Full resume as PDF

    nic.benders at gmail.com
    San Diego, CA

    Infrastructure Expert

      Overview

    • Over 10 years of professional experience, including more than 5 
      years as primary infrastructure architect, implementor, and 
      maintainer for high-availability environments with strict 
      service level agreements.

    • Broad work experience, with primary responsibility for, at one 
      time or another: systems administration, network architecture, 
      software development, and developer management. Projects have 
      covered the range from low and no-cost startups using all 
      existing equipment and Open Source, to large commercial 
      deployments with multi-million dollar budgets and complex 
      enterprise software.

    • More than 8 years of mobile industry expertise, including 
      completed projects with Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and Alltel in 
      the US, as well as multiple international carriers.

      Work Experience

      VOCEL, Inc.

      “Principal Architect” (May 2007 - Present)
    Supervisor: Tyler Jensen, COO

    Engineering lead for all carrier products, including primary 
    responsibility for VOCEL's messaging products and all production 
    side IT infrastructure. 

    • Brought development and hosting in-house to reduce costs and 
      improve project response time.

    • Consolidated legacy, development, and testing environments 
      using VMware ESXi and Xen virtualization.

    • Designed and built internal and carrier customer environments, 
      using Cisco ASA firewalls, Red Hat Linux, HAProxy, Apache 
      HTTPd, Ruby on Rails and JBOSS application environments, MySQL 
      Database and being monitored with Net SNMPd, Nagios, and Cacti.

    • Implemented Agile development and project management practises 
      to reduce time-to-market of new features and technologies.

    • Designed and lead the development of a new modular product 
      architecture, including changing the primary product language 
      from Java to Ruby.

      Sixth Column Consulting

      “Infrastructure Expert” (August 2005 - May 2007)

    • Worked with clients to diagnose and eliminate performance and 
      availability issues in live environments.

    • Provided research and training to clients to keep development 
      teams up to date on language, availability, security, and 
      mobile technologies.

    • Served as an advisor for early stage startups on topics 
      including bootstrapping demo environments, data architecture, 
      and working with the mobile phone industry.

      Motricity, Inc. (previously Pinpoint Networks, previously 
      Intertect Networks)

      “Principal Systems Engineer” (September 1999 - July 2005)
    Supervisor: Jeff Kramer, VP of Engineering

    • Designed, purchased, built, integrated and maintained hosted 
      service environment for Cingular Wireless MEdia Mall site.

      – 99.99% service level agreement

      – 5M page views per day, with usage of over 55Mbps at peak 
        hours

      – Scaled environment to accommodate 10x increase in users 
        during first 6 weeks of operation.

    • Introduced performance monitoring of network components and 
      servers in all production environments and used performance 
      data to diagnose and eliminate tuning problems

    • Expanded the office infrastructure as the company grew from 
      startup to 200+ employees

      – Centralized office file storage with a single NAS appliance 
        for NFS, CIFS and iSCSI

      – Integrated stand-alone spam filtering component to mail 
        system (28k messages blocked per day)

    • Designed, purchased, built, integrated and maintained hosted 
      service environments for carrier customers: O2 (British 
      Telecom), Verizon - MSN, Verizon - Infospace

      – Three tier architecture with Apache on Linux, BEA WebLogic on 
        Solaris and Oracle on Solaris

      – Fail-over stateful firewalls with VPN to customer systems and 
        multiple internal security zones

      – Redundant “active-active” Layer 3 based load balancers and 
        switches

      – Database storage via NFS to redundant active-active NetApp 
        Filers

      Previous Work Experience

      Frankfurt Balkind Partners "Network Security Contractor" (July 
      1999)
    Supervisor: Paul Cuthbertson, CIO

      Labyrinth Solutions, Inc. "Independent Subcontractor" (May 1999 
      - June 1999)
    Supervisor: Chris Christopher, CEO

      WVU Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering 
      "Unix Systems Administrator" (May 1998 - August 1999)
    Supervisor: David Krovich, Manager of Information Systems

      National Radio Astronomy Observatory "Junior Engineer" (January 
      1998 - May 1998)
    Supervisor: John Ford, Head of Monitor and Control Group for the 
      Green Bank Telescope

      Labyrinth Solutions, Inc. "Independent Subcontractor" (August 
      1996 - November 1997)
    Supervisor: Chris Christopher, CEO

      WVU Department of Statistics & Computer Science "Systems Staff" 
      (March 1995 - May 1997)
    Supervisor: Jack Callahan, Associate Professor of Computer 
      Science

      Education

      West Virginia University (1995 - 1999)

    • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science