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Hi

I'm Vladimir Lazarenko

I'm a technologist

and . . .

I love IT engineering :)

Bio Pic

I'm very passionate for engineering and engineering culture. Building teams that empower companies to deliver business value through efficient technology is what makes me tick. I am all about continuous improvement, challenging status quo and pushing the boundaries of “the usual”. Huge fan of keeping complex solutions simple, understandable and accessible. Strong Dev(Sec)Ops movement advocate. Experienced in helping large multinational companies transition from waterfall models to true DevOps.

I have a keen interest in evolving company culture, not hiring a "DevOps team" and claiming that transformation is done.

About Me

Name : Vladimir Lazarenko

Address : Dieren, Netherlands

Zip : 6953AH

Phone : +31 6 11 31 02 93

Email : info at 16bytes point nl

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Skills

  • IT Strategy
  • IT Transformation
  • Platform Architecture
  • Cross-functional team leadership

Scalable Solution Architecture

95

Software design

90

High Availability

95

Clouds and migrations

95

Software development

80

Open Source

100

Achievements

I've worked in different countries & met lot of people throughout my professional life. Earned friendship, respect & trust. Therefore I got some achievements to share.

2013-2017

Agile transformation @Marktplaats

Participated in a global agile transformation of Marktplaats (part of eBay Classifieds Group), where we went from classic "dev toss to ops" approach to cross-functional teams, increased release cadence from bi-weekly to hundreds a week, moving from PHP codebase to a scalable scheduled micro-service architecture.

2007-2013

Mobile app development business

Together with a business partner we've built and ran a mobile app development business at the time where it was all very new. Grew the company from 2 shareholders to over 50 developers. Were part of the early mobile app adoption time. Worked on first apps with Rabobank, AJAX, Interpolis to name a few.

2015-2017

Awesome team @ eCG

Helped build, form and lead one of the strongest DevOps engineering teams in the country. Super proud of what we have achieved, even more proud that the team is going strong after I've decided to split. Miss you guys!

2017-current

Cloud journey @FedEx Express

Introduction of scalable and resilient cloud-based platforms, powering TNT (will become FedEx Express) and FedEx. Modernization of legacy applications, evolvement in ways of working, indoctrination and scaling of DevSecOps culture in one of the largest enterprises in the world.

Education

Aside of the fact that I've attended schools and courses, my main learnings are always on the job. Nevertheless, here are a few things that did get me a shiny paper.

  • HashiCorp Certified Terraform Associate, Apr 2020

    Exactly what the title says. Verify here.

  • Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Master, Oct 2010

    Successfully passed the course and the exam. Have used the skills and techniques frequently in various teams adjusting the framework as needed to get the maximum added value for the team with minimum bureaucracy.

  • Rational Unified Process, 2007

    A framework that was popular at the time :)

  • Kharkov's Radio Electronics University, 1997-2001

    We've all been to high-school at some point...

Testimonials

I have worked with a lot of very smart, skilled and generally wonderful people over the years. Here is what they got to say about me.

Technology leader at eBay

David Campbell

Vladimir is one of the strongest full stack system engineers it’s been my pleasure to work with. He is able to provide technical leadership on everything from low level systems to writing code. Vladimir has a great ability to learn the newest technologies such as containers and cloud whilst retaining total understanding the fundamentals. He provides great leadership to his team and is the go to person for many things. Great leader, great engineer and great colleague.

Director of Software at Northvolt

Arne Bultman

In my 6 years of working with Vladimir I've come to know him as a no-nonsense person that likes to get things done and will do everything in his power to get there. A strong technical skillset allows him to both deal with ongoing operational concerns while working towards a long term strategy. Working with Vladimir has been a pleasure and I'd have no hesitation working with him again in the future.

Transforming payments at Uber

Özgen Güngör

Working with Vladimir is a great experience. He is extremely knowledgeable about architecting scalable infrastructure (cloud or otherwise), networking, and developer tooling. He has strong technical skills and excellent problem solving capabilities supported by years of experience and sharp situational awareness. What makes it so great to work with him is his honest and direct communication and strong drive to get things to the finish line.

Principal Engineer at Norhvolt

Frank Schröder

I've worked with Vladimir for five years at eBay where he ran the SiteOps infrastructure and later the team. He is a no-nonsense person who is focussed on solving the immediate problem and then finds a long-term solution. He always had in-depth knowledge of all of our platforms around the globe and was the first person I've turned to for architecture advise. He is a great person and if you have a large scale infrastructure setup then Vladimir is your man. I'd hire or work with him again without hesitation.

Manager Operations at iWelcome

Arnold Leendeers

Some people you never forget and Vladimir is one of them. A very well skilled person with the brains, drive and creativity to make a change. He contributed significantly to our deployment process improvements, making complex configurations user-friendly.

Head of Business IT Global Infrastructure at OLX Group

Milton Cyrus

I have had the pleasure of working with Vladimir for 8 years. He is one of the best engineers and engineering leaders I have worked with. Vlad has an amazing ability to learn and apply the latest technologies and has a firm understanding of the fundamentals. Vlad is a great addition to any team, as a person, engineer and technical leader.

Experience

I am a technology leader with over 20 years of hands-on tech experience. I have experience in building and leading high-performing DevOps teams in a high-volume global e-commerce environments as well as in shipping industry.

  • FedEx as Cloud platform architect 2017 - present

    Designing and implementing a next generation cloud-based platform for TNT/FedEx Digital that enables TNT/FedEx to iterate fast, delivering value to our customers with better predictability and quality, using modern technology stack, DevOps methodology and CI/CD best practices.

    Driving overal adoption of DevOps practices inside the organization. Member of tech leadership cluster. Interacting with other FedEx operational companies across the world for scaling DevOps adoption across the enterprise.

    Participating in internal and external audits to ensure that various compliance levels are met with minimal human interaction, dependencies and rubber-stamping. Interacting with change management and incident management organizations in order to facilitate automation of compliance-related processes.

    Responsible for interviewing and hiring platform engineers, acting as a product owner for our current and future platforms. Constantly in collaboration with developers in order to drive and facilitate continuous improvement mentality.

    Doing hands-on work with tech stack below:
    AWS, Azure, Terraform, CoreOS, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, docker, fleet, ansible, Kubernetes, python, Golang, git, Jenkins.

  • eBay as Manager Site Operations 2013 - 2017

    Managing a team of 15 highly skilled operations (DevOps) engineers, participating in projects and other hands-on work, taking part in overall infrastructure architecture decisions. Responsible for operations of Marktplaats (marktplaats.nl), CAS International (internal multi-tenant eCG-wide product) and COMaaS (COMmunication as a Service, internal product around instant messaging).

    • Leading 3 sub-teams responsible for architecture and implementation of new technologies and solutions for the whole platform, day-to-day operations and support of Product Development departments (60+ people).
    • Managing stakeholders across the business of eBay Marktplaats ensuring timely delivery of solutions while keeping quality up-to-par
    • Guarding the overall level of system administration automation, striving for as much automation as possible
    • Driving adoption of private cloud based on OpenStack and migration of the products from bare-metal hosting to the VPC
    • Driving migration of microservices towards scheduled workloads based on HashiCorp Nomad.
    • Keeping a look-out for new technologies and approaches, driving the innovation in the department by either experimenting with new tooling or developing the necessary tooling in-house
    • Member of Cloud Steering Committee – a virtual team responsible for internal Cloud strategy and adoption.

    Tech stuff:

    • Installation and administration of systems based on Ubuntu Linux
    • Extensive use of VMWare for testing and QA purposes
    • Extensive use of OpenStack on eCG's own private cloud
    • Various development work in Python, Java, Golang
    • Docker, Vagrant, Terraform, Consul, Nomad are daily a meal
    • Using Saltstack, Puppet, Fabric and other CM/orchestration tools
    • Wrote a ChatOps bot for Slack in Golang to simplify some mundane tasks

  • VLF Networks BV as Co-owner 2007-2013

    VLF Networks B.V. is a privately held company based in Leiden, the Netherlands. We are providing ICT consultancy services to our customers aiming at greater customer satisfaction, shorter delivery periods, better quality and strong long-term business relationships. Our focus is in the areas of UNIX administration, network administration and security, enterprise solutions architecture and many more.

    Our outsourcing department is specializing in software development using various programming languages/technologies, including but not limited to: C, C++, Java, C#, J#, ASP.NET, Visual Basic, Perl, Python, PHP, Shell scripting. You will be assigned a Dutch/English speaking project manager/architect who will go with you through all project requirements/planning details and will remain single point of contact for you for the whole duration of the project.

    We are constantly looking for new colleagues to join us in building a successful name for our company in the market.

  • Marktplaats as Freelance SysAdmin 2008-2010

    Maintenance, roll-outs and administration of eBay classifieds server farm for Kijiji, Gumtree, Marktplaats.

    • Installation and administration of systems based on Debian Linux
    • Installation and administration of systems based on Sun Solaris 10
    • Solaris zoning (including Linux brandz zones, default and lx26 for 2.6 kernel support)
    • Design and implementation of Solaris Jumpstart servers with various configurations
    • Integration of systems with OpenLDAP for authentication and access control
    • Extensive use of VMWare for testing and QA purposes
    • Various development work in PHP, Python or C
    • Veritas Suite installation and configuration
    • EMC Clariion configuration, zoning, fine-tuning, administration
    • Brocade fiber-switches configuration and administration

    Tech stack:
    Debian Linux, Solaris 10 (sparc, x86-64), Solaris zoning, jumpstart, OpenLDAP, VMWare, VMWare ESX, postfix, MySQL, Veritas Cluster, VxFS, EMC Clariion, EMC PowerPath, Brocade, PHP, XML, Python, XML-RPC, SOAP.

  • Getronics PinkRoccade as Freelance Developer 2008

    Development of Java solutions for GX WebManager 9 platform, design and development of interoperability software and modules to ensure successful data migrations between various CMS and GX9.

    • Content migration utilities (Java)
    • Various Java plug-ins and extensions for GX9
    • PHP development (XML/SOAP)
    • Design and planning of development projects
    • Participation in customer brainstorm sessions

    Technical expertise: RedHat Linux, MySQL, Windows 2003 Server, MS SQL, Java, PHP, XML, SOAP

  • ABN AMRO Bank N.V. as Freelance IT Specialist 2008

    AIX 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 installation and administration. NIM management. HMC management. Participating in management and implementation of upgrade projects. Participating in Change Management processes. Participating in Back Office activities (3rd line support). Creation of PDD (Product Detailed Description) for various projects. HACMP installation and configuration. WLM installation and configuration.

    Attended the following education courses:
    HACMP Administration I (3 days)
    HACMP Administration II (3 days)
    HACMP Administration III (3 days)
    AIX V5 Problem determination skills (5 days)

  • Human Inference as Configuration Manager 2007-2008

    Development and maintenance of software “buildstreet”, i.e. cross-platform build environment. Supporting colleagues in all aspects of software building.

    • Maintaining POSIX-compliant build environment
    • Porting software to various platforms
    • Adapting build environments to work with new tooling and tooling updates
    • Porting Windows build environment from Cygwin to Interix.
    • Advising on various software-building topics, including but not limited to choice of tooling, environment configuration, etc.

    Technical expertise: Large number of port-target platforms: Linux, Windows, AIX, Tru64, Solaris, HP-UX, OS/400. Programming in C/C++/Java. Maintaining large portable build environment based on shell scripting and GNU toolset (make/gcc). VC7, VC8.

  • LogicaCMG Telecoms/Acision as Senior Integration Engineer 2004-2007

    • Linux administration including kickstart solutions
    • Extensive use of Veritas Provisioning Manager for automation of application deployment and configuration
    • Design and implementation of networks and solutions
    applications including, but not limited to: WAP Gateways, MMSC, Central Directory Server
    • Active participation in various design processes. Author of various improvements at low as well as large scale
    • Providing support to the Operations department and to the Testing department with regards to the newly designed solutions and products
    • Wrote a client application for OpForce to be used in ops dpt (Java, PHP)
    • Wrote a web-based application in Java to allow early fault detection on the systems managed by Veritas Provisioning Manager. Tools involved: CVS, Shell scripting, Java programming, Java servlet programming.
    • Constantly developing tools in various languages (Java, PHP, C)

  • LogicaCMG Wireless Data Solutions as Deployment and support engineer 2002-2004

    Providing 2nd and 3rdline technical support to international customers all over the world.
    Compaq Tru64 administration, Sun Solaris administration and Linux administration.
    Support of WAP gateway built by LogicaCMG, including fine tuning, bug fixing and installation/upgrades.
    Support of PPG (Push Proxy Gateway) built by LogicaCMG, including fine tuning, bug fixing and installation/upgrades.
    Roll-outs of high-availability clusters, based on Tru64 with ASE availability manager, Sun Solaris 5.8 with Sun Cluster Suite and Veritas Clustering software in-house and at a customer sites in Switzerland, Russia, United Kingdom, Sweden, Greece.
    Problems investigation and debugging of complex software on all levels (Network to Application levels) including but not limited to network traffic analysis, protocol specifications analysis and software bug reports analysis.

    Took part in the design of a global roll-out automation system for clustering environment (platform transparent)

  • PSINet as Operations Support Engineer 2001-2002

    Details about responsibilit here...

  • ISP "CIT" Vostok as System Administrator 1997-2001

    Details about responsibilit here...

TOP CLIENTS

Selection of the customers I had the pleasure and the privilege to work with.

eBay
FedEx
Marktplaats
ABN Amro
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Project Title

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