Ben Vilnis

Profile

As an Engineering Manager with technical experience in DevOps, platform engineering, and site reliability engineering, I thrive on fostering innovation and collaboration within my teams. My journey has taken me from hands-on technical roles to leadership positions, where I've successfully led cross-functional teams in delivering robust observability solutions and driven strategic vision and initiatives with business stakholders. I am passionate about empowering team members through mentorship and promoting a culture of extreme ownership, where team members own their work both within the team and to external stakeholders.

Experience

FDJ United

Sydney, Australia

Engineering Manager

Mar 2024 - Present

  • Transitioned from individual contributor to leadership.
  • Led the SRE team to build and deliver an enterprise-ready observability solution.
  • Established 'SRE Office Hours' to upskill the engineering org across multiple timezones.
  • Provided technical vision and direction for business stakholders, including C-Suite.
  • Mentored and championed team members through to promotions.
  • Managed roll out of 'Four Golden Signals' SLIs for 95 services across 10 teams.
  • Worked with various teams to teach modern SLO-driven workflows and alerting.
  • Introduced extreme ownership, empowering team members to own their work both internally and externally.
  • Team leadership
  • Product management
  • Technical vision
  • Stakeholder management
  • Mentorship

Site Reliability Engineer

Nov 2022 - Mar 2024

  • Introduced SRE principles and practices from 'the Google SRE book'.
  • Migrated workflows from monitoring known-unknowns, to observing unknown-unknowns.
  • Drove adoption of OpenTelemetry instrumentation of wide-structured events across teams.
  • Developed and delivered an incident response and management framework.
  • Automated deployment of multi-regional observability stack, hooking into dozens of kubernetes clusters across various cloud providers.
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • Thanos
  • Tempo
  • Loki
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Kubernetes

SafetyCulture

Sydney, Australia

Infrastructure Engineer

Dec 2020 - Oct 2022

  • Worked on the scripting and automation of various infrastructure/platform tasks.
  • Maintained and optimised Elasticsearch, Grafana and Prometheus deployments.
  • Managed various AWS resources, including EKS, S3, EC2, RDS, Route53, CloudFront, VPC.
  • Participated in on-call rotations, incident management, and postmortems.
  • Engaged in third-party vendor management and negotiations.
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • Elasticsearch
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • CI/CD

Envato

Remote, Australia

Junior DevOps Engineer

Oct 2018 - Nov 2020

  • Migrated the provisioning of infrastructure from in-house tooling to Terraform ecosystem.
  • Introduced and implemented the concepts of composable infrastructure.
  • Wrote CI/CD pipelines in Buildkite to automate infrastructure-as-code deployments.
  • Assisted in the management of multiple infrastructure platforms across AWS and Heroku.
  • Multiple secondments in feature teams to learn and understand the developer experience.
  • AWS
  • Heroku
  • Terraform
  • CloudFormation
  • Datadog
  • Buildkite
  • Scripting
photo of me

Skills

    • Engineering Management
    • People Management
    • Mentorship & growth
    • Product management
    • Strategic planning
    • Technical vision
    • Stakeholder management.
      Site Reliability Engineering
    • Observability
    • Service levels
    • Error budget alerting
    • Incident response
    • Postmortems
    • Capacity planning.
      DevOps & Infrastructure
    • Linux
    • Networking
    • Kubernetes
    • AWS
    • Infrastructure-as-code
    • Composable infrastructure
    • CI/CD
    • Automation.
      Misc
    • Writing
    • Content creation
    • Meetup talks
    • Professional networking.

Interests

  • Firefighting
  • Podcasting
  • Writing
  • Music
  • Philosophy
  • History