About me

Willing to Self-Relocate to Northern Utah upon job offer acceptance - Will need up to 6 weeks to complete.

With over 30 years of IT experience, I bring a robust background in leadership, technical expertise, and a proven track record of driving significant business growth.

My career journey has taken me from Desktop Support Analyst to DevOps Engineer, Systems Architect, and now into Management and Leadership roles within global teams. This diverse experience equips me with the skills to navigate complex technical landscapes and lead teams effectively. I have managed environments ranging from a couple hundred servers to over 1.7 million globally across data centers, cloud platforms (AWS and Azure), hybrid solutions, and private clouds.

I am a strong advocate for solid documentation frameworks, which enhances collaboration and reduces tribal knowledge within teams. My focus on eCommerce sectors, including retail, services, travel, and hospitality, has driven improvements in site stability, performance, reliability, and customer retention. By reducing bounce rates and increasing conversion rates, I contributed to significant sales growth—achieving an increase from $1.7 million to over $3.6 million daily.

What i'm doing

  • People Manager

    IT Management

    Managing On-Site, Hybrid, Remote and Off-Shore technology teams to ensure goals are met with the highest level of quality and commitment.

  • Operations

    Operations/Incident Management

    Drove high-performing Operations, Incident Management, and Release Management. Successfully reduced engagement, mitigation, and resolution times across multiple lines of businesses.

  • Release Management

    Release Management

    Release Manager for tracking of production releases in Monolithic and Agile development cycles. Process, Documentation, and Communications practices to support leadership and Compliance/Security.

  • Observability

    Observability/SRE

    Observability and SRE Experience with large scale (1.7m servers+) to small scale (less than 100 servers) environments and the differences to know that one-size does not fit all when it comes to observability.

Testimonials

  • Jordan Lee

    Jordan Lee

    Dennis was a recent manager of mine and I wouldn't have asked for a better one. Never shot down ideas, always stood up for our team and greatly assisted us in moving projects forward. Sprint after Sprint. Dennis is very professional and knows what it takes to manage a team effectively. Coming from his many backgrounds in the Cloud space he has a lot of perspective to bring to the table!

    Testimonials on LinkedIn

  • Tessa Kottke Nagel

    Tessa Kottke Nagel

    I highly recommend Dennis Christilaw for any future opportunities. During our time working together at Icario, he demonstrated exceptional leadership, collaboration, and technical expertise. As an attentive leader, he fostered a positive, productive environment while consistently innovating and focusing on process improvements. His in-depth IT knowledge, combined with his eagerness to help and collaborate, made him an invaluable asset to the team. Dedicated, reliable, and always enjoyable to work with, Dennis was a standout contributor on every project and any organization is extremely lucky to have them on their team.

    Testimonials on LinkedIn

  • Nicki Roper, CTFL

    Nicki Roper, CTFL

    Dennis is very knowledgeable as a Jira administrator. He shares his Jira knowledge and best practices with others. He is also very knowledge with Change Request processes and implementation of those processes and Change Advisory Board. He has the ability to wear multiple hats even if something is out of his defined role (i.e. Jira Admin and Governance board, CAB governance, SRE Manager, etc.). He would be a great asset to any IT organization.

    Testimonials on LinkedIn

  • Jeff Troha

    Jeff Troha

    It was a pleasure to work under Dennis. He was always supportive of the team's needs and very laid back and easy to get along with. His years of experience and technical knowledge make him a great fit for management roles and his future co-workers will be lucky to have him.

    Testimonials on LinkedIn

Dennis Christilaw
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Dennis Christilaw

Stuff and Things

Tools/Process

Resume

Experience

  1. SRE Manager (Including: Incident/Release Manager)

    Aug 2022 — Jan 2025


    • Led a high-performing remote SRE team, improving reliability, scalability, and retention across global time zones.
    • Aligned engineering budget with business goals, optimizing spend while supporting key infrastructure initiatives.
    • Delivered an Observability roadmap, reducing downtime and accelerating root-cause identification.
    • Built KPI dashboards, enabling data-driven decisions and increasing operational visibility across engineering.
    • Established SLIs/SLOs/SLAs, boosting service reliability and customer trust.
    • Enforced compliance-aligned processes (HIPAA, HiTRUST), enhancing audit readiness and engineering efficiency.
    • Directed observability programs, increasing system transparency and team collaboration.
    • Aligned Engineering Observability goals with business priorities through cross-functional partnerships.
    • Refactored monitoring systems, reducing tool costs by 45% and eliminating redundant alerts.
    • Supported infrastructure scaling through proactive capacity planning and resource forecasting.
    • Negotiated vendor contracts, improving tool value and reducing procurement overhead.
    • Integrated ITIL concepts, enhancing incident handling and operational maturity.
    • Mentored engineers, increasing certifications and raising technical competency.
    • Created a standardized Release Management process, minimizing deployment failures and downtime.
    • Built scalable incident response workflows, improving cross-functional coordination during outages.
    • Deployed threat monitoring and alerting, improving security posture and response time.
    • Implemented Disaster Recovery plans, ensuring business continuity and regulatory compliance.
    • Continuously optimized engineering operations, increasing system reliability and reducing response time.
    • Defined NOC procedures, improving service quality and accelerating incident resolution.
    • Managed JIRA platform for 13 SCRUM teams, streamlining workflows and enhancing consistency.
    • Standardized JIRA setups, increasing reporting accuracy and reducing manual errors.
    • Trained SCRUM Masters, improving JIRA adoption and process alignment across teams.
    • Automated JIRA workflows, eliminating paid plugins and saving $15K annually.
    • Maintained centralized documentation, improving onboarding and operational knowledge retention.

    As the SRE Manager, I was able to take a team that was struggling with the basics of SRE and Observability and turn them into a high-performing team that was able to reduce the time to engagement and mitigation of incidents from hours to minutes. As confidence in the observability platform grew, the team was able to reduce the number of incidents by 40% in the first year and 65% in the second year.

    In a time when incident KPI's were abrasive to the clients, implementing an Incident Management process allowed us to learn the pain-points of the clients and the business and work to rectify these issues. The successful implementation brought our KPI's down from several hours to minutes for engagement and mitigation of incidents. This also gave the SRE team critical information on where system failures would stem from and allow for corrective actions to be implemented quickly. Customer confidence soared as the SRE and IM teams were becoming proactive to incidents and less reactive.

    It became apparent that we also needed Release Management process as deployments were not being tracked and there was no process for the teams to follow. In creating these processes as well as merging them with SRE practices, increased visibility was attained as to the impact of code and infra deployment to the changes in the performance and reliability of the systems. Code quality, as well as infra stability was increased in orders of magnitude now that accountability was added to the process as well as documentation for compliance.

    Understanding the needs for standardization and documentation, I was able to take a JIRA platform that was not being used to its full potential and turn it into a platform that was able to be used by all teams. Cross-functional communication and training between SCRUM Teams allowed the teams to commit more points to sprints and complete more work in a shorter time frame.

  2. DevOps Infrastructure Manager

    Jun 2020 - Aug 2022


    • Led a fully remote DevOps team across US and offshore, increasing deployment velocity and improving operational coverage.
    • Designed and implemented infrastructure automation, reducing manual intervention and deployment times.
    • Built infrastructure-as-code pipelines for AWS observability, enabling consistent, repeatable, and scalable deployments.
    • Optimized engineering operations by standardizing processes and tooling, resulting in improved efficiency and system reliability.
    • Managed the JIRA platform, streamlining workflows and improving team productivity across engineering teams.
    • Monitored vulnerabilities and threats, implementing proactive alerting that improved security response times.
    • Developed Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans, strengthening resilience and regulatory compliance.
    • Owned release management processes, automating deployments and reducing release errors.
    • Implemented monitoring and alerting across environments, ensuring rapid incident detection and reduced downtime.
    • Created incident management and on-call processes, improving escalation workflows and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
    • Built monitoring alerts, dashboards, and reports, enhancing observability and proactive issue resolution.
    • Documented automation templates and scripts in Confluence, improving knowledge sharing and team onboarding.
    • Managed AWS root and primary accounts, strengthening access controls and cloud infrastructure security.

  3. DevOps Infrastructure Architect (contract)

    Sep 2019 - Dec 2019 - Short-Term Contract to fill a team skills gap


    • Developed reusable CloudFormation templates to automate provisioning of new and existing infrastructure, accelerating deployment and reducing configuration errors.
    • Documented automation templates and scripts in Confluence, improving team knowledge sharing and reducing onboarding time.
    • Managed AWS Systems Manager to automate patching, enhancing server security and minimizing manual maintenance.
    • Administered AWS Elasticsearch Service, centralizing log aggregation and streamlining issue analysis.
    • Designed deployment workflows across AWS accounts, standardizing automation and reducing manual steps.
    • Established monitoring alerts, dashboards, and reports with Dynatrace, improving visibility and response times across all environments.
    • Oversaw scheduled maintenance across AWS environments, ensuring uptime and compliance with change management policies.

  4. DevOps Manager

    Aug 2018 - Sep 2019


    • Led a DevOps team focused on automation, security, and infrastructure ownership, resulting in improved system availability, scalability, and reliability.
    • Implemented Site Reliability Engineering practices to enhance customer experience by increasing application performance and system uptime.
    • Developed and enforced security policies aligned with ISPME PCI-DSS, FFIEC, and US Cyber Security Framework, strengthening compliance and data protection.
    • Oversaw KYC operations using in-house and third-party tools, improving identity verification and regulatory compliance.
    • Mentored Junior DevOps engineers, boosting team productivity, technical skill sets, and career development.
    • Trained field service technicians in ATM troubleshooting, improving first-time fix rates and reducing downtime.
    • Established documentation and ticketing procedures, improving issue tracking and operational consistency.
    • Managed remote hardware repairs, including ATM servicing, reducing on-site technician dispatches and downtime.
    • Introduced Agile software delivery processes using Terraform and Ansible, accelerating deployment speed and standardizing infrastructure provisioning.
    • Architected secure cloud platforms, enhancing infrastructure resilience and data protection.
    • Enhanced the performance, availability, and scalability of cloud assets and applications, supporting business growth and reliability goals.

  5. Resume Details

    These are my most recent employers, for a full list of 25+ years of Technology Experience, please request an updated copy of my resume using the link below or emailing me.

  6. Resume Request

    For my FULL resume, please email a request to: dchristilaw@pm.me
    Thank you for taking the time to review my page!

My skills

  • Incident Management
    95%
  • Release Management
    90%
  • Site Reliability Mangement
    85%
  • Technical Documentation Writer
    80%
  • Atlassian Suite Administrator
    80%

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