Wells Fargo, and its Wealth and Investment Management business (WIM), are undergoing ambitious Technology Transformation, which includes modernizing IT Operations technology and processes. New Digital products are being developed and rolled out, in a combination of Cloud and On-Prem environments, catering to financial needs of a wide variety of Customers.

I have joined WIM Technology organization as SRE Practice Lead to:

• drive efforts to transform IT Operations towards SRE methodology and culture,

• upscale engineering and troubleshooting skillset within the org,

• lead continual improvements in the most critical SRE focus areas (Observability and Automation),

• and lead and contribute to strategic Enterprise level initiatives to improve Technology platforms and services.

Came back to EPAM after a long break, to drive establishing a new SRE practice, and help EPAM’s clients reach their technology goals.

As a member of the leadership team for EPAM’s Cloud and DevOps organization, my role includes:

• Managing Production Support and Monitoring Automation Service Delivery for a strategic Client (eCommerce platform), improving team’s motivation for excellence, providing technical mentorship, acting as a technical and ownership role model for EPAM and Client teams, improving Services transparency and reporting for the Client, etc;

• Consulting other projects on the topics of SRE, Leadership and Motivation;

• Developing training materials for SRE practice and career path;

• Contributing to pre-sales activities for new Services with new and existing Clients;

As the Firm is currently undergoing the largest Technology Transformation in its long history, we've embarked on a mission to gradually transform IT Operations, through cultural and methodological changes in the spirit of SRE and DevOps (tighter collaboration, shared ownership, focus on engineering and automation).

• Testing adoption approaches and scenarios that would scale well in this huge IT organization with unique business and regulatory complexity.

• Understanding and addressing technological, organizational and motivational challenges specific to MS.

• Working with dedicated tooling development team on integrated solutions (monitoring, alerting, dash boarding, analytics) to provide foundation for mass adoption of Reliability Engineering practices.

• Creating guidelines for early adopters / pilot projects.

Shifting gears again, into the new ECC SWAT role, created to provide dedicated cross-discipline technical assistance in managing major incidents (high-profile emergency troubleshooting), and in non-emergency research and systemic weaknesses analysis.

• Utilizing broad technology expertise, combined with common sense and attention to details, to drive scientific problem solving process for any critical system in distress.

• Bridging multiple infrastructure and application teams into a single virtual troubleshooting squad as required by circumstances, in realtime.

• Participating in high-profile post-mortems (major incident reviews), focused on deeper understanding or true root causes and identifying opportunities for systemic improvements.

• Using understanding of enterprise systems architecture, and various complex failure scenarios, to perform non-emergency research and systemic weaknesses analysis.

• Spreading the Culture of collaboration, ownership and excellence across partner teams in all areas of MS Technology.

Shifting gears from Consultant to fully hands-on System Support Owner.

• Continuously expanding the scope of covered systems and applications, to include complete front-to-back business and data flows, and eventually cover most of the Prime Brokerage technology universe.

• Building the new global L2/L3 support team to cover 24h follow-the-sun operations of the expanded scope (now that the Crisis was over, and we were back to growing the business), with team members in US, Canada, Mexico, India and Philippines.

• Leading with personal example, both from technology and people perspectives.

• Full support ownership of the brand-new PB Matrix online client portal, including wide range of applications providing clients (hedge funds) with trades and wires booking platform, portfolio insights and reporting, margins, risk and performance analytics, and accounting.

• Deep full-stack troubleshooting of technology and business issues (infrastructure and applications), trends analysis to identify systemic issues and weaknesses.

• Collaboration with DEV teams and Business reps for reliability and supportability improvements (long before SRE and DevOps became a thing).

• Infinite realized opportunities for operational automation and service process improvements.

• Continuous team knowledge improvements to cover areas outside direct scope of responsibility, but which form a more complete big picture of the Firm businesses.