Zach Peters

[email protected]   

◆   zachpeters.org   ◆   linkedin.com/in/zpeters   ◆   github.com/zpeters

Work Experience

Tigunia

Remote

Senior Software Engineer

July, 2021 – Present

• Led  modernization  of  DevOps  practices  across  the  organization,  implementing  standards  that

improved code quality, testing, and deployment processes

• Architect and lead developer for ‘stained glass’ case management portal built with Elixir/Phoenix

• Created model application with complete CI/CD pipeline that serves as company standard, including

full test coverage and automated deployments

• Implemented  comprehensive  monitoring  solutions  using  Tigumon  and  OpsGenie,  including

‘Heartbeats’ feature to detect silent failures in automation systems

• Conducted thorough audit and improvement of 126 automations, significantly enhancing stability

and performance

• Completely  rewrote  backend  services  for  Sales  Tax  product,  improving  API  response  times  from

multiple seconds to a few hundred milliseconds

• Designed  and  implemented  versioning,  caching,  and  security  policies  for  company-wide  API

endpoints

• Created  key  monitoring  dashboards  to  track  API  performance  metrics  for  troubleshooting  and

optimization

• Implemented  core  security  processes  in  Rust  for  critical  systems,  prioritizing  reliability  and

performance

• Developed powerful backend logic and role-based authorization systems for company products

• Created data transformation pipeline to migrate CRM system from legacy format to new production

platform, handling tens of thousands of records

• Developed scripts and systems to integrate data from various institutions for key company products

• Led weekly code reviews to improve team skills and code quality

• Organized work into Kanban boards to improve visibility and productivity

• Created  and  maintained  comprehensive  documentation  standards,  establishing  best  practices  for

both internal and customer-facing documentation

• Standardized logging format across all applications, enabling centralized monitoring and alerting

• Developed multiple PowerShell modules that standardized API calls across the organization

• Integrated logging with Grafana and implemented alerting for script errors

• Built and maintained CI/CD pipeline architecture that remains in use after 2+ years

• Created custom image processing tool (‘Tiggy Smalls’) for thumbnails when off-the-shelf solutions

weren’t suitable

• Led dashboard product development from initial VP vision to fully-realized design, creating mockups

and implementation plans

• Designed  and  implemented  installation  system  for  custom  monitoring  solution,  enabling  rapid

deployment with one-click installation

Business Communications, Inc.

Ridgeland, MS

Director of IT and Integration

August, 2019 – July, 2021

• In August 2019, I was promoted to a new role as a Director of Internal IT systems and Integration.

This was a new function at BCI. This role is less management and more focused on the development

and integration of our different systems; both homegrown and third party.

• Created a Quarterly Business Review system that pulls data from different external APIs to create a

single, cohesive report to review with our customers on a quarterly basis. The backend was based off

of GraphQL which allowed me to flexibly query from datasources in a more efficient manner.

• Learned  Docker  and  created  a  docker  swarm  for  the  various  services  I’ve  written.  This  uses  a

cluster based filesystem for redundancy. This has reduced deploy time to a matter of minutes and

has increased reliability greatly. Over 2020, I upgraded our system to kubernetes to provide better

stability and manageability

• Created various ‘bots’ to help our staff with different reminders and tasks:

• Notification of Priority 1 issues

• Notification of new tickets

• Creation of new tickets

• Daily stats for Covid-19 so we can appropriately schedule staff

• I worked on consolidated alot of the systems I had initially created into a system called ‘metaflow’.

This allowed me to have a generic ‘base’ to run workflows specific to our environment. This allowed

me to avoid a lot of boilerplate that I had to generate in the past.

• Over 2020, I worked on making our environment more consistent and uniform. I adopted Rust as

the primary programming language and ported existing apps over to it. There were several tradeoffs

to this. In the past I had been using Clojure and Go, which are both very different so it lead to a lot of

decreased productivity mentally jumping between the two systems. Rust allowed me to have a single

technology to focus on. The development in Rust is slower and more methodical (this is a benifit for

me) and allows me to have more guarantees on Types which I did not have in the past. This allows

for greater confidence in refactoring and generally adding to the code.

• In 2020 I also started practicing a more test driven development (TDD) approach. Along with Rust,

this  gives  me  better  confidence  in  code  I  am  developing  and  also  going  back  into  code  I  haven’t

touched for a while.

• We were lacking a lot of visibility around work on tickets for customers that had pre-paid for service.

I  developed  a  notice  system  that  receives  updates  from  Connectwise  via  callbacks  (webhooks)  to

instantly notify the assigned engineer. This uses multiple different api calls to determine the ticket,

customer, agreement and the balance to notify the engineer. Notification emails are rendered in mjml

to cut down on different workarounds and boilerplate that are normally required in HTML formatted

emails

• For 2021, I have implemented an integration with Techdata (on of our major vendors) to provide

shipping updates in our project are of Connectwise Manage. There was no native integration of any

kind so everything was build from the ground up. To accomplish this i created a service to pull current

shipping data from Techdata. This involves multiple steps, including managing an expiring token for

authentication. Shipping info is pulled from the Techdata api, validated and formatted and placed on

a message queue (Rabbitmq). From there another service picks up the messages and handles them.

If a change in shipping status is noted it updates an existing database and then renders the change in

multiple fields in Connectwise. Additionally, this will notify project managers as to shipping updates.

By implementing this systems we are saving dozens of hours per week for each project manager of

manual lookups. This also saves frustration on the customer end since we’ll always have access to

the latest shipping information

Practice Director Service Desk / Customer Service, Operations Manger, DeveloperSeptember, 2018

– August, 2019

• In  August  2018,  I  traded  the  ‘Project  Team  Manager’  part  of  my  role  (see  next  section)  with  the

Service Desk Manager. This removed the management of Project Managers from my responsibilities

and added management of the Service Desk and Customer Service

• Managed a team of nine engineers and three customer service staff (remote and on-site).

• Service Desk

• Leadership and mentoring for a world-class service team

• Created processes for SLAs and service desk practices to allow us to reach our 100% goal for Priority

1 SLAs. Established and met SLA goal within the first 60 days of leading the team.

• Created training plans so all staff have a two-year plan for training and self-improvement

• Promoted our top engineer to a leadership position

• Monitored key service metrics to give us better visibility of service delivery. This allowed me to make

corrections with the team and solve issues with a data-driven approach:

• Ticket open/close rate

• Staff utilization

• Response time to high priority issues

• Ticket handling time

• Drove average handling time from 34 hours to 8 hours by consistently reviewing any tickets over

ten hours. These tickets were discussed with the ticket owners to review progress and come up with

appropriate solutions

• Monitoring of tickets that haven’t been updated in 5 days. Following up with the owners to address

the situation accordingly

• Monitored the effort (in hours) to resolve tickets. Made improvements by follow-up and working

on improvements with the ticket owners. This took our average of 4 hours per ticket to 1.4 hours

per ticket

• Customer Service

• Leadership and mentoring for a world-class Customer Service team

• Implemented processes to allow us to reach our ‘no missed calls’ goal

• Implemented processes for service tickets to allow us to gather customer feedback and react rapidly

to issues

• Operations

• Followed ITIL-based processes and policies to enhance our capabilities as a Managed Service Provider

• Creation of core business processes: ‘on call’, ‘zero missed calls’, quote-to-invoice lifecycle

• Created ‘exception based’ triggers and alerts to shift from passive to active monitoring of process

issues

• Creation of QA review processes for service

• Designed a quarterly review process (forms, meeting cycle, follow-up discussions) for our company

• Development

• Creation  of  monitoring,  alerting  and  utility  apps  and  scripts.  Using  Go,  Python,  Elixir,  PHP,  etc.

Following best practices for a 24x7 production environment.

• Created a chat bot for our team chat to help with SLA reminders and provide different utilities for

the team. This is written in Elixir and interfaces with Webex Teams and Connectwise

• Designed  and  implemented  a  billing  reminder  system  in  Elixir  that  interfaces  with  Connectwise

Manage to reminder our customer of upcoming and past due invoices.

• Developed and implemented a program to audit Office 365 usage against our billing system. This

helped to keep our billing in line with customer usage.

• Development  of  security  software  to  audit  our  Managed  email  customers  for  any  leak  of  their

passwords to third parties

• Development of in-house software to audit and manage a managed print service

• Development of a gateway to integrate our Fortinet devices with Connectwise

• Development of a monitoring service that checks for the existence of certain emails or tickets on a

daily basis. If there is an absence if a matching ticket or email it will take action to alert us

• Service  and  framework  to  audit  our  provisioned  services  against  our  business  records/billing.

Alerting us to take action if there is a large mismatch.

Operations Manager / Project Team Manager

September, 2014 – September, 2018

• Managed Customer Service and Project Management departments

• Managed and maintained critical business services including databases and application servers for

ticketing, sales management, sales quoting, and financial systems.

• Migrated  all  company  data  and  systems  from  legacy  CRM  and  ticket  management  software

to  ConnectWise  Manage/Sell/Automate.  Including  all  system  design,  migration  plans,  migration

execution, staff training and day to day systems management

• Developed and managed a new on-call process to take us from customers calling individual engineers

to a fully staffed 24x7x365 call-center with multiple escalation paths so our customers always had

an immediate and appropriate response.

• Standardized issue intake and reorganized our service desk process. Taking this from a single person

taking written notes to a three-person rotation with immediate entry into our ticket tracking system.

Customers went from multi-day delays in engineer response to responses that matched our customer

service level agreements. For critical issues, this was fifteen minutes.

• Implemented  and  managed  several  key  review  processes  including  a  monthly  financial  review  of

projects and a weekly review of service tickets. This contributed to a direct increase in company gross

profits due to better cost controls and more efficient use of resources.

• Designed  and  implemented  several  projects  and  processes  to  optimize  operations  and  reduce

exposure. These were multi-year projects:

• Migrated dozens of websites to a consolidated platform.

• Consolidated all customer disaster recovery data (server backups) into a more modern structure.

• Designed, programmed, implemented and trained staff on a stop-gap monitoring system for critical

customer backup data.

• Restructured  IT  staff  to  go  from  a  ‘siloed’  structure  into  a  tiered  structure  to  provide  better

responsiveness to our customers and to provide engineers with a clear path to promotion.

• Started several teams to create accountability and focus training for specific business needs, such as,

customer data backups and remote management and monitoring of customer environments.

• Led weekly resource meetings to bring multiple teams together to discuss and create a strategy for

the week relating to how staff are being allocated.

• Created a five-year plan for my department to assist in shifting the business from a break-fix to a

managed services company. This includes multiple projects and initiatives to optimize and modernize

business processes. For example:

• Replacing our outdated ticketing, quoting, customer management and server management software

with more modern solutions.

• Creating and enforcing standards for documentation.

• Creating a suite of standard services and products that we offer.

• Designing, implementing and promoting standards for hiring, firing and promoting staff.

• Challenging teams to work in a repeatable fashion to allow the business to continue to scale.

Prior work history available upon request

Education

Hamilton College

Cedar Rapids, IA

Bachelor of Science in Business Management with an IT Concentration

2007