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Aiman Najjar

Resume

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Aiman Najjar
Orlando United States
LinkedIn
Github
Portfolio
aimannajjar.com
Professional Status
Consultant
Available
About Me
DevOps Consultant who works on full-stack freelance projects in his leisure time.

My main areas of interest are large-scale cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code and modern DevOps practices.
Education

Master's in Computer Science

Columbia University

2010 to 2014

Bachelor's in Computer Science

University of Jordan

2004 to 2008
Professional Experience
    • Initiated the creation of Propel's DevOps team, driving the transformation to a scalable infrastructure; this pivotal project ensured the company's capability to adeptly handle an unexpected and significant spike in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Orchestrated a seamless zero-downtime migration project, transitioning legacy ECS infrastructure to
  • AWS EKS Kubernetes infrastructure; optimized system performance, reducing downtime incidents by
  • 90% and increasing overall system reliability.
  • Architected, maintained, and continuously improved infrastructure supporting user-facing production systems that processed well over 7000 OPS.
  • Spearheaded the deployment of cutting-edge Istio Service Mesh technology, securing microservices with mTLS authentication, resulting in a 90% decrease in plaintext intra-service communication and bolstering data protection in a cybersecurity-sensitive sector.
  • Led the development and maintenance of Infrastructure as Code practices through the implementation of Terraform/Terragrunt's 'infrastructure-live" design pattern, resulting in a 40% reduction in deployment errors and a 25% increase in deployment speed.
  • Spearheaded the migration of Jenkins pipelines to Pipeline as Code through Jenkinsfiles that are maintained in application repositories to empower development teams to build custom pipelines, achieving significant reduction in DevOps support overhead errors.
  • Developed and implemented a Jenkins Shared Library solution, enabling development teams to customize Jenkinsfiles while enforcing organizational conventions, resulting in a 70% decrease in DevOps support requests overhead.
  • Facilitated the recruitment and expansion of DevOps team, leveraging detailed documentation and personal knowledge transfer sessions to empower new hires to quickly start contributing.
    • Served as senior member in a large team of DevOps and SRE engineers to develop automation tools for infrastructure processes such as OS and DB patching, server rip and replace, and automated datacenter migrations.
  • Participated in critical production infrastructure on-call rotations, supporting internal stakeholders with
  • VMware Workspace ONE automation failures.
  • Engineered and optimized complex repositories of Ansible playbooks, crafting custom Ansible modules for complex infrastructure operations.
  • Led efforts to provision a new Kubernetes-based, dynamically scalable Jenkins infrastructure.
    • Devised a plan to conduct automated testing of Couchbase's Database as a Service platform in mock
  • AWS environments based on Localstack and k3s.
  • Created a mock Kubernetes controller to simulate the behavior of ALB ingress controllers and PVC ELB provisioners in a local environment.
  • Built end-to-end test pipelines that eliminated the need for real-time target AWS environments, leading o a 100% reduction in shared environment lock time.
  • Designed and proposed a plan for overall reliability improvements, including introducing the GitFlow strategy, BDD testing, and Ansilbe for automated runbooks.
    • Engineered operational process enhancements for offline deployments, streamlining procedures and improving deployment accuracy.
  • Engineered Kubernetes automation processes such as writing advanced scripts to deploy Helm charts and setup new bare-metal supercomputer clusters.
  • Engineered novel automation solutions at Cray to generate offline media containing Helm charts and
  • Linux applications running in containers, enabling the deployment and upgrades of supercomputer clusters in an air-gapped setting.
    • Led DevOps projects at Pythian, crafting strategic roadmaps for clients and overseeing the implementation of cutting-edge technologies.
  • Led the migration of couchsurfing.com's Solr-based search to Elasticsearch with no downtime. I fully planned and executed the migration, including designing and implementing processes for document migration (16MM documents) while still serving new writes and reads.
  • Directed the strategic migration of Optivia to GCP, overseeing the migration of legacy virtual machines formulated and implemented automated processes to reconstruct GCP-compatibly images, transfer disks, and dynamically update inventory records for client monitoring.
  • DevOps, Jenkins, HDP, Ambari, OpenStack, SBT, Scala, Scalatest, Spark
  • Software (Backend), Cloud and DevOps consulting services for corporations
  • Full-Stack Web Development for Startups
  • Clients include:
    • Rakuten Marketing: PHP Backend, Symfony, MongoDB, Hashicorp Vault.
    • NeuroTech LLC: PHP Full Stack, Larvel framework.
    • Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) - Big Data solutions, Hortonworks Hadoop, DevOps
    • Northwestern University - AWS Cloud migration, Java, Spring framework and CI/CD (Jenkins)
    • TravelClick - Ansible, DevOps automation, configuration management, Chef
    • Imtilak.net - Greenfield PHP/Symfony project built from scratch for large real-estate agency (multilingual)
  • Certifications:
    • Google Certified Professional Architect (cert expired 2020)
    • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (cert expired 2021)
  • Rakuten Marketing provides eCommerce businesses with affiliate marketing services. Rakuten Affiliate Network clients include Macy's, Walmart, Vince Camuto, Sportscraft, and Viator.

    The Rakuten Marketing network (formerly Linkshare) is largest pay for performance affiliate marketing network on the Internet.
  • Cloudera • CDH • HDFS • Hadoop • Storm • Flume • Chef • Ansible • AWS • Jenkins • Logstash • Java • RESTful APIs • Node.js • Python • PHP • Symfony ⁍
  • ------ Big Data Java Engineer ------
  • Wrote performant Storm topology to stream high-volume data (roughly 7 - 10k rows per second) from Oracle to HDFS in real-time. (some portions are open source now, available at http://github.com/linkshare )
  • W​rote Flume sinks to geocode and stream click data from Apache logs to Hive tables.
  • ​Wrote unit and functional tests for Storm topology
    components, included Oracle mock using in-memory H2, and Cucumber JVM feature files for integration and functional tests.
  • Big Data TechCon 2014 Certified.
  • ------ DevOps Engineer ------
  • Wrote Chef cookbooks, Python/Shell scripts to fully automate the provisioning of a complex, interdependent 100-terabyte CDH cluster
  • Built custom CSDs and Cloudera Parcels for Redis, Storm and Pentaho BI server. (open source now, available at http://github.com/linkshare )
  • A​utomated deployment of Oozie workflows and HDFS scripts using Jenkins and Git hooks
  • A​utomated SOPs to manage/operate Storm streams using Jenkins.
  • Exposure to Lambda Architecture, with focus on real-time layer and streaming
  • Integrated Storm with Logstash.
  • Wrote many Chef cookbooks to provision various application servers both on AWS and data centers. Leveraging advanced concepts such as encrypted data bags, Chef Search API, LWRPs, Berkshelf ...etc
  • ------ Back-end/Full Stack Developer ------
  • Strictly-compliant RESTful API using PHP/Symfony
  • Strong exposure to MongoDB, including concepts such as sharding and replica sets.
  • Node.JS real-time data streaming application, capable of streaming up to 5k records/second
  • CAS Server and Shibboleth IDP3 integration for SAML2 SSO implementation.
  • RESTful APIs using Node.JS, Express and MongoDB
  • Worked Primarily on DevOps tasks
  • Automated deployment of J2EE applications on 50-node tomcat cluster using Ansible and Python
  • Wrote web application that generates week-over-week charts and tabular daily summaries of EA Mobile Games backend traffic data (using ElasticSearch, Logstash and PHP). The app is used to highlight significant traffic drop to detect obscure front-end/back-end integration or connectivity issues
  • Assisted briefly on EA Mobile Games back-end bug fixes (Java)
  • Concurrently while pursuing MS degree at Columbia University, worked as LAMP developer and developed/maintained complex scholarship application system for Biology Department.
  • Participated in, led and supervised back-end development maintaining best practices.
  • Leading a team of developers for implementation and testing of product under development.
  • Worked with the front-end team on integration
  • Assumed various roles, ranging from digital media sites back-end development, OAuth integrations, iOS app maintenance to 3rd party feeds integrations and cloud infrastructure maintenance
  • J2EE, Velocity, MySQL, Amazon AWS, Ajax, jQuery, JSON, XML, RSS/MRSS Parsers, CMS, RESTful web services, OAuth, social media integration (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).
  • Rapidly rose through positions
  • --- Positions held ---
  • Manager, Software Development
  • Software Engineer
  • Full stack / Java Developer
  • Worked on complex back-end MVC Spring application that powers Wiley's LPI Online assessment tool
  • Worked on PDF reports generators using XSLT transformer
  • Participated in complex database design and implementation using Hibernate as ORM
  • Participated in implementing the front-end application, included complex interactive javascript experience and integrated with the back-end web services using DWR
  • Technologies include J2EE, Spring, MVC, XSLT, Hibernate, DWR, jQuery, Oracle

Freelance Web Developer

Freelance
June 2005 to 2015
Freelancer
United States
  • ---- Full Stack Development ----
  • Occasionally worked as freelancer developer when time permitted in addition to full-time employment or during college and graduate school
  • Worked on various PHP, Perl and CGI projects
  • International clients from Europe, North America and the Middle East
  • Completed 16 projects on Freelancer.com platform, consistently earning 5/5 rating and very positive feedback (see https://www.freelancer.com/u/aimannajjar.html )
  • Maintained and developed a complex PHP application for Columbia University's Biology Department to receive Amgen and SURF scholarship applications online
  • 60% Repeat hire rate
  • 100% on time, 100% on budget
  • ---- Web Development Mentor (Ruby on Rails) ----
  • Worked as Ruby on Rails mentors for theFirsehoseProject. Met with a student on a regular basis to help him learn Ruby on Rails. The FirehoseProject combines an aggressive curriculum of Ruby on Rails tutorials and exercises with one on one mentoring and group sessions.
Skills

Backend

Ruby / Rails PHP / Symfony / Doctrine JUnit/TestNG Java Node / Express Python Spring Hibernate

Databases

MySQL MongoDB Redis Hive Oracle

Cloud

AWS OpenStack Docker Heroku

Frontend

Javascript jQuery HTML5 Bootstrap (Responsive Design) CSS3 React Gulp/Grunt Compass

DevOps / Automation

Chef Ansible Jenkins Linux Bash Python Docker

Big Data

Cloudera HDFS Oozie Apache Storm Apache Flume Impala Elastic Search

On The Side

Objective-C Cocoa Cocoa Touch Google App Engine

Other Skills

Innovative Solutions Recruitment Production Systems Maintenance Infrastructure Data Protection

Technical Skills

WEB DEVELOPMENT Jenkins Istio DEVOPS System Reliability Microservices Design Pattern AWS EKS Terraform COMPUTER SCIENCE Kubernetes
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