Perks Page - Linux Works

cPanel Inc

Product Owner / Houston, TX / 2012 - 2018

I served as the principal stakeholder within the product development team and was ultimately responsible for conveying the vision and functional elements necessary to deliver on cPanel product strategy and organizational goals. I Collaborated with the Director of Development, Chief Product Owner and other internal stakeholders as well as external customers defining and documenting detailed software requirements for cPanels applications and features. Within the product development team, I was also responsible for prioritizing the product backlog and was embedded within a group of Perl developers, QA analysts, and UI developers, doing whatever was necessary to build the best product possible.

- Performed standard Scrum Product Owner responsibilities; Run agile meetings, forecast size/cost of projects while balancing researching future projects for both technical and business viability.
- Built and integrated a RPM based EasyApache 4 (EA4) Apache into CentOS based cPanel systems.
- Updated and published PHP, Apache and other RPM updates to EA4 from ‘Technical Preview’ to over 80% usage on 400k+ systems.
- Implemented Bamboo CI system with our RPM build platform from package updates to mirror deployments.
- Tracked package and software regressions as they progressed from customer reports throughout development and testing processes while ensuring quick output and proper scoping of fixes.

HostGator

Systems Monitoring Supervisor / Houston, TX / 2008 - 2012

I supervised and lead many of the best system administrator teams in Houston. We were charged with monitoring the health and integrity of HostGator servers, and providing 100% service assurance to our customers.

- Developed Return To Service procedures for services including RAID Recovery, MySQL, Apache, and other core services, and for Denial of Service attacks, which was paired with heavy documentation and training, with primary emphasis on maintaining SLA priorities and moving quickly to root cause analysis.
- Developed kernel changes, service configuration, internal procedures adjustments, and hardware recommendation proposals to maintain product reliability and stability
- Created Standard Operating Procedures for various components including application upgrade paths, kernel and system performance changes
- Created workflow and monitoring concepts for Zabbix monitoring platform, including monitoring application best practices, 'outage of service' definitions, alert level thresholds, and server type groups based on profit margins.
- Resolved escalated hardware issues, denial of service attacks and tracked down point of origin from compromised accounts.
- Managed all aspects of the Systems Monitoring department, which consists of a 24x7 team of 36 Linux System Administrator and 3 Shift/Team Leads actively monitoring 5k servers
- Created and maintained work schedules for overlapping employee and management coverage while handling vacation, sick days, and unexpected emergencies
- Maintained Systems Monitoring Internal Wiki, updated articles with relevant data, verified validity of user submitted entries while documenting internal and external systems flow
- Performed bi-monthly Department meetings for 35 employees, communicating new procedures, policies and company business while receiving feedback from employees regarding problems and happenings that would affect work loads, servers, and eventually customers.
- Developed internal and department specific support metrics for performance evaluation and advancement; performed performance evaluations for 30 employees, while setting short term goals and ensuring long term goals are met

Jacob Perkins

Personal Profile

Skills

CentOS

RedHat

Fedora

Linux

Perl

Web Technologies

My Talks

Introduction to EasyApache 4

Experience

cPanel Inc

HostGator

Papers I've Found

Contact