ROBERT L. BERRY
Rob@RobertLBerry.com ▪ (850) 294-6472 ▪ https://dossier.robertberry.me
1398 Mill Pointe Court
Lawrenceville, GA 30043
SENIOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROFESSIONAL
“Striving to Solve problems with technology, not technology problems.”
Strategic and forward-thinking Senior IT Professional with a career history of effectively managing technical operations
and supporting organizational goals while elevating productivity and modernizing systems. Diligent and resourceful in
uncovering solutions that meet all business needs; skilled at balancing resources and forging cross-disciplinary relationships
to align business and technology objectives. Conceives and executes strategies that optimize business operations, elevate
productivity, and reduce costs. As a dynamic leader with expertise in modern IT infrastructure and business process
automation, I’m capable of critically evaluating and responding to rapidly evolving technology environments.
Areas of expertise:
IT STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT – ROI – COMPLEXITY REDUCTION - PROJECT MANAGEMENT– IT INFRASTRUCTURE/CLOUD – IAAS/SAAS/PAAS – DEVOPS – PYTHON -
GOLANG – IT SECURITY - SYSTEMS ENGINEERING – TEAM LEADERSHIP – VENDOR AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS – COMMUNICATE COMPLEX CONCEPTS - NEEDS
ASSESSMENT – PROCESS IMPROVEMENT – COST REDUCTION
SELECTED ACHIEVEMENTS
− Establishing consistent values that promote trust and respect among team members, providing consistent and sound
decisions, and promoting an atmosphere that values candor, leading to success for the team and individuals alike.
− Trusted adviser and strategist, with 20+ years experience conducting due diligence of aging environments burdened by
technical debt, either through neglect or M&A. Managing debt reduction and modernization initiatives, improving
environments with sound IT roadmaps, focusing efforts, and aligning with the business needs.
− Demonstrating engineering excellence on multiple occasions through designing and engineering Cloud solutions both as an
individual and directing other engineers. Communicating the costs and risks analysis to LT that often accompany complex
migrations from physical data center environments to AWS, Azure, and Cloud Citrix solutions.
− Deliberating with teams and business units to redesign business processes to be Cloud ready and take advantage of more
efficient AWS services such as Elastic Container Services, Lambda, and RDS. Also managing and automating the environment
with DevOps tooling such as Docker, Terraform, Cloudformation, Jenkins, Ansible, and GitOps.
− Security conscious and always designing with security in mind, with extensive defensive security experience with AWS
security groups, SSO, MFA, VPN, IAM roles and policies, WAF, and network and OS firewall solutions, as well as, offensive
security experience with penetration testing and bug bounty programs.
TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES
Linux/Unix, Mac, Windows Server operating systems – Data Center/Cloud builds and migrations – Networking
LAN/WAN/SD-WAN/DNS/VPN/mTLS/HTTPS – Shell Scripting – AWS CLI – Python3 – GoLang – VSCode – Enterprise level
Server Virtualization Projects (Docker, CoreOS, Vagrant, Virtualbox and VMWare) – Web servers – Apache – Nginx – IIS –
SQL/NoSQL Databases – Oracle – MySQL/MariaDB – MongoDB – Monitoring/Alerting/Log Analysis/Analytics – Security tools
Burp Suite – Kali Linux – Shodan– ITIL Enterprise tooling and CMDBs – ServiceNow – Jira – Cloud based initiatives via Amazon
AWS – Azure – Citrix – Ansible – Terraform – Docker-compose – Dockerfile multi-stage distroless Golang microservices
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
UBER – Atlanta, GA 2020 (January) to present
Uber Transit IT manager managing M&A of transit applications . An On-Demand Transit application for ride management serving
500+ transit agencies across the U.S., Canada and Australia.
MANAGER OF ENTERPRISE IT INFRASTRUCTURE
ROBERT L. BERRY ▪ Rob@RobertLBerry.com ▪ (850) 294-6472
Professional Experience Continued…
Transforming a neglected and poorly managed IT infrastructure, IT team, and application. Upon acquisition, the team
was losing head count because of distrust and low morale. The infrastructure and application was steeped in technical debt
and complexity. By helping the team to identify and prioritize value-add actions over commodity actions, we managed to get
ahead of the problems, improve morale, grow the team and bring stability to the environment.
− The application had a significant amount of technical debt and an exhaustive number of security flaws at the time of
Uber’s acquisition. Collaborating closely with Uber Security engineers led to the successful mitigation and remediation of all
vulnerabilities through better coding practices, better engineering design, and better data encryption.
− Inherited IT infrastructure neglected and burdened by complexity and technical debt. Reverse engineered long
forgotten and poorly documented environments and reduced the debt by first eliminating processes and legacy environments
with modern solutions:
o Replacing legacy on-prem Citrix with a Cloud based solution
o Replacing a poorly engineered Verizon solution with an AWS engineered egress VPC solution
o Replacing on-prem backup solution with S3 and Storage Gateway solution
o Replacing legacy insecure SMS service with one written in Golang and placed behind AWS ALBs to provide HTTPS
protection
o Replacing legacy GoDaddy DNS servers with Route53 DNS hosting
o Replacing unencrypted microservices communication with encrypted mutual TLS (mTLS)
o Replacing imperative scripting and by hand management with Cloudformation and Terraform IaC combined with
GitOps and Jenkins CI/CD pipelines
− Stabilized the data center then worked towards migrating to AWS. Articulated the design of the proposed AWS
infrastructure through the Uber engineering document review process to have the design peer reviewed in order to meet
stringent Uber standards for engineering excellence and security and data protection.
− Migrated 200+ customers from the data center to AWS. Built the new AWS infrastructure in record time using AMI’s,
CloudFormation, AWS CLI, Python scripting, Terraform and other automation and devops processing. Then migrated the 200+
customers from the legacy data center to the new AWS infrastructure and closed the data center contract 2 months in
advance.
− Cleaned up a chaotic vendor and licensing situation. After the acquisition, Uber inherited countless legacy vendors and
licensing problems. Spent countless weeks identifying the purpose for vendors and eliminating unneeded ones and negotiating
better terms with others. Eliminated most of the ones that required credit cards and onboarded others to Uber’s invoicing
platform, consolidating the financials and making the environment easier to manage.
− Triaged vulnerabilities reported from the Bug Bounty Team. As the only member of the team familiar with security
related triaging tools such as Burp Suite, it was my responsibility to verify reported vulnerabilities and negotiate CVSS scoring
for Bug Bounty payout.
VERITIV CORPORATION – Atlanta, GA 2018 (October) to (December) 2019
A Fortune 500 company, and a leading North American business-to-business distributor of packaging, facility solutions, print and
publishing products and services; and also a provider of logistics and supply chain management solutions.
MANAGER OF ENTERPRISE IT INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES
Leading and fostering a group of talented IT managers and engineers to better prioritize, negotiate, and communicate.
Drove the modernization of the IT infrastructure to include data center networks, global networks, server infrastructure, and
AWS Cloud integration.
− Recognized deficiencies in IT team and Infrastructure. Veritiv adopted a new Cisco ACI fabric to replace a legacy data
center. There was a greater push generally toward software designed networking but the team needed to be better equipped
to manage such environments. Started making arrangements to train the team in automation and configuration management
tools like Python and Ansible.
− Realized traditional hub and spoke architecture was inefficient. As Veritiv continued using more third party SaaS
offerings, it became obvious that hub and spoke and high cost MPLS solutions were no longer viable. Led several PoCs with
SD-WAN solutions, but these failed largely because they functioned primarily at layer 2 and 3 making it difficult for them to
work in the current telephony and MPLS architecture. It became obvious that a modern solution would need to function at
layer 4 to 7 allowing for a gradual and staged adoption. Settled on CloudGenix.
− Understood the difference between file level and block level storage. Data warehouse team was plagued by poor
performance, despite residing on extremely powerful hardware. The performance problem was because of high I/O on the
ROBERT L. BERRY ▪ Rob@RobertLBerry.com ▪ (850) 294-6472
Professional Experience Continued…
data volumes. Understood the reason was because the data volumes were file level mounted storage. Convinced the team to
switch to block level storage and with some DB tuning, the month end issues disappeared.
− Expanded AWS usage and adoption. Receiving a test AWS environment from a third party vendor, the Data Analytics and
the Infrastructure team had a lack of Cloud experience and were faced with networking, security group, and network ACL
issues. Leading the team and using prior AWS experience we were able to work together to clean up the environment and
eventually made the AWS infrastructure the production environment.
INNOVATIVE ARCHITECTS, LLC. – Duluth, GA 2018 (March) to (October) 2018
Microsoft Gold Partner providing flexible, customized technology solutions for any size enterprise.
INFRASTRUCTURE AND CLOUD ARCHITECT
Responsible for designing and managing the execution plan for physical, Cloud, and hybrid IT infrastructure solutions for
various companies in health care, banking, and engineering.
− Simplified development pipelines. Client was having issues implementing DevOps in their team, identified that the
leadership didn’t understand the complexity that DevOps presents to an environment. Taught them to reduce the complexity
by leveraging automation tools to simplify development pipelines.
− Established dev testing environment. Demonstrated to a client how to leverage Terraform and AWS AMI, Route53, and
Application load balancers to manage a blue/green deployment environment.
− Remediated a security IoC for a customer’s AWS web presence. After a health care client’s AWS site was compromised, assisted
and instructed them in properly building an AWS environment that met best practices for security.
− Migrated an on-prem server room to a COLO data center facility. Took an old legacy on-prem server room that consisted of 6
racks and reduced it to two racks to house on-prem MS Active Directory servers. This reduced the amount of cooling that was
required for the room, and moved the production environment to a single rack in a COLO data center and joined the two
environments as a single network using a Cogent low latency directly connected fiber connection.
− Designed Azure Site Recovery plan for a customer that was looking to move their Atlanta based DR site into Azure
NEWPOINT MEDIA GROUP, LLC. – Lawrenceville, GA 2014 to 2018
Premier real estate marketing company providing resale and new home brands throughout North America.
DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
After M&A, inherited an aging technical environment, burdened by technical debt, costly contractors, and excessive
complexity, laboring tirelessly to successfully bring the IT department from consuming nearly 10% of revenue to a more
manageable 6.9%. While reducing the complexity of the existing environment, simultaneously negotiating the technical
acquisition and merger of new products into the technology infrastructure. Successfully shuttered an aging data center located
in another city merging it into the main corporate COLO facility, further reducing environmental complexity, expenditure, and
improving efficiencies. Successfully managed and earned the respect of the technical staff, which included infrastructure
personnel as well as software engineers, leading them to the successful and timely conclusion of many highly technical and
complex projects.
HOMES & LAND AFFILIATES, LLC. – Tallahassee, FL 2001 to 2014
Premier real estate publishing company.
DIRECTOR OF TECHNICAL SERVICES
Designed Homes & Land corporate data centers while managing technical teams at multiple locations, nationwide. Determined
technical direction and provided strategic vision in designing and maintaining data centers and the main Internet provider for
the entire company. Ensured alignment of cost-effective technical solutions with business goals and corporate strategy.
Coordinated with backbone providers and oversaw architectural initiatives and technical improvements while guiding the
creation of IT solutions. Defined IT strategic architectural goals and established required infrastructure platforms, security
solutions, and new network technologies.
HOMES.COM, LLC. – Tallahassee, FL 1998 to 2001
A dotcom start-up key in revolutionizing the real estate industry with Internet technology.
ROBERT L. BERRY ▪ Rob@RobertLBerry.com ▪ (850) 294-6472
Professional Experience Continued…
IT MANAGER
Spearheaded the modernization of an aging data center while managing a team of 20+ comprised of programmers, systems
engineers, data aggregation personnel, and other technical support staff. Determined specific IT solutions and application
architectures and integrated key technical components to support all data center requirements.
HAYES COMPUTER SYSTEMS – Tallahassee, FL 1995 to 1998
Consulting firm offering premier systems integration services to companies and State agencies.
SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Oversaw several projects involving software engineering, SUN Unix system installs and Cisco networking installations for
customers that included private industry, Florida state agencies and Bradley County Sheriff’s Department in Tennessee.
ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE
Hired as freelance IT Architect for Rose Printing to plan a successful revamp of the data center, provide a network topology
redesign, implement automated processes for backup procedures, and helped hiring IT staffing.
Designed, built, and documented a VoIP based call center for GoWaiter.com, training the Call Center Manager on its usage and
operation.
Software Engineer for Spectrum Sciences & Software, Inc. writing software for environmental studies and noise analysis for
U.S. Military government contracts.
Served 8 years in the United State Air Force in the 7001st SSS Elite Guard, responsible for the personal protection of VIP
personnel like German Chancellor Kohl and General Colin Powell.
EDUCATION
Bachelor of Science in Law Enforcement/Info Systems – University of Maryland – College Park, Maryland
Master’s in Software Engineering – University of West Florida – Pensacola, Florida (not completed)
