Bill Blackford's RESUME
Overview:
Several years in network architecture, engineering and the design of networks
that enhance operational proficiency, improve processes and reduce total costs of ownership.
Expert knowledge with high availability design and redundancy. Good track record for
building networks that scale. Network Infrastructure Design and Engineering. Service Provider Core. Enterprise campus and data center. Content Networks.
BGP, routing, MPLS and traffic engineering. Packet capture and flow analysis.
Employment Experience:
Navex Global
Senior Network Engineer, May 2013 - Present
Brought in to take company's global networks from ad-hoc to mature, scalable, repeatable. Created infrastructure standards in all funtional areas. Implemented a cost-efficient strategy that employs cookie-cutter design with an emphasis on scaling big. Increased network performance, introduced large-scale redundancy and eliminated bottlenecks that were previously impacting business processes, customer relations and revenue. Installed and maintained performance monitoring, change control and documentation tools IOW best industry standards.
Frontier Communications
Senior Network Engineer and Peering Coordinator, Core Planning and Engineering Team, June 2011 - May 2013
Member of Core Backbone Engineering Team responsible for design and implementation of IP data network in 13 core POPs and 60 aggregation POPs nation-wide. Tier-3 escalations. Strong use of BGP, advanced policies, MPLS, L2VPN, L3VPN, traffic engineering. Detailed lab testing for Core, Carrier Grade NAT, BRAS, etc. Juniper M20 - M320, MX480 - MX960, ERX1440, SRX series. Cisco 6500/7600 - 12k series. Peering Coordinator for AS5650.
North West Regional ESD / Cascade Technology Allance (Hillsboro, OR)
Senior Network Engineer, January 2007 - June 2011
North West Regional ESD provides service to Oregon School Districts including technology and Upstream ISP Services.
Cascade Technology Alliance is a consortium composed of four public agencies working toward the consolidation of technology resources. My role is to guide the design of merging together disparate networks with four ASN's to form a larger cohesive unit. The design strategy includes improving HA redundant connectivity for our partners while providing more diverse connectivity solutions for our customer base.
Principal Engineer responsible for design, procurement, implementation and support of enterprise and Internet infrastructure. Technologies: Cisco 2800 to ASR and 7600, Juniper M/MX, EX, SRX. Extreme Summit, F5 LTM
- Negotiate transit and metro transport services
- Manage bilateral peering relationships
- Engineer and manage border and customer aggregation routers in all locations
- Manage code revisions and infrastructure platform stability
- Mentor and develop other members of engineering team
- Develop a network services model for provisioning and support
- Design for future scalability
Dotster, Inc (Vancouver, WA)
Senior Network Engineer, May 2005 - January 2007
Dotster is a large ICANN-accredited Domain Registrar, .gov registry, managed hosting and application service provider. The Network and Operations team's emphasis is to manage highly critical environments focused on meeting availability goals.
- Emphasis on design, implementation and support of high availability environments deployed throughout multiple collocation space nation-wide.
- Took lead on complex troubleshooting efforts in time critical, high visibility situations and executed sound judgment with a cool head.
- Worked closely with dev and other members of ops team to identify solutions to issues and problems in a timely manner. Promoted knowledge sharing and team learning.
- Effectively communicated complex issues to executive management and various teams outside of Operations and recommended actionable solutions.
- Crisis Management.
- Applied proactive approach in designing new infrastructure to meet the needs of a rapidly growing business.
- Technologies: Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, F-5
Intel Corp (Contract through Everest Consultants) (Hillsboro, OR)
Network Evaluation Engineer, April 2004 - April 2005
Focus on OEM hardware compatability with Intel NICs.
- Network issue reproduction submitted by harware vendors employing a myriad of hardware and Operating Systems.
- Problem resolution with network hardware and drivers, packet capture and analysis, testing of new features on latest hardware and kernel versions.
- Coordinate test planning, manual testing and automated testing, according to project deliverables.
- Generate and publish test reports indicating test scripts passed, failed, not run. Enter into tracking system.
- Work with off-site teams and OEM vendors.
- Continually build knowledge and proficiency in testing methodologies.
- Technologies: Varieity of network vendor equipment form LAN switches to large chassis switches/routers. Cisco, Foundry, Extreme. Smartbits, Ixia test gear, hardware sniffers. Vareity of optics (850nm - 1550nm, SX, LX, ZX) and coopper media. Dell, Compaq, HP, Sun. Windows, Linux, Solaris.
Unix Network Test Engineer, September 2002 - September 2003
Focus on Intel NIC Unix/Linux driver.
- Testing of the retail networking products and drivers with emphasis on performance, compatibility, stability, new features, advanced networking services and benchmarking.
- Review use cases and create a test plan to address completeness and reliability of NIC features / functions
- Develop, maintain, and execute tests. Maintain complete, detailed test results data.
- Technologies: Linix, SCO 5, Unixware, Sun Solaris, vareity of LAN swiches.
ProDX. (Portland, OR)
Network Engineer, April 2002 - September 2002
- Hired to consult on and implement a data center move. Migrated to new IP transit services. Built new DNS servers,
configured firewalls and Cisco routers. Also consulted with the professional services division where I
designed and implemented networking solutions for outside clients.
Fibres International (Portland, OR (in WA now))
Network Operations Manager, March 1999 - October 2001
- Designed and implemented a hierarchical WAN infrastructure allowing for long term growth that easily adapts to
topology changes for this multi-site interstate enterprise. Designed and managed the company.s Internet
infrastructure and all public services in support of their in-house e-commerce solutions. This included, web,
DNS, mail, file transfer, certificates, performance monitoring and tuning, capacity planning, security.
Worked with developers to meet their needs. Traffic and network management.
Washington Mutual Bank (Data Center Campus, Chatsworth, CA)
Senior Systems Analyst, May 1998 - March 1999
- NOS and data migration. Desktop image builds for large-scale deployment. Network administrative support for large
NDS tree (Novell, NetWare 4.11 LDAP directory), including all associated objects and containers.
Great Western Bank (Chatsworth, CA)
Systems Analyst - Distributed Systems
- User support. Adds, moves, changes in very large environment. Windows 3.x, Banyan VINES, NetWare, AS/400 and
mainframe client connectivity.
Louise.s Trattoria, Restaurant Enterprises, Inc., GHSC., ITT Sheraton (Greater los Angeles)
Restaurant Manager
- Responsible for all financial and operational aspects of food service establishment. Hiring, training, coaching
and counseling staff. Helped develop junior managers.
U.S. Army Active Duty and U.S. Air Force Reserves
Signals Analyst
- Assigned to National Security Agency, Ft Meade, MD. Responsible for on-line edits to and data pulls from national
collection database. Processed wideband tapes. Use of various intelligence resources including the Community
On-line Intelligence Network System (COINS). ELINT, SIGINT, COMINT
Education:
- Juniper: JIR, JSPX, JMV, AJSPR, JNAP, JCOS
- Cisco: ICND, BSCN
- Others available upon request...
- National Cryptologic School, Electronic Intelligence
- University of Maryland, selected classes in Computer Science
Skills:
- JNCIS-SP
- JNCIA-JUNOS
- CCNA
- Technologies: TCP/IP, IPV4, IPV6, OSPF, BGP, Multicast, MPLS, L2VPN, L3VPN, TE, Ethernet, TDM, MEF, QOS, DSx, OCx, OAM.
L3 redundancy, Wireless.
- Hardware: Juniper M, MX, EX, SRX, ERX and J series, Netscreen. Cisco ISR, 7200/7300, ASR, Catalyst 29xx-37xx, 6500/7600, PIX/ASA, VPN concentrator. F5 BigIP. Foundry ServerIron. Extreme Summit.
- Network Operating Systems and Vendor Knowledge: Juniper JUNOS, JUNOSe, ScreenOS. Cisco IOS, XE, Cisco CatOS, Cisco PIX/ASA, Cisco CSS. Foundry NetIron and ServerIron. F5 BIGIP.
Extreme XOS. Redhat Linux, Sun Solaris, SCO, Unixware, Windows, Netware.
- Network Analysis, Monitoring and Management: TCPdump, wireshark (ethereal), shomiti, hardware sniffers, taps, Smartbits, SNMP, Cacti, RANCID, tacacs+, IPPLAN, Netflow
- US Citizen. Held a TS/SCI clearance for 15+ years.
References and work samples are available on request.