Drove the successful on-time launch for Walmart resulting in a $190M customer win
  • Selected as a Technicolor Fellow - invitation only for the top-tier technologists
  • Managed patent portfolio, authored six issued patents and managed a pool of ~40 total patents
  • Tech Stack: included satellite multicast-file-transfer, low latency RTP IP video, SNMP

Arkstream, Inc. - Co-Founder/Vice President Engineering (7/2003 - 2/2004)

  • Co-founded this seed-stage startup and led the implementation of an IPTV ad-insertion product
  • Product was hardware-based audio-video transcode of live IPTV packet streams
  • Personally wrote the low-level IP packet processing system and RTP stream handlers

Alcatel Genesys - Consultant, Senior Software Engineer (7/2000 - 6/2003)

  • Full time Software Engineer (contract through Herlein Engineering Inc. see below)
  • Designed and built new network-based proxy servers for high volume telephone switches
  • Designed and built an automated test suite to fully exercise detailed call flows

Quicknet Technologies, Inc. - Director of Engineering (5/1999 - 6/2000)

  • Grew a team from 5 to 30+ to build a VoIP telephony app over 5 years before Skype existed
  • Invented the Linux Telephony sub-system and contributed device drivers to the Linux kernel

Herlein Engineering, Inc. - Principal Software Engineer (5/1998 - 4/2004)

  • Full time consulting through this company for 1998 and again from 2000-2003
  • Wrote a variety of custom products including embedded systems, Linux, and early VoIP products
  • Invented, developed and sold the Simple Telephony Control Protocol (STCP)
  • Co-authored and drove the IETF to ratify the Speex Codec RTP payload spec (RFC-5574)

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution – Shipboard Support Engineer (3/1997 – 5/1998)

  • Full time system and network support onboard cutting-edge new oceanographic research ship
  • Managed full ships network including server farm, Inmarsat (internet connectivity), RS-422 loop
  • Managed network and data systems on the deep-diving submarine “Alvin”

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