Rob Schroder

I have over 20 years of experience managing teams of SRE's and performance engineers, as well as hands-on experience of tackling performance and reliability problems.

Director, Site Reliability Engineering 

June 2021 to Present 

Engagez

• Built SRE practice from ground up.
• Built technology stack in AWS, comprised of AWS, EKS, Go, PHP, memcache, MySQL, redis, Solr
• Achieved SOC2 compliance.
• Reduced infrastructure costs by fifty percent.
• Built CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins.
• Instrumented applications, services, and infrastructure using CloudWatch, prometheus, and
• NewRelic. Automation was accomplished with Terraform and Salt.
• Managed on shore and off shore QA teams.

Full-time Student

University of California

August 2019 to March 2021

Manager, Site Reliability Engineering

One Kings Lane (Acquired by Bed, Bath, and Beyond)

July 2012 to June 2019

• Built a site reliability engineering team comprised of engineers with strong backgrounds in DevOps, systems engineering, performance engineering, application development, and database management.
• Team members were embedded with development teams and made sure code was delivered in a timely and instrumented fashion.
• All team members participated in a 24/7 on-call rotation. We maintained 99.99% uptime, all while enjoying our work and maintaining high efficiency.
• Team members were distributed geographically with locations in San Francisco, New York, London, and Argentina.
• Conducted postmortems that focused on resolution and prevention of repeat incidents, not on blame.
• Technology Stack: Nagios, Splunk, OpenTSDB, StatsD, Boomerang, CFEngine, SaltStack, Ruby, Rails, Resque, Java, Javascript, Redis, memcached, MySQL, CentOS, Android, iOS, Gatling

Performance Engineering Lead 

November 2010 to July 2012

Manilla, LLC

• Built the performance engineering practice at Manilla from the ground up.
• For simulating load, we used open source tools such as jmeter and the grinder. For root cause
• analysis, we used a combination of New Relic, ruby-prof, JProfiler, boomerang, and code
• instrumentation.
• For reporting, we used statsD and Graphite.
• Testing and performance analysis efforts resulted in a thirty times reduction in hardware costs.
• Built an automated load testing, profiling, and reporting infrastructure that allowed us to release software regularly with confidence.

Co-Founder, Director of Performance Assurance 

January 2005 to November 2010

 Coban Corporation (Acquired by aurionPro Solutions in January 2007)

• Built and managed a cross-client team that was responsible for guiding customers through the complete performance assurance life cycle, from gathering performance requirements on through to capacity planning, test strategy definition, load simulation, root cause analysis, and maintenance driven regression testing.
• Responsible for managing all aspects of delivery, from sales support to scoping, resource planning, budgeting, and contract review and submission.
• Turned customer’s business requirements into a cohesive set of tasks and testing goals. Developed detailed schedules, project estimates, resource plans, status reports, and metrics. Managed successful performance testing projects at over 25 clients, including Citigroup, American Express, Marriott, Safeway, Expedia, Sun Microsystems, Walt Disney.
• Technology Stack: Java, Javascript, WebSphere, Weblogic, Tomcat, Hibernate, Oracle, DB2, Solaris, Windows

Lead Performance Engineer 

March 2001 to January 2005 

Epicentric, Inc. (Acquired by Vignette Corporation in 2003)

• Played a lead role in establishing performance engineering methodologies and best practices.
• Responsibilities included giving input on requirements, reviewing design, writing performance test plans and strategy documents, isolating performance and scalability bottlenecks, and performing the respective root cause analysis.
• The Vignette application portal was capable of delivering thousands of transactions per second with sub-second response times.
• Technology Stack: Java, WebSphere, Weblogic, Tomcat, Oracle, DB2, ehcache, RedHat, Solaris, Windows

Senior Software Engineer 

October 1999 to March 2001 

2Bridge Software

• Played dual roles of developer and performance engineer.
• Lead performance engineer for 2Bridge’s 2Share and Golden Gate content management
• applications.
• Wrote 2Share’s installation application.
• Technology Stack: Java, Tomcat, WebSphere, Weblogic, ObjectStore, Oracle

Staff Software Engineer 

February 1997 to August 1999 

IBM Corporation

• Built QA and load-testing lab for the first release of IBM’S WebSphere Application Server.
• Technical lead for the testing effort surrounding the WebSphere servlet container.
• Developed the load-testing tool that was used for testing the first two versions of WebSphere
• Technology Stack: Solaris, AIX, Windows, HPUX, RedHat, OS/2, OS390, Oracle, DB2, Apache,
• Netscape, and IBM web servers.

University of California, Santa Cruz

B.S. Astrophysics