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Ryan Parman

Hi there 👋

Cloud-native engineering leader with a focus on reliability, scalability, and security for the modern web.

Most-Recently: Enterprise Architect, Cloud Center of Excellence at McGraw Hill.

GitHub (personal) • GitHub (side project) • LinkedIn • Stack Overflow • Web résumé • PDF résumé • Word résumé

Summary

Ryan Parman is a cloud-native engineering leader with over 25 years of experience, who specializes in technical leadership, software development, site reliability engineering, and cybersecurity for the modern web. A seasoned problem-solver who excels at listening, learning, adapting, and driving continuous improvement. Committed to delivering exceptional work, building impactful solutions, and elevating team performance. Thrives in environments which empower innovation and becoming a force-multiplier.

Key accomplishments include:

  • Founding member of the AWS SDK team.
  • Patented multi-factor authentication as a service at WePay.
  • Instrumental in defining CI, CD, and SRE disciplines at McGraw Hill.
  • Conceived the idea of serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud at Amazon Web Services in 2010 (AWS Lambda).
  • Contributed significantly to numerous other high-impact projects.

Technical Skills and Software

While my experience and personal technical interests are broad, the following list is focused more on my interest in DevTools, DevOps, and SRE roles. I would be happy to share additional experience for other areas upon request.

Note

Each skill listed includes a current proficiency level — Low, Medium, High, or Expert — along with a directional arrow indicating proficiency trends. An upward arrow (↑) signifies that I am actively working with the skill, and my proficiency is likely to increase over time. A downward arrow (↓) indicates that I have not utilized the skill recently, and my proficiency may decrease unless refreshed.

Work Experience & Notable Projects

Northwood Labs — Side Project

Owner (January 2024—Present)

McGraw Hill — Remote (since COVID), previously Seattle, WA

Enterprise Architect, Cloud Center of Excellence (January 2024—October 2024)

  • Assumed a role influencing the technical direction of the entire organization.

  • Prevented “Ivory Tower Syndrome” by collaborating closely with members of the Cloud Center of Excellence, Reliability Engineering, Cybersecurity, Networking, and Application Development teams.

  • Ensured a focus on real-world, actionable feedback and provided strategic direction aligned with practical needs.

  • Continued to be involved in the oversight and direction of our AWS stack, security, guardrails, and more.

  • Collaborated with peers focusing on Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

  • Deepened understanding of our cloud fabric to enable high-performance networking across multiple clouds.

  • Identified opportunities to extend the security measures and guardrails developed for AWS to other cloud platforms.

  • Trained peers on the effective use of Terraform for cloud management.

Principal Cloud and Platform Engineer (June 2020—January 2024)

  • Transitioned from Engineering Manager to a strategic technical leadership role, focusing on projects I'd initiated. By stepping away from direct personnel management, I was able to concentrate on providing technical leadership.

  • Documentation: Prolific documentarian. Documentation is worth 50% of your grade.

  • Reliability Platform: Either directly or collaboratively designed and maintained AWS Control Tower, Artifactory, GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Actions, Circle CI Enterprise, Jenkins, and more.

  • AWS Control Tower: Partnered with McGraw Hill Enterprise Architecture and AWS Professional Services to deploy AWS Control Tower and AWS Identity Center. Lowered costs and increased control over account guardrails. Enabled automated provisioning of new accounts, and developed smoke tests as a post-provisioning validation step.

  • Base AMI program: Leveraged insights from Packer, CIS Benchmarks, security patching, and the specific needs of internal AMI customers to develop a unified build pipeline integrating best practices. Achieved zero downtime across the organization by automating the seamless rotation of hosts to use the new AMIs. Automated rollbacks for failed nodes.

  • Streamlining: Integrated Terraform, Monitoring-as-Code, Base AMIs, and custom security tooling to empower application teams. Enabled deployment of Docker images with minimal configuration to Amazon ECS clusters, incorporating best practices, infrastructure monitoring, and operational tooling. Reduced overall costs by streamlining deployment processes.

  • Preventative automation: Conducted comprehensive scans of Route 53 and other DNS providers to obtain a mapping of thousands of active websites owned by McGraw Hill. Enabled faster rotation of expiring datacenter certificates by identifying both the certificates and their installation locations. Verified required DNS records for self-rotating Amazon Certificate Manager certificates.

  • Self-hosted GitHub Actions runners: Implemented Amazon EKS to deploy self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions within our GitHub Enterprise environment. Developed hourly smoke tests to validate the GitHub Actions runner environment and the imported actions for internal developers. Enhanced visibility and provided working examples to effectively leverage actions, improving overall developer efficiency.

  • Automation for Artifactory: Rebuilt our Artifactory cluster with a “cattle, not pets” approach. Migrated artifacts from NFS to S3, which significantly lowered costs. Rewrote configurations using Terraform to eliminate manual configurations. Moved service-user management into Terraform. This automation reduced human error, improved security posture, and increased consistency, leading to a better developer experience.

  • Token Vending Machine: Enable continuous token and password rotation for our engineering teams, providing a "push-button, receive-token" solution. Leveraged AWS Secrets Manager, Lambda, KMS, IAM policies, and custom CLI software written in Go. Implemented the initial integration for service accounts in Artifactory.

  • ARM64 Adoption: Proactively addressed dependencies on Intel x86_64 by updating build pipelines for ARM64 compatibility. Implemented ARM64 runners for GitHub Actions and established ARM64 parity in Artifactory for remote repositories. Authored tutorials and hands-on documentation for utilizing Docker BuildKit to produce multi-platform container images. Prepared the organization for the adoption of AWS Graviton (ARM64) CPUs for cost optimization, ensuring all components were in place for seamless integration.

Engineering Manager, Site Reliability (October 2018—June 2020)

  • Owned and served as the key decision-maker in development of a core platform for company-wide, reliability-focused projects.

  • As development teams transitioned to Full-Cycle Development, led the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team in addressing macro-oriented problems affecting over 75 decentralized, heterogeneous engineering teams across the company. These initiatives empowered greater self-service for engineering teams, enabling them to move faster without reinventing the wheel.

  • Managing humans: Managed a team of four — one full-time and three contractors. Unfortunately, the team was spread thinly, and I also had to pick-up several hands-on engineering tasks to keep up with our workload. Ultimately, I was pulled back into engineering in my subsequent role because there was a greater need for me there.

  • ECS-optimized Amazon Linux Base AMI: Customized the AWS-provided AMIs to comply with Level-2 CIS Guidelines for both Amazon Linux and Docker. Collaborated closely with cybersecurity, operations, and various business units to ensure compliance. Achieved high levels of opt-in adoption, enhancing confidence among cybersecurity and operations organizations in the product development teams.

  • Prism: Developed custom security and operational tooling where off-the-shelf tools wouldn't give us what we needed, to understand the current posture of ±200 AWS accounts. Made the data transparent to ALL engineers, enabling teams to be involved in improving their infrastructure stacks.

  • Monitoring-as-Code: Leveraged Terraform and Go to streamline the generation and ongoing maintenance of dashboards and monitors in Datadog and New Relic across a large, heterogeneous range of applications.

  • Formed and led a leadership group to establish a rigorous process for developing, patching, distributing, and maintaining reusable Terraform modules utilized by numerous product development teams across the company.

  • Assumed engineering management responsibilities for the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) group in McGraw Hill’s Seattle office. Led initiatives to better integrate our office and practices with the expanding SRE practice across all U.S. offices. Joined the SRE leadership group to guide and participate in developing improved reliability processes, collaborating with product development teams to adopt and implement these practices.

  • Revamped the Seattle SRE interview process to prioritize the recruitment of high-quality engineers with a 70/30 focus on software engineering (Dev) and systems operations (Ops), emphasizing strong leadership qualities. Integrated numerous ideas and leadership principles from experience at AWS to enhance the recruitment strategy.

  • Implemented a more collaborative SRE-style approach by closely integrating with development teams, effectively minimizing the practice of siloed hand-offs to operations teams. This initiative enhanced cooperation and efficiency within the areas supported by the Seattle SRE team.

Staff Software Engineer (October 2016—October 2018)

  • Led the development of multiple Tier-1 services within the educational content authoring pipeline, leveraging technologies such as REST, GraphQL, API design, Amazon ECS, Docker, Terraform, ePubs, and security best practices.

  • Provided the technical direction of these projects, promoted their adoption across the organization, provided comprehensive documentation, and offered ongoing guidance on adoption.

  • Lead the development of the authoring component of McGraw Hill’s SmartBook 2.0 product, and the internal system which indexes authored content, builds ePubs, and encodes images/video for McGraw Hill’s ePub CDN.

  • Initiated the adoption of continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), rapid deployment practices, and Docker containers. Championed "dogfooding" of new processes, resulting in deployments that were both more frequent and more reliable.

  • Introduced a more hands-on monitoring approach, enabling development teams to actively engage in their own operations rather than relying solely on third-party vendors used by other groups in the company. Achieved significantly lower Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) during incidents by implementing application-level metrics tracking and introducing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

  • Served as a core team member in migrating all new infrastructure to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and Packer. Identified patterns across applications and initiated efforts to streamline infrastructure maintenance using shared, reusable Terraform modules.

Perimeter of Wisdom, LLC

Co-Owner, CTO, Producer (February 2015—2018)

  • Developed the entire website for “The First-Time Offender’s Guide to Freedom,” managing all technical aspects from inception to deployment. Also performed all production work on the eBook authored by E. M. Baird.

  • Utilized then-modern front-end technologies — including Bootstrap, LESS, JavaScript, Gulp.js, npm, and Bower — to build the website's front end.

  • Developed the back end using PHP 5.6 with HHVM and Nginx, integrating MySQL, Redis, Slim Framework, Monolog, Pimple, Twig, Guzzle, Doctrine, Phinx, and Symfony components.

  • Deployed the application using Ansible and developed within a Vagrant environment running Ubuntu.

  • Conducted unit, integration, and functional testing using PHPUnit, Behat, Mink, and Selenium. Leveraged Amazon SES for email delivery, Amazon S3 for static file storage, Stripe for payment processing, Linode for web hosting, and MaxMind for IP-based geolocation. Integrated Google Books and Dropbox to ensure customers always had access to the latest errata fixes.

WePay — Redwood City, CA

DevOps Engineer (April 2015—September 2016)

  • Enhanced WePay's cloud infrastructure provisioning by optimizing update deployment processes and managing security patches. Improved application and infrastructure monitoring.

  • Streamlined the planning, development, deployment, and maintenance of new microservices throughout the company.

  • Led a cross-company initiative to upgrade the monolithic application's software stack from PHP 5.4 to PHP 5.6. Facilitated cross-team collaboration among all major engineering teams and QA departments.

  • Managed the replacement of over 200 servers across multiple environments, achieving zero customer-facing downtime.

  • Maintainer of multiple tier-1 systems including Artifactory, GitHub Enterprise, and Phabricator.

Senior API Engineer (April 2014—April 2015)

  • Developed new API endpoints to help expand WePay’s business and support its partners.

  • Was instrumental in designing/developing WePay’s MFA-as-a-Service offering. (U.S. Patent filing US15042104 “System and Methods for User Authentication across Multiple Domains”.)

  • Enhanced the security of WePay's products by coordinating fixes with cross-functional teams while managing competing priorities. Personally resolved numerous issues to ensure product integrity and protect customer data.

Truncated

See postions held 10+ years ago…

Amazon — Seattle, WA

Web Development Engineer II, Amazon Web Services (March 2010—April 2014)

  • Hired by Amazon to work on the AWS SDK for PHP after they hard-forked my open-source CloudFusion project. Invested heavily in supporting developers by actively listening to their needs, engaging with the community, and representing AWS in PHP-related industry groups.

  • Collaborated with the AWS Elastic Beanstalk team to provide PHP support for the platform, which launched in March 2012. Worked closely with the PHP community to determine a PHP environment that would accommodate the needs of the broadest range of developers.

  • Developed a rigorous internal test suite for testing Elastic Beanstalk environments, which became the foundation for testing by other language-specific teams. Contributed early input on adding support for git push deployments.

  • Played a key role in the creation and development of the AWS SDK for PHP v2, incorporating significant changes in the PHP language and community since CloudFusion was first written in 2005. Contributed to the successful launch of the new SDK in November 2012.

  • Collaborated with the AWS Design team on the AWS Management Console, leveraging experience as a web developer and software engineer to bridge the gap between design and engineering disciplines. Contributed to building a high-quality, robust, and user-friendly console for interacting with Amazon Web Services.

  • Came up with the idea for what would eventually become AWS Lambda in 2010. Spent 3 years pitching the idea to anyone inside of AWS who would listen, before meeting with the eventual manager of the AWS Lambda team.

  • Spending much of my time focusing on Amazon’s Customer Obsession leadership principle, I successfully pushed for meeting developers where they already are, and being better stewards of our community:

    • an SDK for both web browsers and Node.js
    • publishing AWS SDKs on GitHub; open-sourcing SDKs with the Apache 2.0 license
    • development of non-secret SDK improvements to happen in the open
    • the underlying AWS service models became exposed to end-users
    • the creation of https://github.com/awslabs to exist as a place for unofficial AWS projects
    • "waiter" functions that are now commonplace in the AWS SDKs and AWS CLI
    • AWS development blogs and Twitter accounts
    • the ability for AWS employees to answer questions on StackOverflow

  • Improved internal security by successfully getting the Console, SDK, and Development Tools teams to stop using the same set of AWS root credentials across the entire department.

  • Led one of the first teams to provide reusable UI building blocks for creating AWS service consoles. This was in the Bootstrap-like era of AWS Consoles.

CloudFusion (née Tarzan) — Open-Source Project

Creator and Developer (Early 2005—March 2010)

  • Developed CloudFusion, a fast and powerful PHP toolkit for rapidly building cloud-based web applications.

  • Prioritized design decisions that enhanced performance, ease of use, and overall usability.

  • Aimed to provide a high-performance developer toolkit for leveraging Amazon's cloud infrastructure, fostering community growth, and building useful, user-centric applications based on the toolkit.

  • Amazon Web Services hired me and hard-forked this project in 2010. It became the AWS SDK for PHP.

Rearden Commerce (now Deem) — Foster City, CA

Senior User Experience Developer (July 2008—March 2010)

  • Supported the User Experience team, Java developers, and widget development teams by prototyping new features and integrating them into existing systems.

  • Migrated JavaScript code from older frameworks to the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI), enhancing codebase maintainability.

  • Educated teams on the value of high-quality front-end code, placing a strong emphasis on writing code with better performance, faster load times, and improved accessibility across all projects.

WarpShare — Morgan Hill, CA

Co-Founder and Chief Information Officer (September 2006—March 2010)

  • WarpShare worked to bridge the gap between digital piracy and the economic models of RIAA and MPAA industry groups.

  • Aimed to support musical artists and copyright holders by exploring innovative ways to derive value from piracy.

  • Recognized that piracy could not be entirely eliminated and analyzed the shortcomings of traditional anti-piracy efforts by the MPAA and RIAA.

  • Developed CleerPeer, an efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol, which improved upon the performance and efficiency of existing protocols like BitTorrent. Addressed and solved multiple performance and efficiency issues present in the original BitTorrent protocol. (U.S. Patent filing US8103870B2 “Hive-based Peer-to-Peer Network”.)

  • Contributed to early concepts in peer-to-peer (P2P) digital content delivery with CleerPeer (c. 2007). These ideas have since been realized in technologies like IPFS, which empowers P2P-based distribution of digital content.

  • Researched machine learning-powered content identification methods (c. 2007), which have since been successfully adopted by companies such as YouTube.

  • Designed a social network focused around digital media, incorporating gamification elements to enhance tagging and content improvement over automated data sources. Recognized that users enjoy keeping track of music, movies, and TV shows, discovering similar content, and sharing with friends. Drew inspiration from platforms like GetGlue (acquired by Yahoo), Letterboxd, IMDb, Trakt.tv, and Plex to create an engaging and interactive user experience.

  • Pioneered an innovative business model (c. 2008) enabling users and brands to support and sponsor content through interactive advertising integrated into the media experience (e.g., content-targeted advertising, a smarter version of sponsorships).

    • Designed ads to be part of the content, avoiding interruptions common with pre-roll and mid-roll ads used by platforms like YouTube at the time. (Apple pursued similar advertising concepts with their iAd service (2010), aiming to transform advertising into an experiential medium.)

    • Brands sponsored downloads by paying 99¢ per song, held in escrow for the benefit of copyright owners (or donated to charity) in exchange for social engagement, offering an ethical approach to digital content monetization via “piracy”. (For end-users, it is similar to sponsorships of today.)

    • Readability (c. 2009) implemented a similar business model for written content (e.g., blogs), but kept any unclaimed funds. Public backlash led to them shutting down in 2016.

    • We didn't foresee the shift from piracy to streaming services like Pandora, Spotify, and Netflix.

  • Failed because: team was too small; team lacked the required expertise in advertising; team lacked the required expertise in machine learning; funding dried up as the US entered the credit crisis from 2007–2009; tried to do too much up-front; early mistakes spending money on starting a company instead of developing a consumer product.

SimplePie — Open-Source Project

Creator and Co-Developer (July 2004—October 2009)

  • Ryan is the creator, evangelist, and co-developer of the SimplePie project — a PHP library that enables web developers to simply and easily integrate news feeds into their websites and web applications.

  • After recruiting additional development resources in June 2005, Ryan began to shift from a primarily development-focused role to a primarily people-focused role, where he currently works to ensure that people are aware of, and can easily use SimplePie through support, documentation, tutorials, plugins, and evangelism.

  • SimplePie was integrated into WordPress, Drupal, MODx, and several other large projects written in PHP. If you've ever used WordPress since 2006, you've used SimplePie with or without knowing it.

Yahoo! — Sunnyvale, CA

Front-end Developer (Contract), Yahoo! Messenger (November 2007—January 2008)

  • Lead the front-end development of the Spring 2008 re-launch of the Yahoo! Messenger website. He collaborated with a core team of developers to provide increased usability, accessibility, organic search engine optimization (SEO), and simplified maintenance, resulting in exceptionally tuned performance for 29 locales.

  • Involved in tuning the front-end stack for performance, where they employed semantically valid HTML/CSS, caching, gzipping, image spriting, code minification, and reduced HTTP requests, resulting in exceptional performance.

Stryker — San Jose, CA

User Interface Developer (Contract) (May 2005—September 2006)

  • Core member of the team tasked with re-building the company intranet site around Oracle Portal. His time was spent writing and discussing functional and technical documentation, conducting usability interviews, and creating a fresh UI that employed user-centered design principles, web standards, and fancy new AJAX tech.

  • Member of the Endora Marketing Team, which was geared towards spreading information about the company's move to Oracle's ERP software. In that capacity, Ryan maintained the Endora website, wrote numerous articles for the monthly newsletter, interviewed project leads, and created fun little ERP-related polls to help drive interest in the project (essentially internal marketing).

  • Worked with the eBusiness team to improve maintenance and development for the UI of the GlobalSource project. He also re-engineered the Stryker Endoscopy public site to follow modern web standards, and built a PHP-based templating system for the site that significantly sped up development.

Digital Impact (now part of Axciom) — San Mateo, CA

Production Specialist (March 2004—April 2005)

  • Coordinated with Campaign Managers on email campaign integration, with responsibility for email content and change requests, and ensuring that the content format was consistent with client requirements. He performed the quality tracking and reporting of campaign integration-related metrics, and consulted and troubleshot on text and HTML templates.

  • Maintained HTML code guidelines, provided optimal design and processing, and provided suggestions for strategic and process improvements. He also acted as syndication expert for the internal RSS development team.

  • Client experience included Banana Republic, SBC (now AT&T), Hewlett Packard (HP), Sony Style, Lexus, MAC Make-up.

Recommendations

A full list of recommendations can be found on my LinkedIn profile.

Groups & Accomplishments

Education

Silicon Valley College (now Carrington College) — San Jose, CA

Bachelor of Arts, Design and Visualization (November 2003)

  • GPA: 3.84

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