Fabian Ponce
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since January 26, 2018
Fabian is a software engineer with expertise in cloud infrastructure and experience working as an individual contributor as well as in technical leadership roles. His past employers have included startups and established companies operating in fintech and healthcare industries. Fabian brings deep technical knowledge to the table and enjoys working with people, whether to build high-performing teams or understand and deliver on key business objectives.
Portfolio
Experience
- Linux - 14 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 14 years
- PostgreSQL - 5 years
- Ansible - 5 years
- Python - 4 years
- Continuous Delivery (CD) - 4 years
- Continuous Integration (CI) - 4 years
Preferred Environment
Terraform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Linux
The most amazing...
...story I've been a part of was at Toast, where I was part of the team that helped build the systems that took us from a scrappy startup to an eventual IPO.
Work Experience
Consultant (Part-time)
Duffield Cloud Consulting
- Established a consulting business after collaborating with several past employers on infrastructure projects in an on-demand capacity and enjoying the work.
- Worked with a major media company's subsidiary to reduce annual recurring cloud infrastructure spend by half a million dollars while improving reliability to exceed a 99.99% standard.
- Provided "DevOps-in-a-Box" solutions for companies that needed to start deploying their software in the cloud but didn't need a full-time engineer.
Staff Infrastructure Engineer | Tech Lead
Toast
- Refactored the existing infrastructure automation to support the deployment of various environments on non-overlapping CIDR ranges. This allowed me to create a unified VPN experience for all Toast employees.
- Migrated the configuration management code from Ansible 1.9 to 2+ and built a test suite to verify end-to-end functionality.
- Created Apache Spark infrastructure for long-term reporting and analytical workloads, providing enhanced stability and performance for customers migrating from an existing transactional PostgreSQL database.
- Played a key role as a 1st responder in all major service incidents and evangelizer for reliability engineering best practices.
- Built a PCI egress control as a service solution on top of the existing cloud platform, bringing deep observability and metrics for each microservice for our service teams and SOC.
Experience
Infrastructure Building Blocks at Saylent
I built a lightweight deployment automation, continuous delivery pipelines, and infrastructure tooling that was low-maintenance, easily understood, and gave their team a good place to start.
This improved their ability to set up new customer environments, provide demos, and get faster feedback on their work.
Reducing the Cost of Downtime
By implementing a failover application that could handle this traffic and record the metrics for later consumption, we were able to reduce the cost of downtime and set up a roadmap for improving developer velocity without damaging the business.
Scaling WordPress for Broadcast Television
I worked alongside a small team that identified performance issues in the website and helped bridge the gap between their internal team's understanding of the software project and their cloud providers. We solved technical challenges such as N+1 queries, migrated them to AWS, and provided a reliable and predictable means to scale up cloud resources during the live broadcast since auto-scaling wouldn't react fast enough.
We ultimately improved their website to a point where it could handle the live broadcast traffic without sweat and still save on hosting costs when they were off the air.
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js
Tools
Terraform, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Jenkins, Ansible, AWS IAM, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Chef, Postfix, VMware, Apache Tomcat, RabbitMQ, Gradle, Travis CI, CircleCI, Puppet, NGINX, Amazon EKS
Languages
Go, Ruby, Java, Bash, Groovy, C++, Python
Paradigms
Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI), DevOps, Continuous Development (CD), DevSecOps, Agile, ETL, Agile Software Development, Azure DevOps
Platforms
Android, Drupal, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Linux, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Docker, CentOS, Apache2, Azure, Ubuntu, Heroku, Red Hat OpenShift, Cilium
Storage
Datadog, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, WebSphere Liberty
Industry Expertise
Healthcare
Frameworks
Dropwizard, Spark
Other
Fintech, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), SMTP, Cloud Architecture, Amazon RDS, CI/CD Pipelines, Containerization, SecOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Multitenancy, Release Management, Enterprise Architecture, AWS DevOps, Network Architecture, Team Leadership, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Ubuntu Server, SparkPost, Kubernetes Operations (kOps), GlassFish, Groovy Scripting
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