Brian Shurley
Verified Expert in Engineering
Relational Database Services (RDS) Developer
AWS cloud architect and engineer with over 10 years of AWS experience. Expert data architect, data engineer and database engineer across many platforms and technologies. I'm fortunate to have a rich history and experience delivering solutions at a professional level in many technologies and problem domains, i.e. I can succeed on a very wide range of efforts. Taking the rest of 2024 off from full-timecorporate life, looking forward to working on interesting part-time projects of all types.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Python, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform
The most amazing...
...experience is looking back at all the interesting, challenging and diverse projects I've been a part of and the impact they have had!
Work Experience
Principal Cloud Engineer
Procare Solutions
- Steered and contributed to stabilizing and modernizing an AWS-based childcare management web app increasing application availability from 99.8% to 99.99% in one year.
- Adopted complex infrastructure into Cloudformation IaC and enabled automated deployment of infrastructure and code to over a dozen environments.
- Developed multi-region disaster recovery strategy for a petabyte of data stored in S3, achieving a 15 minute RPO and zero RTO.
- Transitioned S3 infrastructure-as-code from CloudFormation to Terraform / Terragrunt and implemented a CI/CD pipeline for Terraform-based infrastructure.
- Incident resolution and troubleshooting across entire tech stack, solving problems in PostgreSQL, Redis, S3, ALB, ASG, EC2, CloudFront, Route53, Ruby on Rails, Puma, Sidekiq.
- Lead the migration of PostgreSQL database from AWS RDS to Aurora eliminating downtime caused by database I/O contention and spearheaded plan for stabilizing and scaling a quickly growing Postgresql database.
- Expanded use of New Relic for observability, alerting and application performance monitoring.
Director of Engineering, Data Platform
Procare Solutions
- Developed robust data pipelines ingesting terabyte-scale data from multiple dissimilar sources into S3-based data lake, using AWS Step Functions and Glue jobs (Spark).
- Built data warehouse for use by analysts on teams across the organization, using S3, Athena and LakeFormation and PowerBI dashboards and curated data sets for ad hoc analysis.
- Delivered initial business value only three months after starting, with an analysis of impacts of COVID-19 to the childcare industry.
- Built and managed a high-powered team of AWS data engineers by training and mentoring developers with no previous cloud experience.
- Provided organization-level guidance on AWS architecture and best practices for enterprise-wide AWS migration effort.
- Product selection and proof of concept of MDM solution using both Informatica MDM and Semarchy xDM to match and merge customer data across 5 separate sources.
- Designed and delivered customer-facing product allowing large child care enterprises access to their data for ingestion into their own data ecosystems, leveraging Azure AD (now Entra ID) for federated auth, Athena and LakeFormation.
- Followed DevOps best practices such as automated testing and deployments using CodeBuild and CodePipeline, observability and monitoring using CloudWatch.
- Partnered with economists at the Federal Reserve bank to provide anonymized child care attendance data for academic papers.
Data Architect and Cloud Engineer
DHI Group Inc / dice.com
- Enlisted to help build a high-performing data engineering team and design their next generation data and analytics platform using the AWS cloud and steered the overall enterprise data strategy.
- Developed software patterns and best practices around data pipelines, data lake and warehousing, big data, containerized workloads, data modeling, and data privacy and security using technologies including AWS, Airflow, Redshift, Docker and Python.
- Advocated for DevOps practices and served as scrum master.
- Designed and developed a serverless API to ingest and validate streaming data from DHI’s numerous applications and microservices into a data lake, while protecting sensitive data in transit, using AWS Lambda, API Gateway, Kinesis Firehose, S3, Glue.
- Implemented Apache Airflow server to orchestrate data pipelines and other workflows, hosted using Docker and AWS Elastic Container Service (ECS).
Data Architect
Freelance
- CTO dashboard for DHI Group | Designed and built data pipelines using Python-based data pipelines and Tableau Server dashboards showing IT operational metrics.
- Cloud database migration for DHI Group | Responsible for migration of on-premise data lake to AWS cloud. Assisted DBA team in migrating the multi-terabyte dice.com OLTP database from on-premise to AWS RDS.
- Commission system integration for Vail Resorts | Designed and built data integrations enabling the implementation of a new cloud-based commission system. Using Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS) and C# .NET.
- Data lake implementation for DHI Group | Designed and implemented near real-time replication between very active OLTP sources hosted on MySQL, Oracle, and MSSQL targeting a MSSQL-based data lake.
Consultant
Slalom
- Project-based contract work for various Colorado companies. Key projects listed below.
- Restaurant MDM implementation for Chipotle Mexican Grill | Implemented MuleSoft Mule ESB and Anypoint Platform suite of products to integrate data between source systems and Semarchy MDM.
- Customer analytics data warehouse for Vail Resorts | Built a modern enterprise data warehouse focusing first on customer and transaction data, replacing legacy data marts.
- Solar program enrollment and reporting for Xcel Energy | Delivered a data migration, integration and reporting solution for a Salesforce.com based web application being built by our team.
Data Architect
onTargetJobs Inc. (now part of DHI Group Inc / Dice Holdings)
- Provided architectural direction over the continuous development on four different high-traffic websites which together has over 3 million unique visitors per month.
- Designed and guided implementation of enterprise-wide information factory and business intelligence applications.
- Modeled and implemented a data warehouse using Microsoft SQL Server and anchor modeling techniques.
- Built dimensional data marts and SSAS multidimensional cubes. Developed various BI applications using SSAS Tabular databases and Power View.
- Was a top-tier technical troubleshooter and data analyst. Solved problems of a critical and complex nature.
- Was the company-wide thought leader: educated developers, defined best practices, and improved SCM processes.
- Advocated for technologies to improve efficiency and performance.
- Used various data mining and unstructured data analysis tools to generate adaptive autosuggest search terms.
- Explored better ways of connecting employers and job seekers using predictive analytics.
Experience
AWS S3 replication and observability enhancements
Skills
Languages
SQL, T-SQL (Transact-SQL), C#, Python, Bash, Java, C#.NET
Paradigms
Entity-relationship Diagrams, Business Intelligence (BI), Scrum, ETL, Agile Software Development, Load Testing, Test-driven Development (TDD), DevOps
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, Azure, Mule ESB, Linux, Oracle, New Relic, Docker, AWS Lambda
Storage
Microsoft SQL Server, Attunity Replicate, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Database Modeling, Data Integration, Database Administration (DBA), SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Master Data Management (MDM), Azure SQL Databases, Teradata, Redshift, PostgreSQL, Semarchy MDM, Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Azure Active Directory, Relational Databases
Other
Data Warehousing, Data Visualization, Data Modeling, Relational Database Services (RDS), Data Engineering, Database Optimization, RESTful Web Services, Performance Optimization, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Lake Formation, AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), CI/CD Pipelines, Identity & Access Management (IAM)
Frameworks
Windows PowerShell, .NET, NHibernate, OAuth 2, Ruby on Rails (RoR)
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Terragrunt
Tools
Git, Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform, AWS Step Functions, AWS CodeBuild, Informatica Master Data Management (MDM), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Tableau, Qlik Replicate, AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), AWS IAM, Amazon CloudWatch
Certifications
AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Certified Database - Specialty
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
Amazon Web Services Training and Certification
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