Petru Paler
Zurich, Switzerland; email: petru@paler.net; Web: http://petru.paler.net.
Professional experience
Senior Systems Engineer, Site Reliability (2006 - present)
Supporting high volume, high availability internet-scale services. Worked on
indexing, logging, authentication, apps control panel, Reader, Calendar,
apps storage backend.
- technical leadership
- go-to person within the team on broad range of topics
- Capacity planning
- Software development
- Part of the oncall rotation
- Software/hardware/network issue investigation, reporting and fixing
- Software canarying, deployment and rollback
- Performance tuning / hardware utilization analysis
Network/systems engineer (2001 - 2006)
Design and development of a large-scale email reputation system.
- Design of a system, protocol and server for email reputation data
- Co-authored the SIQ protocol IETF Internet Draft in
order to standardize and consolidate the email reputation systems
- Implemented a Python-based SIQ server for reputation data, in use by outboundindex.net
and mailcruncher.com
- Implemented a data mining system in order to compute the reputation data offered by the SIQ server
- Implemented SIQ query clients for Sendmail and Postfix
- Designed and implemented the network structure for the outboundindex.net servers, and provided operations support for them
Co-founder, CTO (2005 - 2006)
NSE Brasov, Romania and Milan, Italy
- Co-founded the company and handled day to day operations in the Romanian office
- Led a team of 3 people in designing and implementing NSE's managed security monitoring (MSM) service
Freelance consultant (2000 - 2005)
Services:
- Systems design and implementation
- Software design and development
- Legacy system integration
- Scalability design
- Leading small teams of developers
- Network design, operations and security
- Penetration testing
- Large scale DNS and SMTP implementations
- Spam protection systems
Worked with clients in the USA, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong,
Romania, Italy and the UK, including:
Network engineer (2002-2003)
- In charge with network design, security and on-call problem
resolution
- Redesigned the network layout in order to improve speed and resiliency
- Integrated networks of ISPs bought by the company
- Provided networking, systems and security consulting for the company's clients
- Coordinated the management of the Linux and OpenBSD servers that provided
the DNS, mail, web serving, authentication/billing, backup and security services
to the clients, as well as the servers in the colocation center
Systems administrator, programmer (1999 - 2000)
Coltronix Europe Corp., Bucharest, Romania
- In charge with designing and implementing the company's fast
growing, country-wide IT infrastructure and network
- Designed and implemented the company virtual private network,
including firewalled access points to the Internet
- Installed, configured, maintained and tuned the company's file,
mail and web servers
- Provided UNIX and security consulting to clients
- Designed and implemented a metasearch engine
- Worked with the programming and user interface teams to design
and implement scalable backends for the web sites that the company
was building
Network administrator (1998-1999)
Hip Service SRL, Brasov, Romania
- In charge with the ISP system and network administration
tasks
- Redesigned the network layout to provide better service quality
for clients
- Moved the accounting system from a custom, proprietary solution
to a centralized RADIUS architecture
- Ported the Linux driver for a Moxa C168 multiport serial board
from kernel 2.0 to kernel 2.2
Computer skills
- Programming languages: Python, C, SQL
- Technologies: TCP/IP, DNS, SMTP, HTTP, distributed & grid computing
- Platforms: Linux
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL
- Note: worked with many other languages, platforms and technologies over the
years. The above is a list of current skillsets.
Training
- ArsDigita bootcamp (Los Angeles,
August 2000). Topics covered: web development using the ACS toolkit, Oracle
databases, usability, web application security.
- Some coursework towards the Cisco
CCNA certification track
Education
Languages
- Romanian: native
- English: fluent
- French, German: basic