dpifke

Location: Anywhere in U.S.
Willing to relocate: Temporarily
Technologies:
I’m looking for 3- to 12-month contracting opportunities (corp-to-corp), anywhere in the U.S., with organizations looking to move some or all of their infrastructure on-prem.
I can...
Design reliable, secure, scalable, and cost-effective compute, storage, and networking that’s tailored to the needs of your business, using open source software, open weight LLMs, and off-the-shelf hardware.
Find suitable colocation host(s) and negotiate agreements for space, power, bandwidth, and insurance; or hire and supervise a licensed general contractor for building out a server room in your office or other facility.
Get the best deals on equipment, cabling, transportation, and everything else.
Hire and supervise temporary labor for the buildout (“rack and stack”).
Bootstrap networking, storage, cluster management, and Gitops systems.  I have lots of experience running Kubernetes on bare metal, arranging BGP peering at public interconnection points, and connecting private clouds to public ones.
Perform initial validation and load testing, and help you migrate services from public clouds or SaaS providers.
Provide training and consultation on SRE best practices, observability, oncall rota, etc.
Resume/CV:
I have 30 years of experience in ISP, web, and related businesses, including as a Technical Program Manager for Google SRE.  I started an ISP in 1996, back when all that was needed to do so was a bank of modems and a Linux box or two.  I led data center buildouts for several dot coms—including a major social networking site, Bebo—in the late 90s and early 2000s, before the “cloud” existed, and I have tons of experience in the intervening years writing software and operating production services on all of the major hyperscalers.  I had a stint managing wifi buildouts in hotels all over the country, where I learned the ins and outs of finding and working with skilled and reliable tradespeople.  As the founder of two startups, I know how to be scrappy and move fast in a high-growth environment; I’ve also been an employee and consultant embedded in more mature organizations, always with a reputation for getting things done.
Email: dave at pifke dot org