Luis E. Cerezo

Amazon Web Services • FBD/FSI

Sr. Technical Account Manager, US West (Enterprise Account Engineer III ) • Feb 2024 — Present

Same role, now focused on Financial Services Industries vertical.

• Serve as New TAM Onboarding Coach, mentoring and developing newly hired Technical Account Managers across technical and customer engagement best practices.
• Leadership team member for TFC Prototyping Focus Area, driving innovation and rapid solution development for complex customer challenges.
• Active member of Serverless TFC, contributing to serverless architecture patterns and best practices across the TAM community.
• Steering committee member for public events with Boulder AWS User Group, fostering community engagement and knowledge sharing.

Amazon Web Services • FBD/US West

Sr. Technical Account Manager, US West (Enterprise Account Engineer III ) • April 2021 — Feb 2024

The TAM role blends the Solutions Architect and Business account management roles to proactively support large enterprises to build and succeed in AWS.

• Accelerated customer strategic outcomes by delivering architectural and operational guidance across AWS Well-Architected pillars, resulting in improved performance, optimized costs, and increased security posture.
• Delivered sustainable cost optimization by improving operational health through right-sizing, automation, and architectural efficiency, ensuring cost reductions align with performance and reliability requirements.
• Acted as Trusted Advisor to Customer Senior Leadership to proactively guide architecture decisions for maximum efficiency and minimize risks, preventing business and brand impacting events.
• Drove operational excellence by conducting Strategic Business Reviews and optimization exercises, validating performance against desired outcomes and identifying continuous improvement opportunities.
• Enhanced organizational resilience through proactive planning engagements, assessing cloud maturity and advising across operational excellence, security, reliability, and performance efficiency pillars.
• Acted as Customer advocate inside of AWS, driving AWS product road maps to align with customer needs and accelerate innovation adoption.
• Built customer cloud expertise through hands-on workshops, immersion days, and game days, increasing team capabilities and reducing operational risks.
• Built Proofs of Concept in AWS to solve complex customer challenges and validate architectural approaches before full-scale implementation.
• Delivered measurable business outcomes by providing consultative guidance on best practices, helping customers transition from cost-focused discussions to strategic growth initiatives.
• Proactively prevented operational incidents through continuous monitoring, architectural reviews, and implementation of AWS best practices across mission-critical workloads.
• Designed and operated large-scale Game Days, creating realistic failure scenarios to test organizational resilience and incident response capabilities.
• And so much more.

PLXIS (An IPC Company) • Remote

Sr. Infrastructure Engineer/Sr. SRE • January 2015 — April 2021

Part of a small and amazing team that manages, develops, continuously improves the ICD and Gift Card platform for one of the world's most recognizable brands serving over 25K locations. We have an ICD Processing volume of 6 Billion USD annually with a reliability of over 5 9's.

• Reduced AWS spend 21% using various standard strategies and contract negotiations with 3rd party vendors using private offers.
• Implemented a paging and alerting system that reduced staff pager fatigue by reducing false/no action needed pages by over 99%.
• Led continuous improvement of incident response policies, on-call policies. (PIR > Post Mortem, blameless is the way)
• Co-led design of AWS infrastructure, including VPC, network, and security group designs, implemented in Terraform.
• Moved and translated on-premise shared services such as Squid and Splunk to AWS, with automated deployment through SDLC/env implemented in Terraform, Ansible and other tooling.
• Due to business requirements, redesigned Splunk again to run in AWS, using Terraform and Ansible (above).
• Co-led redesign of on-premise cage architecture that allowed for improved reliability and deployability. Covered most deployment and configuration of cage infra using Ansible.
• Redesigned and implemented Splunk architecture and controlled Splunk Cluster deployments and configuration in Ansible.
• Remote management of data center cages and PoPs with occasional travel on-site when required
• Prioritized security throughout the development lifecycle, shifting security left to identify and remediate vulnerabilities early, preventing incidents from becoming newsworthy events or attracting attention from security researchers.
• Responded to PCI/DSS deficiencies and Security audits.
• Paired with team on continuous improvements to our tools, architecture and systems.

Viasat/Exede • Denver, Colorado

Senior Red Hat Linux Engineer • March 2012 — January 2015

Individual Contributor on a medium sized team responsible for the billing, customer onboarding and provisioning of satellite internet for residential and commercial aircraft services.

• Supported the back office systems RHEL 5, 6 and Solaris in a 24/7 zero downtime environment
• Supported and configured boot off SAN hosts and data (HP XP24000/Hitachi USP-V)
• Participated in team lead design decisions
• Participated in 24/7 on-call rotation
• Led small team Oracle RAC redesign and DB redesign.
• Participated in small team for datacenter DR config and testing
• Responded to PCI and SOX deficiencies and Security & patch audits
• Various scripts written as needed, in perl and bash and now python
• Assisted middleware teams with configuration & system design
• Rebuild and correct deficiencies in Puppet deployment

Petroleum Geo-Services • Houston, Texas

Sr. Linux Engineer • February 2005 — March 2012

Linux Engineer with wide scope of projects and responsibility in an organization that used science and massive compute power to map the earth's crust to help oil companies lower risk of exploratory wells in marine environments.

• Designed and deployed full automated install and configuration management tool globally for Linux and Unix servers, and Linux Workstations using cfengine 2 & kickstarts on various platforms including RHEL/CentOS,Fedora
• Designed and deployed full single-sign-on solution globally for Linux and Unix servers and Linux & Apple Mac workstations using Likewise Enterprise; Integrated with existing Windows Active Directory across 8 Datacenters across the globe, over 1500 hosts. This was later extended to the HPC clusters, covering tens of thousands of hosts.
• Designed and deployed monitoring with Nagios
• Created and maintained custom software pkgs (RPMs) for internal software and 3rd party configurations
• Supported ~ 500 PhD level users for in-house seismic processing/exploration and 3rd party applications, including infrastructure for development teams for emerging technologies
• Interfaced with HPC group to streamline workflow between the users and research and production clusters
• Provided support and troubleshooting for complex in-house software (can't google that!)
• Acted as the main interface between Global IT management and managers of G&E (R&D), and Data Processing groups, and HPC management
• Implemented hardware standards for all Linux high-end visualization workstations. These workstations have very large graphics and memory footprints, and powered immersive visualization rooms for internal and client collaboration
• Implemented change process for Linux environment using CVS for policy management, inspired by the ITIL framework.
• Assisted in 3 major office moves in 3 different countries, Including PM of infrastructure and services moves.
• Heavy international travel, worked in various roles, including as hiring manager for Linux engineers in Kuala Lumpur
• Various scripts written as needed, in perl and bash

Schlumberger OilField Services • Houston, Texas

Server Admin • Jan 1999 — February 2005

Individual contributor on a small team of 7 people with various duties from desktop support to managing servers running various engineering applications.

• Administration of multi-platform servers serving 600+ end users.
• Various projects, server consolidation, consolidated over 30 Windows servers to 15 Linux and Unix servers for infrastructure services, NFS, CIFS, DNS & DHCP
• Consolidated several (IIS, netscape suite spot, iPlanet enterprise) web servers to single host (apache vhost +ssl) on RedHat Ent. Linux 3
• Sun Solaris upgrades from 2.6 to 8
• Deployed Oracle environment on Sun Solaris for consolidation of various databases
• Day to day administration and maintenance of Unix(solaris 2.6-9), Linux, Windows NT/2000 servers,Oracle 8i databases, Legato server, and NetApp
• Various scripts written as needed, in perl and bash

Operations and Architectural Leadership

20+ years across various industries building resilient architectures and operations crossing people, processes and tools

AWS and other cloud services

Several years experience building, operating and managing AWS environments and cloud services

Linux/Unix & Infrastructure services

20+ years managing various systems in a wide variety of flavors and scales.

Automation tooling

Over 13 years experience in automation tools such as cfengine, puppet, ansible and terraform.

• Awkward is kinda your brand though - CTO at previous company
• Luis is the king of emojis. - PhD holder and engineering peer
• I thought you would be wearing jean shorts - engineering peer. ($generation[-1])
• I didn't know linux could do that. I'm not sure if I should be impressed or turrrified - CISO at previous company
• I hadn't planned on wrecking my car tonight - Principal Engineer @ MSFT, Somewhere in KL

• Red Hat/CentOS •
• Amazon Linux 1, 2, 2023 •
• Terraform •
• AWS Serverless •
• Event Driven Architectures •
• Step Functions •
• SNS, SQS •
• Decoupled Systems •
• EventBridge •
• AWS VPC •
• Ansible •
• cfengine •
• puppet •
• Humble Professionalism •
• Encourager •
• AWS SG •
• AWS Load balancers •
• AWS EC2 •
• packer •
• CI/CD •
• Agile •
• Splunk Architecture •
• AWS design •
• O11y is Observability •
• Builder of peers •
• Outcome focused •
• Infrastructure as Code •
• Security minded •
• Selinux enforcing •
• DevOps •
• git and ops •
• all systems fail, smart people learn. •
• Blameless post incident reviews > root cause analysis •
• Reliability is a core feature. •
• Move security efforts to the left. •
• Linux •
• PCI/DSS •
• Red Hat Satellite •
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization •
• AWS •
• Do as you learn •
• AWS IAM •
• AWS Cloudwatch •
• Splunking all the things •
• AWS S3 •
• Cloudflare •
• DNS •
• Occasional pair programmer, occasional rubber ducky. •
• Seeking objectives, over meeting requirements •
• Lifelong student, Coach when needed •
• Monitoring •
• Nagios •
• Docker also Finch! •
• data dog •
• containers •
• Extending Ansible •
• ansible dynamic inventories •
• I hope to learn something every day •
• Data, Dog. •
• slack emoji game is 🔥 •

• Boulder AWS User Group - Steering Committee Member
• Some pretty photos
• More pretty photos
• This video of my dog makes me smile.