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”