Chris Talbot

About Chris Talbot

I lead and mentor a team of observability, SRE and DevOps engineers designing tooling that identifies the causes of complex IT problems. My solutions align with the business directives of cost reduction, standardization, automation, self-service, and productivity enhancement. I identify challenges and risks, then develop a business-specific set of projects that move the needle forward toward outstanding enterprise availability and performance. In the boardroom, I deliver, showcasing notable public speaking and presentation abilities. At the console, I dig in to solve problems at a line of code level of detail. I have commitment and pride in the work I do, holding myself to high standards without succumbing to perfectionism. I manage my team with pride and humility, creating a feedback loop of trust and shared purpose that allows us to deliver on audacious objectives within an accelerated timeline.I’ve risen to a leadership position professionally due to a series of remarkable achievements that demonstrate competency and my ability to deliver quantifiable results while nurturing a healthy work culture and climate. I build market-leading observability solutions, delivering competitive advantage.Key Achievements: Reduced application downtime across the enterprise by over 75% Designed and integrated an associate dashboard improving time to resolution by 80% Designed and integrated a client dashboard reducing call volume by 50% Developed APIs that exposed KPIs to other solutions Monitored entire physical and virtual server infrastructure Extended monitoring coverage into the AWS Cloud Evolved a traditional monitoring operations team into a DevOps oriented observability design teamCore Competencies: Operations Enablement Observability Evolution Observability Standardization DevOps Transformation Resilience Engineering Enterprise Monitoring Budget and Vendor Management Hybrid Cloud Application Performance Management (APM) Data Visualization and Analysis Critical Incident Management (CIRT) Team Building High EQ

Experience

1. Observability Technology Manager

   Enova International

   Apr 2017 — Present · Chicago, IL, US

   Evolved a traditional monitoring product administration team into a DevOps development focused observability engineering and consulting team+ Managed a 7-figure Operations budget, aggressively achieving annual year-over-year cost reductions exceeding 15%.+ Delivered these cost reductions while simultaneously reducing the frequency, duration, and severity of critical incidents via enhanced observability+ Evaluated, piloted, negotiated for and delivered DataDog and PagerDuty as enterprise-wide observability standards+ Oversaw, project managed, and rolled-out Enova’s first in-house developed observability tool+ Managed vendor relationships with Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, AWS, Grafana Labs, Elastic, PagerDuty, and BigPanda+ Established prescriptive observability standards that simplify the daily practice of observability for software engineers+ Evangelized the benefits of observability and DevOps across the organization, accelerating a “shift-left” of Operations into the Software Engineering department+ Contributed to the evolution of the CIRT/Major Incident process, reducing Major Incidents 18% Year over Year

Education

• Trinity College Dublin

  Neurobiology, Neurobiology and Neurosciences

  1997 — 1998

• University of Massachusetts Amherst

  Bachelor of Science, Neuroscience

  1995 — 1999

Skills

• Data Center
• Software as a Service (Saas)
• Troubleshooting
• Bmc Patrol
• Integration
• Netcool
• Vendor Management
• Virtualization
• Hp
• Enterprise Software
• Enterprise Architecture
• Solaris
• Saas
• Business Process Monitor
• Unix
• Bmc Portal
• Infrastructure
• System Deployment
• Servers
• Itil
• Wily Introscope
• Application Performance Management
• Vmware
• High Availability
• Oracle
• Requirements Analysis
• Cloud Computing
• Agile Methodologies
• Sitescope
• Architectures
• Architecture
• Scrum
• Business Service Management
• Sql
• Linux
• System Monitoring
• Disaster Recovery
• Solution Architecture
• Shell Scripting
• Hp Business Availability Center