Benjamin Hodgens

Benjamin Hodgens

Summary

  • Proven leader in systems architecture, operations, integration, and administration, with a strong track record of directing teams, driving strategic initiatives, and delivering results.
  • Over 20 years of information technology experience with consistently increasing responsibility and position requirements.
  • Esteemed by both peers and managers as a collaborative team player and natural leader.
  • Demonstrated ability driving complex projects involving multiple departments and organizations to successful conclusion.
  • Able to proactively work outside of prior domain experience through extrapolation, collaboration, research, and analysis.
  • Effectively meet business needs by using a holistic approach: business needs assessment, project planning and scoping, asset management, customer relationship management, support follow-through, and proactive technical management.
  • Exemplary problem solving ability: able to digest, fix and simplify complex systematic and architectural problems.
  • Well versed in systems level integration, migration, reporting, and process streamlining.
  • Broadly experienced in a wide range of cloud, server, virtualization, storage, and network technologies.
  • Familiar with multiple scripting and programming languages, regular expressions, and OO and MVC principles.

Work Experience and Major Accomplishments

Professional Services Manager

Oct 2024 - current

VAST Data, Durham, NC

  • Lead the Professional Services team, doubling its size from 6 to 12 members while overseeing a 4x increase in the average installation size.
  • Proposed, designed, and implemented a company-wide initiative to optimize field activities, aligning individual contributor roles with specialized hardware and software installation tasks. Secured direct approval from C-level leadership, with the initiative chosen as the strategic direction for 2025 to support the company’s financial COGS structuring objectives. This streamlined deployment processes, improved efficiency, and reduced PS opex costs by 26%.
  • Developed and implemented company-wide key performance indicators (KPIs) for product installation operations and revenue realization, establishing performance metrics from the ground up to drive efficiency and accountability.
  • Developed and implemented company-wide standards to streamline field activities, reduce cycle time, and minimize errors. Drove a 30% reduction in field installation failure rates through process improvements and standardization.
  • Analyzed historical field installation data on duration and staffing to identify optimization opportunities. Developed and implemented standardized criteria for sizing and planning deployments, resulting in an approximate 20% improvement in scheduling efficiency.
  • Technically mentored two PS Engineers to expand their expertise into Solutions Architecture.
  • Piloted a company-wide CAPA (Corrective and Preventive Actions) initiative, creating a structured post-install debrief mechanism to capture and implement key learnings.
  • Coordinated cross-functionally with procurement, sales, sales engineering, R&D, and support teams to drive adoption of process improvements and increase efficiency.

Architect

June 2024 - Oct 2024

VAST Data, Durham, NC

  • Designed and implemented a site installation plan review workflow to reduce field errors and ensure seamless deployments that was adopted by the sales engineering organization. 75% of early reviews lead to escapes being identified and corrected before getting to the field.
  • Served as the key quality checkpoint between Sales and Field Operations, ensuring all installation plans met company standards and best practices before deployment. Reviewed and refined plans to reduce errors, improve execution, and enhance customer experience.
  • Established and documented installation review guidelines to drive consistency and quality across projects.
  • Conducted site readiness meetings with sales engineers and customers to validate configurations, align expectations, and ensure successful installations.
  • Maintained and updated the installation plan template, incorporating updates from new software releases and hardware qualifications.
  • Captured and documented post-install learnings via JIRA, contributing to process and product improvements.
  • Managed and updated known issues tracking, ensuring real-time awareness and resolution of field challenges.

Senior Solutions Architect - FSx for OpenZFS

May 2022 – June 2024

Amazon Web Services, Seattle, WA

  • Primarily responsible for guiding FSx/OpenZFS project managers with technical and field insights, customer sentiment, and field collaboration - curating 22 feature requests, reporting 23 service issues, and providing technical feedback on in-development features in regular steering meetings and document review.
  • Coordinate service enablement activities across service, marketing, and go-to-market disciplines to assure consistency of messaging.
  • Author and curator of the initial annual report indicating service health and market direction for FSx/OpenZFS (FY2023).
  • Enable AWS experts for FSx/OpenZFS through authoring 11 technical assets, reviewing 8 public blogs, and delivering impactful sessions, like "FSx for OpenZFS Cost Optimization," with 120 attendees and a 97% CSAT. Regularly engaged for customer-requested expert engagement.
  • Led a cross-discipline initiative for service differentiation, completing the "Storage Selector" pilot project, contributing to organizational tools and enhancing field and customer storage service knowledge.
  • Foster team development by initiating training bootcamps, mentoring individuals, and serving as a regular panelist for new hire onboarding.
  • Primary chalktalk presenter at AWS re:Invent 2023, for the session, “boosting performance and running compute-intensive workloads at scale”, achieving 100% attendance and a 98% CSAT.
  • Lead the solution architect community by preparing and presenting technical enablement sessions internally on storage service best practices. Primary point of technical expertise for field enablement materials for FSx/OpenZFS.
  • Regularly provide architectural review and recommendations to customer executives and technical staff.

Senior Critical Case Engineer

Jan 2020 – May 2022

Cloudian Inc, Santa Monica, CA

  • Responsible for identifying, investigating, and documenting architectural ranged-read memory performance bottleneck; resolution netted 186-350% improvement in throughput, with a 41-80% reduction in CPU utilization.
  • Regular collaboration with project management for product improvement prioritization; personally defined technical criteria and operating mechanisms for future product offering.
  • Designed, proposed and implemented new support escalation process, providing a formal method to evaluate support and sustaining efforts while decreasing the support role provided by engineering.
  • Instigator and primary driver behind opening communication channels between Support and Product Management to formalize Sustaining effort efficiency.
  • Designed and presented training workshops on diagnosis of network, stack traces, and resource contention for Support.
  • Primary networking and performance expertise escalation resource.
  • Implemented and maintain performance diagnostic collection and analysis tools.
  • Focus on identification and diagnosis of architectural design issues and improvements.
  • Provide engineering escalation assistance and direction to Support.

Senior QA Automation Engineer

Joyent, San Francisco, CA

Dec 2017 – Sept 2018

  • Implemented continuous integration and deployment mechanisms for "next generation" Linux kernel and platform image creation.
  • Wrote initial canary services for new prototype cloud management implementation; integrated into CI.
  • Defined and implemented tests identifying Illumos kernel performance limitations and performance related bugs.
  • Implemented toolchain for repeatable, comparable performance testing across multiple container and host operating systems.

Cloud Operations Engineer

Aug 2017 – Dec 2017

Joyent, San Francisco, CA

  • Executed system deployment and maintenance of company's public and privately operated cloud. Participated in on-call rotation.
  • Wrote heuristics to automate data center physical disk identification and replacement procedures.
  • Authored internal specification documentation on automated deployment and testing to production.
  • Identified and resolved long-standing infrastructure contingency backup performance issues. Reduced backend time for billing operations by 500%.
  • Proposed new procedures and coordinated efforts to improve technical escalation to engineering.

L3 Support Engineer

Aug 2015 – Jan 2017

Nexenta Systems, Santa Clara, CA

  • Chosen by NexentaStor 5 engineering team as operations’s primary technical liaison to determine engineering requirements for sustaining engineering. Identified key weaknesses in go-live strategy, specifically around command line syntax/usability and customer diagnosis engine. Worked closely with Engineering Director to ensure clear understanding, buy-in, and ability to implement the needed changes.
  • Routinely selected as lead engineer or point of contact for escalated support cases with high potential for customer dissatisfaction or technical confusion. At least 95% of these cases were successfully resolved without further escalation, and with either a clear technical solution applied or appropriate bugs filed against product.
  • Primary operations engineer for full-stack performance analysis and complex root cause analysis. Provided customers with mitigation steps which resolved pressing problems and, where appropriate, details on other environmental changes were necessary to meet customer operational expectations.
  • Frequently provided impromptu consultations with L2 to proactively address issues prior to either managerial or customer escalation leading to improved case closure rates.
  • Conceptualized, gathered requirements, designed, and delivered log repository analytics toolset, providing data mining and predictive diagnosis against 32TB of raw data. Tools are used routinely throughout the company’s support operations, reducing time to successful resolution by 75% on at least 85% of cases raised.
  • Regular collaboration with engineering and Q/A, providing in-depth discussion and diagnosis on architectural issues (specifically, with ZFS, NFS, VAAI, CIFS, filesystem normalization, and nbmand) through successful resolution. Responsible for pushing architectural changes made in multiple releases which vastly improved product stability and performance.
  • Consistent top performer: out of 13 support engineers, reported 27% of all bugs in 2015 and 28% in 2016.
  • Continued maintenance of support analytic scripts and log extraction and ingestion repositories.
  • Routinely reported on and provided ownership of bugs for multiple engineering teams.

Senior L2 Storage Support Engineer

Sept 2013 – Aug 2015

Nexenta Systems, Santa Clara, CA

  • Served as primary communication liaison between customers, customer relations, sales, and engineering.
  • Lead engineer on team of 9 providing 24/7 international support for ZFS-based storage products.
  • Primary technical trainer and guidance for new L1 and L2 hires.
  • Primary maintainer of internal support documentation for customer-facing support activities.
  • Wrote analysis tools for existing performance log gathering tools to automate time consuming support tasks.
  • Heavy emphasis on and involvement in full-stack performance analysis and root cause analysis.
  • Provided initial direction and requirements for next generation of product documentation.

Managed Services POWER Systems Engineer

May 2012 – Sept 2013

Sirius Computer Solutions, Omaha, NE

  • Regularly sought by management and outside departments for assistance with troublesome network, storage, and performance related diagnosis and resolution. Frequently brought into projects and diagnosis efforts to provide new, fresh perspective and direction.
  • Planned and coordinated system-level requirements for projects for numerous development teams.
  • Wrote Perl scripts to collect, audit, clean, and merge sudoers across several thousand LPARs for an S&P 400 financial services institution, allowing for tighter security compliance for account management requirements. Migration to new sudoers files was seamless.
  • Served as primary escalation contact for overnight and international support incidents.
  • Primary party responsible for all Linux and AIX administration needs for clients of managed services.
  • Secondary responsibilities of upgrading, maintaining, troubleshooting, monitoring, and provisioning AIX LPARs.

IT Systems Manager

March 2011 – May 2012

Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, CA (UptimeUSA)

  • Wrote project and resource plans necessary for initial customer on-boarding. Plan maintained existing service levels while competing on optimization and cost reduction.
  • Supervised and provided guidance to staff of 5 in daily administrative tasks, projects, and user requests.
  • Oversaw daily operations surrounding MSRI lecture video production, member onboarding, and IT system operations.
  • Met regularly with MSRI staff and Uptime management to provide clarification on time lines and assure projects remained within scope through managing expectations.
  • During an unplanned facility power outage, performed fuel/power calculations to Berkeley Plant staff to allow Space Science Lab and MSRI to continue operations on diesel gensets. Calculations assured optimal genset operation through the week, assuring successful NASA rocket launch at SSL.
  • Performed complete equipment audit in pursuit of data sufficient to complete FY2012 equipment purchase requirements. Planned asset depreciation and project timeline for the following 3 years.
  • Planned and implemented a functionally structured and maintainable architectural re-design, resulting in a virtualization consolidation of 45+ interdependent standalone systems onto 20 physical hosts.
  • Reduced service cyclomatic complexity and single points of failure through an audit of systems and their functional roles.
  • Through automation, playing to individual strengths, budget re-prioritization, and optimization, reduced staffing requirements from 6 full-time employees at time of on-boarding to 2 FTEs 1 year later. For instance, eliminated legacy human-intensive encoding system with scripted ffmpeg encoding process requiring minor intervention.
  • Managed 3 operationally independent networks: staff, frequently cycling academic members, and public web.
  • Consolidated 3 independent LDAP and 1 NIS+ authentication systems to a single central LDAP domain.
  • Migrated 1,500-user mail system from Cyrus to Dovecot.

Storage/UNIX Engineer

Feb 2010 – March 2011

Boomerang Management Ent., Rapid City, SD

  • Primary administrator of co-located XenServer, Linux, AIX, and FreeBSD servers; client servers across 3 states. Provided technical specification and schedule for equipment replacement in the colo. Solely responsible for specification, operation, and maintenance of all server hardware/software and data backup.
  • Implemented and maintained tiered backup on FreeBSD ZFS on whitebox SuperMicro/LSI chassis.
  • Observed, identified, and provided written justification for AIX storage upgrade to mitigate long-standing and unacknowledged IOPS-related performance bottlenecks.
  • Complete design and sole authorship of PowerShell scripts which migrated 8,000+ files based on hierarchical medical classifications from a directory tree to SharePoint. Tools were used for months for further migrations by customer without additional assistance.
  • Helped administer and improve environment with 100+ concurrent Citrix ICA clients as well as 500+ concurrent SharePoint client environment (team of 3 sysadmins).
  • Administered hylafax system responsible for transmittal of 3,000 faxes a day. Eliminated long-standing transmission failure causes, reducing failure rate to approximately 4% from 8-9%.
  • Complete redesign and documentation of company's co-located equipment racks.

Technologist

2007 – 2012

IT Independent Contractor

  • Clients include Pomeroy, Sears, IBM, Best Buy, PupSafe, AtlaGroup, Gold Pages Publishing.
  • Authored detailed deployment documentation and run books, including diagrams and troubleshooting guidelines, for all clients.
  • Performed backup and disaster planning and implementation for multiple small and medium organizations.
  • Founded AtlaGroup, a Bay Area MSP, which operated with a positive ledger through it’s first two years. Involved in operations and planning through the first year.

Site Deployment Lead

Sept 2008 – Jan 2009

Unisys in support of the 2010 Census

  • Oversaw site project implementations, assuring compliance with specifications.
  • Project implementation while supervising 4-5 technicians.
  • Directed installation and asset delivery for physical cabling, workstations, server racks, and VoIP system.
  • Configured local VoIP systems and workstations for initial use.
  • Answered to project NOC at the end of each day, verifying success weekly with my immediate project manager.

Systems Administrator

Aug 2007 – Jan 2008

West River Health Services, Hettinger, ND

  • Responsible for over 150 workstations and a dozen Windows servers located across 9 remote facilities in a hospital/clinical software environment with multiple legacy dependencies.
  • Additional responsibilities included hands-on user support, project planning, asset management and acquisition, and the creation and maintenance of documentation.

Network/Computer System Admin

Dec 2004 – June 2005

Good Samaritan Society, Sioux Falls, SD

  • Responsible for building, deploying and maintaining Linux servers across all national campuses.
  • Groupwise mail administrator.
  • Provided remote phone support.

Systems Adminsistrator

2000 - 2006

HES, Huron, SD

  • Performed all technology related purchasing and equipment management including printers, servers, and workstations.
  • Built and maintained high-end AutoCAD systems for engineers and draftsmen.
  • Resolved all technical issues experienced by employees.

Intern UNIX Administrator

Sept 2000 - May 2001

Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA

Education and Accomplishments

Blackbelt, nidan

2016 - now

Fusion Martial Arts (Shorin-ryu karate)

Continuing lifelong education and edification.

Owner and Bladesmith

Sept 2018 - now

Black Hills Knives LLC

Owner, operator and knifemaker. BHK makes knives with materials sourced and made 100% in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Founding Owner

2012

n2con (ne AtlaGroup)

Founding owner of San Francisco Bay Area managed IT service provider. Company merged with still-operational company, N2CON.

BSc in Information Technology

2007

Colorado Technical University of Sioux Falls, SD (GPA 3.45)

Study emphasis in project management, HPC clusters and security.