I aspire to harness business objectives to technology design principles. I have a strong suspicion that the only real competitive advantage any business operation really has is the intellect, creativity, and drive of its people.
This document is intended to be a high-level overview of my career, with an emphasis on my professional growth and development. For details about specific technologies I have worked with and projects I have completed, see www.tomammon.net - which is itself a technology demonstration.
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Engineering
Hotwire's rapid growth, and resulting fast pace, has provided me with a remarkable opportunity to understand how the network drives business objectives. As I've worked to build business cases and provide financial reasoning for my design choices, I've begun to understand the business value of protocols and design philosophies. As the company's lead network architect I'm expected to provide subject matter expertise and that expectation, along with the requirement to articulate business value, have brought me enormous professional growth.
TechOps Network Engineering
Adobe's sophisticated network environment gave me some very challenging and stretching opportunities, which raised my level of skill and understanding. As a senior contributor, I provided subject matter expertise for Inter-AS MPLS and MPLS traffic engineering, and applied these technologies to build a global private backbone. I continued climbing the automation learning curve to reduce my own human error and to assist my colleagues in their operational work. I continued my work to support other engineers by providing training for Ansible and MPLS-TE.
ICS Network Engineering
As a senior contributor, I worked as subject matter expert for MPLS and MVPN (Multicast) technologies and built my first international private backbone. In an effort to keep my network designs grounded in reality, I traveled to many countries to train other engineers and in some cases do the implementation projects myself. I served as a last-tier escalation point for complex network issues. I also dug up my old programming skills (last used in my college days) to start automating the network, and in the process learned about interacting with API's and solving operational problems in a programmatic way. I continued to mentor those who were interested in improving their skills and made some lifelong friends in the process.
ICS Network Engineering
My work for this international non-profit organization included supporting a large global WAN connecting remote offices in 68 countries. I also supported a large metro campus built with MPLS L3VPNs. This was the first network where I deployed MPLS P and PE routers. At the same time, I was the subject matter expert for Cisco DMVPN technologies, and I learned how to design networks that other engineers could successfully deploy and operate on their own. This combination of service provider technologies and traditional enterprise WAN technologies gave me a solid foundational understanding of core routing principles. The time I spent trying to understand the perspectives of the operations engineers who deployed my designs was some of the most satisfying work I have done so far in my career.
Center for High Performance Computing
As the operations team leader, I organized and supervised the work of two network technicians. My technical understanding deepened, which allowed me to serve as the subject matter expert for IP routing protocols, Infiniband, and storage networking. In this role I learned that I enjoy teaching and explaining technical concepts. My peers tell me that I have an aptitude for explaining technical concepts.
Center for High Performance Computing
After many years of tinkering with networks and servers on my own, I began my full-time employment as a network engineer in a high-performance computing environment. This gave me the opportunity to learn how to use linux to solve real problems. It also gave me the opportunity to work with low-latency, high performance networking technologies such as Infiniband, which in turn led me deeper into hardware where I discovered ASICs, packet buffers, the limitations of TCP, and other foundational principles of networking.
B.S., Telecommunications Administration
CCIE #57102, Routing & Switching
