Tyler Sparks

Belief

I am passionate about creating innovative software products and coaching the best engineering talent, challenging teams to achieve their potential. I balance strategy and tactics to assess risk quickly and implement solutions rapidly while maintaining momentum towards the overarching vision. Identifying and eliminating friction to achieve a goal is what motivates me. I am always looking forward to difficult challenges, catalyzing growth.

I believe
» Software development within a team is an exercise in fostering cohesion and learning together; leading to impactful delivery and increased creative solutions» Sustainable velocity of development comes from facilitating learning and shortening feedback loops» Leadership is about character more than systems or process» People achieve excellence when given power and autonomy with appropriate challenge and clear goals» Companies reach their greatest performance when values align and the culture enables tranformational growth for individuals» Serving a customer requires contact, measurement, and empathy» The finest software comes from self-organizing teams» Software reflects the organization that created it, simple software requires simple organization

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Experience

Principal Engineer/Architect

Sling TV

Software design and web engineering
2017 - 2018

I transitioned to the development group to help with strategy and vision to continue growth, and to achieve high-impact business goals. Led architecture and design for the user management system, commerce, payments, partners, and marketing site.

- I guided several 1 year+ projects and designed solutions to address pivots in business strategy. - Led the charge towards scalable domain specific services, event driven designs, functional programming, improved testing, GitOps, modern CI, and other core systems and chassis elements for a service approach. - Coached and mentored Principal, Staff, and Senior engineers in technology practices and software design. - Introduced a software design process to allow teams to design the software features they were working on instead of having specs delivered. - Addressed productivity issues affecting the development group around tools and tech debt.

Cloud Architect

Sling TV

Infrastructure architecture and automation
2016 - 2017

Sling TV is the #1 live streaming service in the pay TV industry. I was brought in to help with scalability, infrastructure costs, and automation as the customer base grew.

- Improved automation and introduced container approach. - Began infrastructure testing initiative. - Designed new architecture in collaboration with security to address changes in tools, security footprint, PCI, and PII concerns. - Worked with the senior manager and PM to transition Ops team to a Kanban flow style of work, and start more SRE type activities with an awareness of proactive and reactive work contexts.

Owner

Sparks Concept

Sole Proprietership: Consulting and Web Engineering
2007 - Present (9+ years)

Engineering consulting, web applications, API systems, software engineering workflows and methodologies, architecture and system design, performance optimization and scalable systems.

Worked with 50+ clients on 80+ projects, ranging from small boutique software to consulting for companies with 500+ employees.

Some examples of the types of projects include: - Redesigning a $2M datacenter, creating principles and practices to allow for use in a commercial environment, 40% increase in capacity before additional spend through better use of resources - Migrating a company infrastructure to open-source resources in AWS, saving 70% on server costs from licensing and more efficient application runtimes - Creation of OpenStack, CloudStack, and VMWare private clouds, and hybrid clouds with AWS, including template configurations to fast deploy service farms - Creating microservice architectures for a variety of applications and industries - Using serverless tools and designs for high capacity intake and service functions - Microservice templates to allow generating the skeleton of a service minus handlers and state for extremely fast service creation in an organization, with new service able to come online using the integration and delivery pipeline in 2 days or less - Statically rendering public resources in a parallel system eliminating all live server resources with full delivery from CDN and near real time updates - Functional front-end architectures for applications - Creation of a software engineering group with delivery pipelines, documentation tools, monitoring, and education for employees - Data capture, system design, and analysis including UX analysis, for a large research study $1.5M+ and 15K users - Design of distributed stateless applications with near instant resource scaling - Architecture changes to move specific operations client-side in an app or in a browser, eliminating an entire server-side service with a high monthly cost - Analysis and creation of tools and security policies for an international company with 20M/mo traffic that was experiencing a 6GB+/s sustained DDoS attack - Built a custom video player including HTML5 delivery six months ahead of general support in email clients in 2009

Development

UCCS

Software Research and Development
2010 - 2011

Assisted in the front facing development and testing of a software project at UCCS. The project centered around iOS work both with Objective C and the Titanium Development environment(appcelerator).

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General Expertise

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Leadership Skills

Team Organization Effective Communication Conflict Management Education and Training Casting Vision

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Technology

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Tools

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Education

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

B.S. Computer Science
2007 - 2012

M.S. Computer Science
2013 - 2016 (ABT)

Notable Courses

Database Systems (5420)
Computer/Network Security (5910)
Datacenters and Cloud Computing (5540)
Advanced System Security Design (6910)
Advanced Topics in Web Security and Privacy (6930)
Programming the Mobile Web (5030)
Software Maintenance (5340)
Advanced Internet and Web Systems (5260)
Software Design (5320)
System Admin and Security (3910)