I have a passion for Linux and Open Source software and have been fortunate to work in this space since 2009. If your team can use a person with deep knowledge of Linux and associated Open Source technologies, that might be me!

Contact me at: george@usermod.net
The current version of this CV lives at: https://usermod.net/cv/

Canonical ⋅ Technical Support Engineer

location: Athens, Greece (remote)
period: September 2022 - December 2022 (4 months)

At Canonical I was hired to be part of the newly formed Desktop Support Group.
I also contributed to the initial stages of Canonical’s Blender support.

Red Hat ⋅ Senior Technical Support Engineer

location: Brno, Czech Republic
period: February 2015 - April 2019 (4 years 3 months) positions:

  • Senior Technical Support Engineer (Oct 2018 – Apr 2019)
  • Technical Support Engineer (Sep 2015 – Sep 2018)
  • Associate Technical Support Engineer (Feb 2015 – Aug 2015)

At Red Hat I worked as part of the customer support team for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I initially specialized in filesystem and storage and later in kernel related issues.
My main responsibilities were:

  • Solving technical issues for customers running RHEL such as kernel panics, out of memory events, performance issues, filesystem corruptions, lvm corruptions, storage disconnections (NAS, SAN).
  • Working in a high pressure environment with response times defined in a Service-Level Agreement.
  • Communicating with customers over e-mail and phone.
  • Contributing to Red Hat’s Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) knowledgebase.
  • Interviewing candidates for technical roles.
  • Mentoring new hires.
  • Contributing to internal tooling and services (bash, python).
  • Delivering employee training on subjects such as:
    • Basic vmcore analysis and identifying common causes of kernel panics.
    • git usage.
    • Advanced usage of vim and command line tools such as zsh, fzf, ctrl-p, tmux, for parsing sosreport and similar data.
    • Introduction to awk and practical examples for ad-hoc analysis of performance data using awk.
    • KCS coaching.

Video Sites ⋅ System Administrator

location: remote - home office
period: November 2011 - April 2013 and February 2014 - January 2015 (2 years 6 months)

I worked for a series of video on demand websites as a system administrator. My day to day responsibilities revolved around Linux system administration.
My main responsibilities were:

  • Maintenance of 150 bare-metal Linux servers.
  • Provisioning new and decommissioning old production systems.
  • Setting up development environments for newly hired developers.
  • Provisioning and maintaining internal services for developers (e.g. internally-hosted GitLab).
  • Participating in an on-call rotation responding to monitoring alerts for production systems.

In addition to day-to-day tasks, I planned and implemented a migration from an old performance graphing system (cacti) to a more flexible modern stack (graphite, grafana, statsd, logstash, collectd) for the entire infrastructure. (I don’t know how mature prometheus was in 2014 but if it was and I was aware of it, I would have used it!)

thinkbinary.gr ⋅ on-site Technical Support

location: Athens, Greece
period: March 2010 – May 2011 (1 yr 3 months)

I provided on-site technical support for small offices with Windows infrastructure.
This was a part-time position, responding based on customer support requests. Work usually involved:

  • Managing Windows Active Directory servers.
  • Configuring shared printers.
  • Configuring smb file sharing.
  • Managing user access and permissions for different teams (management, sales, engineers, etc.).
  • Provisioning and decommissioning workstations.
  • Assisting users with miscellaneous requests.

City Unity College ⋅ System Administrator

location: Athens, Greece
period: September 2009 - December 2011 (2 years 4 months)

I worked in the college’s IT team while it was expanding to its second building in the center of Athens. My colleagues and I carried out the installation of all the computer equipment for the new building which included:

  • Unpacking and setting up approximately 100 workstations across computer labs and staff offices.
  • Patching all of it from the patch panels into the network switches.
  • Configuring network switches.
  • Setting up and maintaining Windows Active directory servers.
  • Maintain an openvpn network to connect the LANs of both buildings to facilitate printer and file sharing for staff.

Beyond the work related to preparing the IT infrastructure for the new building, day to day responsibilities included:

  • Providing on-site assistance for college staff, professors, and students with any technical issue.
  • Managing the college’s email system.
  • Maintaining the existing IT infrastructure for both buildings.

Certifications

  • Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Ansible Automation
    valid from/to: Oct 24, 2017 - Jun 01, 2021
  • Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
    valid from/to: Mar 27, 2015 - Jun 01, 2021

Red Hat cert ID: 150-040-954