John Houghton

About John Houghton

I’m a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on building and operating observability…

Experience

1. Senior Site Reliability Engineer

   Veeva Systems

   Dec 2016 — Present

   Work focused on building, operating, and sustaining large-scale observability and reliability platforms supporting Veeva CRM at enterprise scale. Ownership spans system design through long-term operation, with emphasis on signal quality, operational clarity, and systems that hold up under real-world pressure.Key contributions* Built and operated internal observability and reliability platforms supporting CRM at enterprise scale, with sustained ownership across design, implementation, deployment, and operation for systems processing billions of log lines and metric points per day.* Modernized access to application logs by replacing a legacy internal log access tool with Elasticsearch, enabling deeper analysis of system behavior and performance.* Helped build and evolve a next-generation centralized metrics and alerting platform, consolidating metrics collection using AWS MSK–based infrastructure.* Rebuilt and consolidated the metrics user interface into cohesive dashboards and panels, working with developers to define, collect, and render new operational metrics. Reworked alerting into a low-noise model closely aligned with product ownership, and assumed long-term responsibility for system maintenance, stability, and remediation of design issues.* Currently completing delivery of an operational verification system built on Apache Airflow and deployed within the AWS ecosystem, automating collection and reporting of critical system data such as certificate expiration, instance lifecycle behavior, and load balancer health.