About ReactiveOps

Our Team

We’re a small group of experienced, dedicated, and focused DevOps specialists. Our unique, boutique company is dedicated to providing you with the best service, just like an in-house team would. Get to know us!

• 

  Matt Rogish

  Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer

  

  Matt has been CTO/Director for a number of companies. During college, he helped found a sports community startup, where he did everything from app development to system administration to DBA work. He then moved into full-time operations as a DBA for The Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland.

  Matt was introduced to outsourced DevOps and PaaS while working as CTO for The J. Peterman Company, Toura, and Funding Gates. He then moved on to Rails Machine - a Ruby on Rails hosting company - where he eventually recognized an opportunity and decided to bootstrap ReactiveOps.

  • While at J. Peterman, Matt was exposed to the proper physical design of datacenters while migrating on prem hardware to colocated racks.
  • Matt was an early adapter of Heroku at Funding Gates. After encountering the limitations of the platform, he moved the application to Rails Machine. Matt’s introduction to Rails Machine led him to become CTO, where he implemented new products and processes to reduce customer churn.
  • At ReactiveOps, Matt continues to build and maintain a scalable business and is excited to change the way people view the outsourced DevOps market.
• 

  EJ Etherington

  CTO

  

  EJ began his career working as a Software Technician at Hewlett-Packard. He then moved on to TaterTot, where he implemented “DevOps” practices to automate the scaling and release of their API.

  EJ officially moved into DevOps, working in Application Support at Jama Software, where he was exposed to automation and containerization. He continued creating automation pipelines at Vadio and Smarsh Inc. before landing at ReactiveOps.

  • While at Jama Software, EJ helped build a large scale customer account management tool to speed up customer migration and load balancing.
  • When EJ joined Vadio, they were using hand deployment scripts with python. He was responsible for migrating them to a fully automated deployment in CI/CD pipeline, using containers orchestrated by Mesos.
  • He was also heavily involved in initiating information sessions at Vadio, which introduced team members to configuration and container management best practices.
• 

  Sarah Zelechoski

  Vice President of Engineering

  

  Originally a data scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Sarah transitioned into systems administration when the need to problem solve supporting infrastructure arose. She moved on to Sourcefire to focus on development, and began writing Ruby based infrastructure tools (before this was called DevOps). Her career also took her to Harris, where the daily deploying and destroying of VMs boosted her automation skills, as well as LifeImage where she increased deployment speed and reliability.

  • While at Sourcefire, Sarah acquired an intimate knowledge of AWS EC2 and S3 technologies. She was responsible for initialization and maintenance of EC2 instances and Elastic Load Balancers using both cloud-­init and Opscode Chef. She also constructed ruby gems, radiant extensions, and cocoa applications to interface with the S3 API.
  • During her time at LifeImage, Sarah was the principal Ansible developer, actively developing over 50 unique Ansible roles and playbooks to manage corporate and production infrastructure. She managed extensive vSphere infrastructure, including 5 clusters, covering everything from performance lab and development to production and DR.
  • At ReactiveOps, Sarah has helped Boxed go from a system on EC2 classic without centralized deployments, to enabling dev deploys in less than 5 minutes and immutable production deploys in less than 15 minutes. She also helped Betterment build a serverless disaster recovery system, requiring little maintenance and few operational resources.
• 

  Eric Malloy

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Eric began his career as a SysAdmin at the age of 14, helping grow a small family business into a multinational security management firm. Eric’s automation-driven, DevOps mindset began in the production operations team at Nokia, where he realized that many manual tasks could be automated. He then moved to a R&D team that focused on automation innovation.

  In addition to Nokia, Eric has developed and implemented new applications for enhancing automation at companies including Microsoft, Pearson, and Philips.

  • At Nokia, Eric enabled the Next Generation Nokia App store to test and deploy to production at each code commit, allowing for the rapid delivery of features and elimination of seven testing environments. This increased production deployments from 1 feature a month to multiple times per day.
  • Eric was also responsible for tasks in order to obtain an ISO 27001 certification for a legal management startup in Cambridge, MA. He automated their full stack infrastructure enabling a business continuity mandate of recovering from total regional infrastructure loss within 4 hours.
  • At Pearson Education, Eric was a member of an engineering team that designed and implemented a Kubernetes based PaaS used by hundreds of developer teams that helped drive a 20% gain in productivity.
• 

  Eric Hole

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Eric started his career working as an analyst in a NASA satellite image analysis lab at Yale University. He then moved to the workstation and cluster compute support group, helping maintain all varieties of unix and early linux clusters for researchers across campus.

  He was introduced to modern cloud computing and DevOps practices working with Open Listings (YC W15), an early stage startup that aims to make the home-buying process easier and cheaper. He worked on the integration of the scraping, storing, and transformation of real estate listing data from the RETS API servers.

  • Eric became interested in combining his experience in development and ops after accidentally ending up at the Philly DevOps meetup. He got involved in a project with another group member using Kubernetes and GKE to reimplement the wayback machine.
  • He decided that Kubernetes was no longer just a hobby, it had become a passion and he made it into his profession.
  • At ReactiveOps, Eric works on cloud infrastructure projects for our clients in Kubernetes. He is also a core contributor to the kops project, making the project more approachable for users and developing unique solutions to complex problems.
• 

  Daniel O'Sullivan

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  After getting accepted into Columbia grad school for Urban Planning, Daniel instead decided to dig further into the IT work that had piqued his interest.

  He soon accepted a position at the Institute for Humane Studies where he quickly moved up to help-desk manager. He was later involved in Network Operations with the sister organization, Mercatus Center at George Mason University. That's when he realized that he needed significant system automation and discovered Puppet.

  After deciding he'd like to do this full time, he found a job at Catalyst Real Estate Software and he was able to help them move their legacy software to AWS.

  • While at Catalyst Real Estate Software, he set up an ECS-based infrastructure. He also built a Kubernetes-based infrastructure with Terraform.
  • At Carbon Black, Daniel helped manage the infrastructure for one of their products that had seen 10x user-base growth and even cut costs in the process. While there he also implemented Janitor Monkey and Spinnaker.
  • When not building Kubernetes-based infrastructure, Daniel can be found camping or sailing the gulf coast in his 22ft. sailboat.
• 

  Crismar Mejia

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Crismar attended a Technical High School in the Dominican Republic and received a scholarship at Utah State University to study Computer Engineering. His first job was as a Technology Analyst for Goldman Sachs. Afterwards, he became a Software Engineer for OpsecSecurity.

  After college, Crismar experimented with Rails and Android, but always had an interest in systems engineering. He soon found himself digging through Github where he realized that so many things were built with Go, which led him to discover Kubernetes.

  • After working through all of the Kubernetes courses he could find online, he applied for the diversity scholarship to attend KubeCon 2017, where he ran into the ReactiveOps team.
  • Crismar contributes to the Kubernetes Service Catalog.
  • When not playing with Kubernetes, Crismar spends his time cooking, exercising, and dancing.
• 

  Jess Grebenschikov

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Jess studied Molecular and Micro Biology at UC Berkley before working for a biotech immunology lab as a research scientist. She then went to work in medicine as a nurse with the intention of becoming a doctor. However, Jess realized that she could make a bigger impact on healthcare through technology, which brought her to Bright.md.

  • Because Bright.md was a startup, Jess was able to touch just about every part of the tech side. It was through this experience that she discovered a passion for solving DevOps problems.
  • At GoPro, Jess worked on building out an information data pipeline to aid their business intelligence team.
  • In her spare time Jess enjoys public speaking, technical writing, and volunteering for non-profit organizations. She also does Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and pursues minimalism.
• 

  Lance Smith

  Lead Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Lance started his career at Catalyst Repository Systems as a tech support. He then worked on C# and Python development before moving to an Ops Engineer role.

  After Catalyst Repository Systems, Lance went on to Shutterstock where he built developer tools writing systems tooling and making delivery more reliable for the 200 developers on staff. He then moved to Blinker where he was tasked with building out an infrastructure team that helped take the company from a startup idea through to market.

  • While at Blinker, he helped build a hybrid infrastructure running computer vision and machine learning in a data center. He also built a container orchestration system with Nomad and the entire Hashicorp stack on top of AWS.
  • Lance helped map docker containers to hardware devices to leverage GPU processing and reduced the infrastructure spend by 50%.
  • When not working with computers, Lance plays mandolin and wrangles his dogs.
• 

  Dave Konopka

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  After college, Dave found a job in application development and discovered that he was interested in the deployment of applications. He started working on deployment and CI pipelines and transitioned into an SRE role. At ReactiveOps Dave enjoys helping companies find solutions to keep application and deployment processes performing at their peak.

  • At Articulate Dave helped develop the operations team responsible for managing production services, software build and deployment process, and development tooling.
  • At AWeber he assisted in the the transition to container based deployments using CoreOS.
  • At DemystData he setup a logging pipeline for complex data, using almost every AWS service under the sun.
  • When his laptop is closed he's practicing ParentOps with two energetic, creative children. He also enjoys running and a good game of Open Legend.
• 

  John Wynkoop

  Lead Site Reliability Engineer

  

  John originally went to college aspiring to become an attorney. However, he ended up taking a help desk job because he needed the money. He soon got bored repeatedly installing Windows, so he automated the process. He then used his newly found spare time to play with linux and learn networking.

  After graduating, he moved to the Bahamas and worked for the Navy on systems for real time submarine tracking. He later went on to work for the University of Tennessee by way of Oak Ridge National Lab working on Kraken and High Performance Computing (the third fastest super computer in the world at the time).

  He then left to work at a managed services company running tens of thousands of servers for companies.

  • At Oak Ridge National Lab, John oversaw building one of the earliest GPU computing clusters for Georgia Tech.
  • At the University of Florida, John ran a statewide 400 gigabit backbone serving public institutions.
  • In his free time John explores underwater cave systems in the US and Mexico and works to preserve our fresh water supply.
• 

  Corey O'Brien

  Lead Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Corey has been automating testing and deployment pipelines since before 'DevOps' was a thing. He led the test automation team at HP Exstream before transitioning to Rackspace where he worked on continuous delivery of new products. He is passionate about cloud-native applications and solutions.

  • While at HP, he helped create a bespoke continuous integration solution for configuring and automating the deployment and load balancing of massively parallel testing infrastructure using VMware vCloud and AWS. This resulted in an increased automated testing bandwidth of 600% and the automated integration of testing results into the release pipeline.
  • At Rackspace, Corey fell in love with Docker and Kubernetes. He designed and implemented a fully continuous delivery pipeline for Kubernetes clusters on OpenStack and the applications running in Kubernetes. This enabled fully-automated, zero-downtime deployments hundreds of times per month.
  • Within a month of joining ReactiveOps, Corey became our first Certified Kubernetes Administrator. He continues to use his automation expertise to build world-class infrastructure for our clients.
• 

  Rob Scott

  Site Reliability Engineer

  

  Rob comes from a software development background where he's worked with a wide range of technologies. Whether it was with MySQL, Redis, or Mongo, he has always been fascinated with data aggregation and analysis. He's also spent a significant amount of time developing complex systems with Node.js and Rails.

  At Spire Labs, Rob served as VP of Software Architecture, building out production infrastructure for several products. Rob led an effort to move Spire's infrastructure to Kubernetes, leading to significant increases in system availability and redundancy. His experience with Kubernetes led him to want to help others harness the power it can provide.

  • Because of the work he had done at Spire Labs on Kubernetes, Rob was flown to London to be a part of the AWS video series “This is my Architecture”.
  • Rob has spoken about Kubernetes at a number of events, including RedHat's DevNation Federal.
  • Rob contributes to Kubernetes documentation and continues to speak and write on cloud native technologies
• 

  Kendall Miller

  Chief Operating Officer

  

  Kendall worked for a small mobile-based messaging startup a few years before Twitter took over the world. After that, he spent most of the next decade doing strategy consulting for leaders in Southwest China and writing code in his spare time. Now living in Denver, when he’s not talking with your CTO about how the team can fix their infrastructure nightmares, he’s climbing mountains and chasing his children.

  • At a large international organization, Kendall recruited a multinational team and established a branch office in two other cities, where he sold consulting services to over 40 organizations in three years.
  • Later he worked at a small industrial manufacturing facility as an outside sales consultant, where he increased the customer base by 50% in five months.
  • At ReactiveOps, he oversees the sales/marketing team and works to help make the dream of disrupting infrastructure a reality, keeping his finger on the pulse of changing demands in the market and valuable partnership opportunities.
• 

  Brian Bensky

  Director of Sales

  

  Brian was initially a professional musician in New York. After 10 years, he was ready for a change and got into sales for a home decor company, Mitchell Black. He then moved on to Market Creation Group, where he helped emerging technology companies build strong brand execution.

  • While at Mitchell Black, Brian built an outreach program that attracted international designers, boutiques, and wholesale conglomerates.
  • At Market Creation Group, Brian built and expanded the outbound program, sourcing national businesses and partnerships.
  • Brian now helps companies take their infrastructure to the next level by connecting them with the ReactiveOps framework.
• 

  David Polstra

  Director of Marketing

  

  David began his career as a project manager for The Giving Kitchen, an Atlanta non-profit. He helped raise awareness and funds for restaurant workers facing unanticipated hardships. He then moved on to Sideqik, where he was exposed to digital and influencer marketing.

  • At the Giving Kitchen, David executed an employee giving campaign that involved over 150 restaurant workers and owners, which helped raise vital funds for the organization.
  • While at Sideqik, he worked closely with clients to implement influencer marketing campaigns for social media. David also intitiated inbound marketing campaigns in order to build awareness for the SaaS product.
  • At ReactiveOps, David is dedicated to introducing companies to the power of all things DevOps and Kubernetes.
• 

  Scott Weiss

  Marketing Coordinator

  

  Scott began his career as a digital marketing intern for various technology and service companies while attending the University of Colorado. At University, while residing in the Psychology department, he looked for new ways to integrate psychologically-based strategies to the ever-shifting field of digital marketing. Four years later, he began work as ReactiveOps' Marketing Coordinator, where he assists the sales and marketing team with content, inbound, and growth-marketing strategies.

  • At Placeable, Scott assisted in a website, AdWords, and general digital marketing revision. Additionally, Scott completed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ) to understand how marketing efforts translate into conversions and sales.
  • While at Sovos Compliance, Scott sharpened his skills in the content and email marketing domain. He became more familiar with mid and enterprise-level marketing tools such as Marketo and Mailchimp.
  • At Spark Boulder and Packlane, Scott cultivated the skills and processes necessary to become an effective remote team member. Additionally, he strengthened his knowledge in Google Adwords and social media advertising strategies.