Bryan Gomes

1504 65th Street SE
Auburn, WA 98092
gomes.be@gmail.com
253-887-1780

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Objective

A mid to senior level position in a product development performance testing organization.

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Experience

Enterprise Network Engineer, New Product Introduction

3/2003 - Present
F5 Networks
Seattle, Washington

In my role as a New Product Introduction Engineer I must be multifaceted, technically adept, organized, and able to work with multiple organizational groups within the company. As the senior member of the ENE-NPI team I serve as the primary technical representative of Professional Services throughout the product release cycle. In this capacity I work with my counterparts in the Product Development organization to be the voice of both the customer and the entirety of the F5 Networks technical staff supporting the products.

As a new product nears its release date, the job responsibilities shift to focus on F5 Networks internal training needs and the propagation of product knowledge. In this role I am required to create training materials, lab materials, setup, maintain, and document the training and lab environment, deliver training, and train other trainers to provide internal training throughout the global organization.

Primary job responsibilities include:

• Attend Preliminary Design Reviews (PRD) & Critical Design Reviews (CRD) and provide input and content representing the Professional Services organization.
• Review and comment on Functional Specifications for each distinct feature in each release.
• Participate in daily product triage session in which enhancements, fixes, and changes are discussed and either "triaged in" or "triaged out" of the upcoming software/hardware release
• Formulate and execute a Beta plan for each major release including authoring use-cases, surveys, maintaining the Beta portal, interviewing and lining up testers, distributing the software, shipping, tracking, and retrieving hardware. Compiling feedback and presenting it to the product release team, etc...
• Write and maintain a Services Requirements Document (SRD) for each product that is updated for each release.
• Reviewing product documentation for upcoming software/hardware releases.
• Assure all Professional Services' commitments for a given release have been met and sign off on each release.
• Internal training of F5 Networks technical staff on new software/hardware releases.
• Assisting the Escalations Team in both pre-sales and post-sales capacities in matters involving recently released software/hardware.

Releases in which I have served as lead NPI Engineer:

• FirePass 4.0: The first F5 FirePass product release
• BIG-IP 9.0: The first BIG-IP "Next Generation" release leveraging the Traffic Management Microkernel (tmm)
• BIG-IP 9.2.x: Global Traffic Manager and Application Security Manager
• BIG-IP 9.4.x: Administrative Domains (AuthZ), Single Configuration File, TMM plugins
• BIG-IP 9.6.x: First release of clustered BIG-IP, first release of Chassis hardware platform (VIPRION)

Enterprise Network Engineer, Escalations

4/2002 - 3/2003
F5 Networks
McLean, Virginia

I served as the first Enterprise Network Engineer in a remote office. With the corporate head quarters being in Seattle my primary function as the "remote ENE" was to come online early and better serve the needs of our customer base in Asia, Europe, and the east coast of North America.

Each day I would review the escalation issues from the various regions and take the most critical cases based upon both severity and chronological dead lines. I served as a singular escalation point for several multi-national corporations for several months until other escalations engineers could be hired in other remote offices.

The role of escalations engineer is the highest level of F5 Product support it is often said that if the issue cannot be resolved by and escalations ENE then the issue is either a product bug or a request for enhancement.

Senior Network Support Engineer

2/2000 - 4/2002
F5 Networks
McLean, Virginia

As the first remote Network Support Engineer hired by F5 Networks I assisted my manager in getting the F5 Networks office up and running in terms of systems, facilities, and staffing.

As the technical lead for the staff of Network Support Engineers I took on the responsibilities of training the other engineers and assisting them with their case work. Serving as a technical mentor for the team I would "float" from engineer to engineer to jump in on any urgent issues or simply assisting anyone who needed technical expertise.

I had daily conferences with other lead Network Support Engineers and Developers from headquarters to report daily case activities and try to identify any service oriented trends early. I also visited headquarters in Seattle once per quarter to stay abreast of upcoming product changes.

Founder & Manager of InterManage Post Installation Team

6/1998 - 2/2000
ANS Networks / MCI Worldcom
Reston, Virginia

The InterManage Post Installation Team was founded to ensure that new InterManage (managed firewall service) customers had a smooth transition from installation to production. Supporting both the ANS InterLock and Checkpoint Firwall1 firewalls, the team's charter was to manage the first 30 days of every customers' deployment, work through and resolve any implementation issues, assist each customer in verifying the solution meets all of their stated goals, and finally transition them into the normal InterManage support process at which point should only require general maintenance of firewall policies.

As founder and manager of the Intermanage Post Installation Team I was required to write the Mission Statement for the group, compose all of the policies and documentation, assemble, lead, and train the team of engineers. In this capacity I was not only the manager of the team but I also served as the technical lead for the team.

ANS InterLock Firewall Support Engineer

8/1995 - 6/1998
ANS Networks / MCI Worldcom
Reston, Virginia

After serving as a temp in the America Online data center in Reston, Virginia racking and cabling equipment, I was hired on by ANS as an InterLock Support Engineer. With little experience with computers and almost no Unix experience to speak of my learning curve was indeed steep. I was immediately put on the phones to answer support tickets without having even a minimal working knowledge of the product or the operating system. I did my best to project an aura of confidence and competency with my fellow employees and the customers I worked with. With continued self study, constant experimentation, and everyday real world experience I quickly became proficient and started.

Towards the tail end of 1997 our organization put together a plan to offer a managed firewall service and expand our support offering to include Checkpoint Firewall-1. When the new service launched it became obvious that the most challenging aspect of the managed firewall service was the transitional period between implementation and production. Recognizing that the bulk of the support cost and burden was heavily loaded into this transitional period I wrote a proposal for the creation of a Post Installation Team to guide customers through the issues they would assuredly encounter during the implementation to production phase.

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Skills

I am currently responsible for several full racks of network equipment in the Professional Services lab, including a fixed training rack, a mobile training rack (both with a compliment of F5 Network equipment, 3rd party switches, and Linux based servers), a 10Gbps rack for testing and supporting the BIG-IP VIPRION Chassis platform, and yet another rack of equipment used for testing, troubleshooting, and validating cases, white papers, and solutions.

As my current role requires that I and other members of the NPI team provide internal training for each new feature release I created, documented, and currently maintain the _master training server_. The training server was created in such a way that it could be replicated quickly from any remote office with only a standard Debian (or Ubuntu) netinstall CD and SSH access to the master training server. Because the master training server replication process is portable, simple, and relatively quick it has been cloned by much of the F5 Networks technical staff to be used as multipurpose servers in functional testing, troubleshooting, and proving concepts.

• F5 BIG-IP: LTM, GTM, LC, Web Accelerator
• Servers: Unix/Linux System Administration (Apache 2, OpenLDAP, FreeRadius, TacPlus, ProFTPd, gforge)
• Network Infrastructure: Switches and Routers from various vendors
• Web 2.0: Twiki/wiki & MS Sharepoint
• Scripting: Perl, shell
• Operating Systems: Linux/Unix, Windows XP & Vista, Mac OS X

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References

Available upon request: Request References

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-- BryanGomes - 17 Apr 2008