Josh Parsons

Passionate about engineering team enablement and empowerment

A cropped headshot photo of Josh Parsons. Josh's head is turned away from the camera, and has been captured in a moment while laughing with a smile.

Welcome! I am Josh Parsons, and I’m based in Seattle, WA. Most of the content you will see here will center around my interests and pursuits— generally, that means topics related to tech and creative projects I’m working on. I will create longer form blog content here (things that I would rather not create as a thread on social media). Creative projects will widely vary, but will include things such as interactive fiction, games, art, or music.

Contact

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlpjoshparsons/
Twitter/X: walktothesun
Mastodon: @walktothesun@hachyderm.io
Bluesky: @walktothesun.bsky.social

Background

I have spent the vast majority of my professional career in tech. I have gained a wide range of tech experiences in IT support, IT consulting, system and network administration, SaaS production operations, site reliability engineering, and platform engineering.

I am passionate about empowering those I work with, fostering team culture and spaces that are
psychologically safe and setting a high standard of customer service. For me, this means being a
compassionate listener, an effective communicator, and a technical collaborator who thrives in cross-team and cross-functional environments.

Resume/CV

Experience

Senior Site Reliability Engineer / Software Development Engineer II, Amperity, Seattle WA
January 2019 – August 2024

The teams I worked on owned a wide range of core services, systems, and libraries that focused on empowering and enabling other engineering and customer-facing teams to be able to do their work effectively.

I led a weekly Observability Office Hours session to assist colleagues with monitoring and observability questions. In May 2024, I participated in a case study published by Honeycomb in which we reported a 26% drop in on-call pages through our investment in sustainable production excellence.

Additionally, I served as a member of Amperity’s Culture Committee, where we helped to advocate for the perspectives and concerns of Amperity employees and ensure they were considered and acted upon by company leadership.

Our team’s responsibilities included:

  • Driving the improvement of observability practices, administration of tooling
    (Riemann/InfluxDB/Grafana for metrics, Honeycomb for event-based, context-rich telemetry), and
    management of our core instrumentation library
  • Cloud infrastructure and service administration in AWS and Microsoft Azure
  • Organization of Terraform workspaces and structure, as well as education of Terraform best practices
  • On-call responsibility of production systems, including active participation in incident response duties
  • Ownership of our distributed services platform, initially Apache Mesos/Aurora, then spearheading the
    company’s migration to Kubernetes
  • Oversight of core compute services on Apache Spark, including services to handle routing job requests
    and scaling to meet demand
  • Administration of our CI/CD build, test, and deployment system, GoCD
  • Ubuntu virtual machine system management and host configuration enforcement through Salt
  • Management of critical cross-environment systems such as Vault, Zookeeper, Kafka, and PostgreSQL
  • Disaster recovery and business continuity management and testing
  • Assisted with evidence collection and participated in auditor interviews for yearly SOC2 audits

Assoc. Director, Software Development, IQVIA, Seattle, WA
April 2018 – December 2018

I worked on a team that created and shared internal development tools that focused on improving the internal developer experience.

Our team’s responsibilities included:

  • Building CI/CD automation libraries to enable both in-place and blue-green deployments of web services to AWS ECS
  • Creation and distribution of consumable Terraform modules to scaffold web service projects
  • Design of standardized sets of code analyzers

Sr. Software Engineer, IQVIA, Seattle, WA
August 2017 – April 2018

I worked as a backend developer focused on the development and maintenance of Layer0, an open source PaaS written in Go that facilitates the deployment of Dockerized web applications to AWS ECS.

Mgr. Tech Support, IQVIA, IQVIA, Seattle, WA
February 2014 – August 2017

I worked as the technical lead of a seven-person SaaS production operations team of engineers based in Seattle, WA and Bangalore, India.

Our team’s responsibilities included:

  • Management and monitoring of cloud infrastructure across multiple AWS accounts and services
  • Usage of Salt for system administration, software deployment, and state enforcement of RedHat Enterprise Linux systems and Windows Servers
  • On-call rotation responsibilities for responding to and remediating production-critical Nagios alarms
  • Worked closely with software engineering teams, provided guidance on AWS usage, and assisted developers with service deployment to production
  • Created training content, documentation, and technical guidance for other team members on key areas
    of service and support

Network Operations Analyst, Appature (later acquired by IQVIA), Seattle, WA
August 2012 – February 2014

I worked as the lead IT support and helpdesk resource for all internal departments.

My responsibilities included:

  • Management of on-premise servers, workstations, wireless network configuration, physical network
    device configuration, and Exchange mail server management
  • Correspondence and partnership with IT vendors

Lead Support Engineer / IT Consultant, RLI Technology Group, Seattle, WA
August 2011 – August 2012

I worked as the tech lead of a three-person IT consulting shop. We provided managed IT services and help desk support for nonprofits and small businesses in the Seattle, WA area.

System Administrator / IT Specialist, Treaty Oak Bank, Austin, TX
February 2007 – June 2011

I worked as a system administrator for a regional community bank in central Texas. I provided IT helpdesk support for employees across all four of its branches.

My responsibilities included:

  • System and server administration of Windows workstations and servers
  • Oversight of IT vendor relationships, including contract management and proposal assessment
  • Maintenance and testing of business continuity and disaster recovery plan

Skills

Cloud platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Databricks
Distributed services: Kubernetes, Apache Mesos/Aurora
Virtualization/Containerization: Docker, VirtualBox, AWS ECS, Hyper-V, VMWare
Infrastructure as Code/Configuration management: Terraform, Salt
Deployment automation: GoCD, Jenkins, TeamCity, GitLab CI
Project management + OnCall: JIRA, Confluence, OpsGenie, PagerDuty, Nagios
Programming languages + scripting: Clojure, Go, Bash, Python, Powershell
OS administration: Windows, Windows Server, Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux
Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL
Telemetry tooling: Honeycomb, Loggly, Riemann, InfluxDB, Grafana, CloudWatch, Splunk, Elasticsearch. Logstash, Kibana

Education

BS Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin, 2004

Speaking engagements

“Driving Observability Adoption Forward as an Internal Champion… During a Pandemic” – o11ycon+hnycon 2021

Publications

“Achieving a 26% Reduction in On-call Pages at Amperity with Modern Observability for Logs” – Honeycomb case study, May 2024