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Steven M Castano

 

CAREER SUMMARY

  • Information Technology professional with 20+ years experience in the management of and advanced architecture and engineering skills in enterprise SaaS operations, corporate IT and software development environments
  • Strong oral and written communication skills contribute to collaborating with cross-functional teams
  • Extensive experience in multiple types of IT organizations, Software as a Service (SaaS)/Cloud providers, ISP’s, federal and local government, publicly traded, privately held, education, and legal organizations
  • Migrated out the entire production workload from on-premises co-lo hardware up to multiple cloud infrastructure services, including Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, increasing uptime and stability while reducing yearly operating costs by nearly 40%
  • Replaced proprietary licensed products with open-source solutions to both increase performance as well as reduce operating costs, in addition to tripling the number of customers who could be serviced at 50% of the price

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE


July 2013 – Jan 2022                                Speridian Technologies/BenefitAlign LLC, Rockville, MD
        Vice President of Architecture & Engineering

    • Directly led five direct reports and managed multiple teams (Architecture, Engineering, Systems/Database Administration and 24×7 Support) for a total of 85 personnel
    • Kept up to date on the latest technology while managing a technology refresh of all global data centers, including:
      • Reducing the cost of hardware used to support users by 35%
      • Migrating appropriate workloads and components to the cloud saved money on hardware and maintenance, avoiding future upgrade costs
    • Architected and managed the deployment of the following: a new microservices-based SaaS platform, new cloud services and hybrid cloud offerings backed by Amazon AWS (Elastic Container Service) and Microsoft Azure as well as deployed microservices based on Rancher and Kubernetes, the cloud services, and hybrid cloud
    • Focused heavily on service and infrastructure monitoring to improve company uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which contributed to moving SLAs from ~95% up to 99.99% as well as reduced the need for planned outages from once a week to once a month
    • Led the company effort through multiple industry certifications and audit processes, including SSAE 16, PCI DSS and multiple federal certifications in the healthcare technology sector through CMS
    • Moved from licensed software to open-source alternatives and migrated from on-premises hardware to a cloud-based solution for a savings of approximately $2M per year in operating costs
      • Efforts led to launching products before competitors to gain “a first to market” advantage and moved the business forward much faster in facing environments without customers
      • Utilizing microservices to share code and services between multiple products reduced development efforts needed to bring them to market and allowed the organization to hire additional staff which increased the speed and accuracy of development
    • Led various newly established programs, including:
      • Moving corporate IT resources to cloud services for email, file storage, and chat/collaboration
      • Pushed to move the organization’s on-premise data center deployments to cloud deployments on AWS and Azure
      • Implemented a change control board procedure with a focus on following a product roadmap and proper QA validation of improvements and changes to the platform before deployment
      • Converted all Microsoft SQL and Oracle databases over to MariaDB/MySQL
    • Increased communication between developers by restructuring the Engineering team from multiple siloed teams (limited to a single product) to a large team of developers from each specific technology which enabled sharing of knowledge and eliminated multiple teams working to solve the same problems in isolation; efforts resulted in reducing implementation and delivery timelines by 20% increasing the quality and reliability of the products 

Director of Infrastructure Services (July 2013 – May 2019)

    • Directed a team of 19 made up of Network Engineers, Database Administrators (DBAs), Systems Administrators, Systems Architects and Security Analysts and Auditors
    • Deployed the company’s first co-located SaaS data center, including designing, purchasing, and configuring all aspects of the data center hardware landscape
    • Created new documentation regarding SOPs, change control, and security audits
    • Operated a 24/7 Network Operations Center with staff in three countries to provide infrastructure support to internal employees and field customer hosting issues
    • Assumed responsibility for all new corporate IT infrastructure and deployed new integrated phone systems, global remote access solutions, a unified wireless network, new mobile device management platforms, and a consolidation of hardware acquisition channels for end-user devices
    • Implemented very dense blade servers, combined with lower power and space-consuming storage solutions that allowed condensed footprint saving 25% in monthly operating costs while still improving performance
    • Hired to start from absolute zero and build a fully functional, stable and scalable data center in less than 90 days which contributed to launching the organization’s cloud software (SaaS) solution nearly 6 months earlier than projected and 85% under the original budget

 

May 2013 – June 2013                          Pepco Holdings, Bethesda, MD
        Senior Infrastructure Consultant

  • Reporting directly to the Director of Grid Operations, led the upgrade and redesign efforts of the PowerOn GE Energy Management System while collaborating with a team of 25 IT Engineers, Power Systems and Energy Grid Engineers, Operators and Supervisors
  • Updated the design for integrated network and storage traffic on Cisco Nexus devices
  • Performed a large-scale server consolidation using both Solaris and VMware virtualization platforms
  • Updated and streamlined IT automation for change control and ticket escalations to improve accuracy related to addressing customer reported issues and communication efforts
  • Deployed new infrastructure monitoring and alerting tools to assist in deploying the proper resources in promptness and reducing troubleshooting time which contributed to reducing the number of hours paid to contractors during large outages from weather and other environmental issues

 

Oct 2012 – April 2013                            Freddie Mac/Insight Global, McLean, VA
        Lead Platform Architect (Consultant)

  • Developed and implemented deployment plans for a large-scale technology refresh utilizing more cost-effective and scalable hardware for networking, storage, and computing
  • Implemented internal cloud computing environments and platform consolidation initiatives to reach an 85% overall server virtualization level
  • Worked with the Engineering and Operations groups to develop multi-level disaster recovery and continuity of operations plans
  • Ensured SLA compliance for all mission-critical applications, including performance assurance, security compliance, and data retention and reliability
  • Ran weekly Community of Practitioners meetings to encourage engineers and administrators to learn new technologies and industry best practices
  • Presented project status and high-level overviews to senior management at Freddie Mac Standards Council bi-weekly meetings

 

May 2007 – Sept 2012                           SAP/SuccessFactors, Arlington, VA
        Director of Information Technology Architecture & Infrastructure (Nov 2010 – Sept 2012)

  • Directly supervised a two-team, 12 person staff responsible for all aspects of design and implementation of all SaaS production and corporate IT environments
  • Created $2.4M in savings over three years by implementing cost-effective strategies related to service agreements
  • Managed an IT Infrastructure budget of $8M annually, including capital expenses and operating expenses
  • Project lead for the integration of two $5B+ organizations with nearly 70K total employees
  • Moved multiple services from non-redundant local services out to large enterprise cloud service and achieved 100% SLA compliance and raised uptime to 99.999%
    • Additionally, sponsored the relocation of all corporate IT resources to fully redundant data centers for business continuity and drove uptime of all locally hosted services to 99.95% or better
  • Designed and implemented environments in SaaS production data centers in Virginia, Arizona, Sacramento, London, Shanghai, Amsterdam, and Sydney
    • Managed the deployment and operations of corporate IT data centers in 12 major cities in the U.S and overseas to support approximately 5K employees
    • Built, operated, and maintained 22 data centers in seven countries hosting multiple application landscapes and virtualization platforms

Reduced user trouble tickets by over 80%

EDUCATION & OTHER TRAINING

    • BS, Computer Science & Information Science, University at Albany, Albany, NY
    • BS, Computer Engineering & Applied Sciences, Polytechnic University, Farmingdale, NY
    • Certifications include: Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), Certified Novell Engineer (CNE), Certified Lotus Professional (CLP), Cisco Certified Network Administrator (CCNP), Cisco Certified Design Professional (CCDP), Cisco Certified Design Associate (CCDA) and VMware Certified Professional (VCP)