Benjamin A. Zvan
Engineering leader with a strong technical foundation in distrubted systems, platform engineering, and software delivery. Experienced in scaling enterprise platforms, developting engineering talent, and improving organizational effectiveness. Known for building autonomous, colaborative teams that deliver reliable systems and meaningful business outcomes.
Experience
Target Corporation - 2017—present
Senior Engineering Manager - 2022—present
- Led the scaling of an enterprise configuration-driven UI platform from early-stage architecture to production scale, supporting the majority of top-of-funnel digital traffic while reducing new page implementation time from days to hours.
- Developed engineers within and beyond direct reporting lines through technical autonomy, structured career coaching, and supported stretch opportunities, helping them advance to Senior and Lead Engineer roles.
- Improved an ongoing engineering organizational health survey through targeted question design and refined measurement methods, identifying opportunities to strengthen engineering culture and informing leadership discussions.
- Reduced the operating cost of a critical guest-facing service by 30% year over year during peak retail season.
Lead Platform Engineer - 2021—2022
Senior Platform Engineer - 2017—2021
- Design and implemented a sharded Varnish-based caching layer with per-instance hot-item caching, distributing demand for popular products across cache instances and reducing backend requests for high-demaind products by 98%.
- Reduce lead time from commit to deploy by 95% from 3 hours to 8 minutes, enabling rapid feature deployment and reducing the mean time to recovery.
- Eliminate the need to manually submit change request forms for production releases, reducing time wasted by technical people performing administrative tasks.
- Reduce the need for manual validation/smoke testing, speeding time to production, reducing human error and enabling continuous delivery to production.
- Improved and maintained deployment and scaling tooling and strategies for a distributed microservice platform in Kubernetes, supporting over 250K RPS at peak traffic.
- Mentor others to help them acheive their business and career goals
Capella University - 2011—2017
Senior System Administrator - 2012—2017
System Administrator - 2011—2012
Bring new and standard industry practices into the organization. Lead team of system administrators in managing change and maintenance of enterprise web applications. Architect solution delivery process, concentrating on stability, sustainability, and scalability.
- Introduce DevOps culture, practice, and tools to Capella University, and drive continuing shift to DevOps.
- Increase stability, decrease risk from releases, and improve lead time by standardizing and automating deployment and maintenance of Enterprise Java applications and servers.
- Automate unit, browser, code quality, and security testing to accelerate and standardize build and deployment.
- Share best practices at industry conferences and events; bring back new information and techniques to improve operations.
- Streamline continuous delivery by identifying and implementing modern industry tools.
- Took initiative to temporarily lead middleware operations team when I recognized management was over-committed and unavailable.
- Member of Agile Community of Practice (CoP), and Agile Database Management task force. Founding member of innovation/hackathon project, Automation CoP, Java CoP, and DevOps Oversight Subcommittee of The Architectural Review Board.
University of Minnesota - 2006—2011
Software Administrator
Support and maintain the University's enterprise web applications, particularly the student-facing websites, including registration, course catalog, and other high-profile applications. Architect installation and maintenance plans for new and existing applications.
- Standardized and modernized architecture and deployment methods, improving reliability and ease of maintenance of the University's Java web applications. Included implementing Tomcat Manager and Deployer tasks for scripted deployment and standardizing directory structure across systems to improve consistency and maintainability among environments.
- Rapidly studied and deployed new, commercial software. Improved repeatability of procedures by creating documentation and improving error reporting in scripts used for automation.
- Provided direction for monitoring team to improve the performance and acceptance of automated monitoring.
- Daily responsibilities included migrating new code, updating software and configurations, environment maintenance, and troubleshooting problems.
Zvan.net/Ben Zvan Photography - 1992—Present
Self Employed
Self-employed in a variety of consulting and contract work. Operate a small web hosting service. Provide server-side scripting, site construction, maintenance and design.
Knowledge
Systems: Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris Software: Ratpack, Kubernetes, Docker, Apache, Tomcat, OpenSSL, JBoss, postgreSQL, Neo4j Tools: Spinnaker, Drone, Thoughtworks GoCD, JUnit, Spock, Sonar, Nexus, Puppet Languages: Bash, Go, Kotlin, Groovy, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, Java, Javascript, C, Perl Methodologies: DevOps, Agile, Infrastructure as Code, Immutable Systems, TDD, DDD
Education and Certifications
Two years of Engineering Physics at the University of Minnesota BlackBoard Certified Administrator - October 2014 Red Hat Certified Technician (RHEL 4) - February 2007
Professional Training
Neo4j Administration - July 2015
Java Performance and Tuning - May 2015
Oracle Unbreakable Linux Administration - June 2012
BEA WebLogic Server 9/10: Administration - October 2008
Microsoft IIS 6 Administration - September 2008
Tomcat 6.0 Administration - January 2008
Selected Presentations
DevOpsDays Minneapolis, July 2016 - DevOps in The Enterprise
DevOpsUMN, February 2017 - The DevOps Oversight Subcommittee of The Architecture Review Board
Velocity San Jose, July 2017 - WTF is A Graph Database
Interests
Photography, computing, technology, social justice, gaming, motorcycling, bicycling, travel