Olivier Mauras

Grand-Rue 81, 1616 Attalens
+41 78 618 91 78
olivier@mauras.ch

Dedicated Engineering Leader with over 20 years of experience architecting and optimizing technical solutions. Currently leading a high-performing DevOps team through fast-paced projects, leveraging my expertise in team management, stakeholder engagement, and project management. Recognized for transforming traditional IT processes into streamlined engineering workflows that enhance system reliability and development velocity while reducing operational overhead.

• Professional Skills
• Experience
• Trainings & certifications
• Complementary Informations
• Education

Professional skills

• Strong leadership abilities with proven success building and managing distributed technical teams across multiple countries
• Skilled in mentoring, coaching, and developing talent while strengthening team cohesion in remote environments
• Strategic vision for implementing DevOps and DevSecOps practices and ensuring compliance with industry standards
• Excellent stakeholder management, effectively communicating complex technical concepts to all organizational levels
• Proven ability to lead high-visibility initiatives while maintaining operational excellence under pressure
• Strong project management capabilities with focus on prioritization and delivering business value on time
• Experience establishing technical governance models that balance innovation with quality and security requirements
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, with attention to technical detail and security best practices

Experience

DevOps Engineering Manager

Proton - Plan-les-Ouates (CH)
January 2022 - Present

Since I started at Proton I have successfully kickstarted a mostly remote team - across 6 countries - of 8 DevOps engineers that is providing services, tooling and best practices to the whole company's Engineering department.

• People manager with 8 direct reports, reporting directly to Infrastructure Head Of
• Responsible for leading and managing company's high priority/visibility transversal projects
• Leading DevSecOps initiative as part of the company's ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications
• Accountable for all aspects of team's management including: Recruitment, performance appraisals, personal development and performance management, coaching and mentoring to enable the team to meet challenges and objectives
• Responsible for leading team to achieve and maintain service level commitments: Focus on quality and professionalism
• Maintain team competence by ensuring that skills or knowledge gaps are met with appropriate documentation, training and development: Focus on team wide expertise
• Lead, organise and host monthly DevOps meetings where the team introduces new tools/solutions coming up: Focus on presentation, collaboration and feedback gathering
• Maintain team cohesion by organising quarterly meetups and team activities
• Maintain effective relationships with key stakeholders, colleagues and external contacts (Business Unit Directors, CTO, External vendors)
• Ensure effective controls and workflows are in place and that all team members adhere to the requirements

DevOps Tech Lead

Groupe Mutuel - Martigny/Epalinges (CH)
March 2019 - December 2021

At Group Mutuel, I was responsible for the design, implementation and management of the company's, Kubernetes based, Platform as a Service to help their Engineering team adopt the DevOps methodology to improve their agility and velocity.
I bootstrapped and led the team as a central hub within the IT department, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration between, Architecture, Engineering and Infrastructure teams.

From Kubernetes day 0 implementation (PKS/TKGI/Rancher) to day 2 management and optimisation, I designed a robust and automated solution based on industry standards (Terraform, Ansible, Gitlab CI) enforcing least privileges/zerotrust security principles, to support the company's shift to Kubernetes with minimum friction and maximum integration with their existing infrastructure.

• Manage the PaaS implementation project and ensure its timely delivery
• Hybrid platform out-scaled on cloud (Azure and GCP) with transparent and secure connectivity (istio service mesh)
• Gather and prioritize requirements from key stakeholders
• Review existing processes to propose and implement workflow, efficiency and security improvements
• Ensure that team skills or knowledge gaps were met with appropriate knowledge sharing, documentation and training
• Organize, create and document trainings, bootcamps and procedures for Engineering and Infrastructure teams
• Ensure appropriate logs and metrics were in place for prompt error reporting, capacity planning and Engineering visibility
• Provide secure and flexible as a service dynamic solution based on existing infra components, like DNS, certificates, logs, etc

Integration Engineer

Big private bank - Geneva (CH)
March 2018 - February 2019

For one year I have helped the integration team to streamline, standardise, optimise, and automate their application deployments using industry standard and reusable tooling.

• Evangelize, train and integrate new technologies like containerization and continuous integration
• Automate and optimise application deployments through Puppet
• Provide knowledge and advice on their new, CloudStack based, IaaS platform with TerraGrunt as code boilerplates during pilot phase

IT Systems Expert - Linux specialist

Kudelski Group - Cheseaux sur Lausanne (CH)
January 2010 - February 2018

For 8 years I have been in charge of the whole Linux infrastructure of the Kudelski Group.
I have completely (re)designed the Linux infrastructure from the ground up to help the group cope with its growth needs.
While in charge of a diverse array of critical services ranging from DNS system to source code management, global corporate monitoring, and public-facing email services, I assumed the additional role of project manager for all IT initiatives pertaining to these services under my responsibility. Additionally I have also managed long-term consultants integrating them into the team while overseeing their tasks and assignments.

• Designed and built a completely automated Linux provisioning infrastructure around Cobbler and Rudder using custom made integration layer
• Design, implementation and management of the configuration management platform based on Rudder and deeply integrated with Git for fast deployment of modifications.
• Design and implementation of cloud agnostic event driven orchestrator and configuration management with SaltStack.
• Handled migration of classic infrastructure to private OpenStack cloud: Redesigned completely, from automated golden image build service, to fully automated infrastructure components and services deployment as Infrastructure As Code with Terraform and SaltStack.
• Integration of specific test workflows under docker, openstack and AWS.
• Design, implementation, and fine tuning of the corporate monitoring solution - Zabbix instance with more than a thousand monitored hosts.
• Design and implementation of a highly secure profile for critical and public facing Linux systems – Grsecurity with RBAC.
• Design and implement internal Geo DNS solution based on open source technologies.
• Design, management and optimization of SCM platforms – Perforce, Git and Subversion.
• Design and implementation of a custom Linux container platform based on OpenVZ.
• In charge of Atlassian Suite products - Crowd, Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Fisheye - Installation, maintenance, tuning.
• In charge of external services: External mail relays, Public/Private (S)FTP, Web servers, Proxies, ...
• Level III System support for Oracle Middleware teams – System tuning, installation process optimizations - and other various Java applications on different application servers - tomcat, jetty.
• Security clearance to work on isolated and highly critical networks.
• Writing process documentation for delegation, Service manuals, maintaining team internal Wiki.

Unix/Linux, Backup and Storage Senior Engineer - Technical Project Manager

MTF Quadra - Ecublens (CH)
January – September 2009

While I initially joined MTF as a backup and Unix/Linux specialist, I quickly took the opportunity to act as a technical project manager where I led successful storage and backup project deliveries.

• Design and deployment of storage, backup and virtualization solutions at Datacenter level
• Design and deployment of disaster recovery solutions on backup site – FalconStor / Datadomain / Replication
• Storage IBM, Pillar Data, HP, Datadomain / Switchs Brocade, Cisco
• Technical project management:
  • Validation of technical designs and requirements
  • Contacts, appointments and planning with customers
  • Ressources management and projects planning
  • Validation and verification of the delivery at customer sites
• Atempo customizations tailored to customer needs - scripting, integration, ...
• Active participation in SUN Partnership:
  • Attendance at OpenSolaris booth in Bern OpenExpo 2009
  • Presentation of SunRay products at SUN/MTF booth during Geneva Linux Days 2009

Senior Customer Support Engineer

ATEMPO - Courtaboeuf (FR)
March 2008 – December 2008

When working with Atempo, I have been able to help key account customers to fine tune their backup and storage systems to improve their performances and stability.

• Certified « Time Navigator Advanced Administrator » - Customer support on Time Navigator, Live Backup, ADA, DFM
• Key accounts customer pool management: Airbus, Renault, IXIS CIB, APHP, MAE ...
• Help deploying software suites and problem solving
• Help configuring and tuning, network and infrastructure elements, SAN fabrics, NAS ...
• System tuning – Linux, Unix, Windows
• Performances analysis, improvements and optimizations proposal
• Bugs reporting and management
• Communication with marketing, development teams, and customer care
• Deployment of test platforms and proof of concepts, Virtual machines (ESX server), Celerra emulators ...

System and Network Engineer

WEBRASKA - Maisons Laffitte (FR)
August 2006 - February 2008

I have been in charge of the maintenance and optimization of a high traffic, high availability off-board GPS Navigation platform, providing international level III support for customers like Orange, Vodafone, Swisscom, Yahoo! ... as well as deploying the said platform on some of our customer's premises.

• Administration, installation, monitoring and maintenance of more than 250 RHEL 4/5 servers and 50 network elements in production environment.
• Design and implementation of high availability clusters: Redundancy, Load balancing software and hardware - Heartbeat, IPVS, Cisco CSS
• Design and implementation of a highly efficient custom made Linux container platform based on Linux Vservers
• Design and implementation of new virtualization platform - Xen on CentOS 5
• Monitoring customization and optimization - Nagios with custom plugins, Cacti
• Customization of Red Hat kickstart for faster profile deployments - Custom dynamic Kickstart written in PHP
• Deployment and fine tuning of Tomcat application servers - Both as Web frontend or backend
• Performances benchmarks for constant optimizations and fine tuning of OS and network stack
• Redaction of technical documentations dedicated to customers
• Very high focus on custom opensource solutions

Team Manager – Level II Network Technician

STERIA / ORANGE - Lyon/Montrouge/L’isle d’Abeau (FR)
June 2005 - July 2006

I joined Steria in 2005 as a network technician on a long mission of client OS migration for Orange France where I quickly jumped on a management position where I have been responsible to recruit, train and assign a team of 5 members.

• Orange customer site migrations - around 200 computers per site
• Complete inventory on site
• Preparation of Linux Thin Clients deployment - Packaging RPMs, Boot PXE server, kickstart
• Stock management
• Custom XP image for non thin client from Win NT/2000

System and Network Administrator

CARTOCAD - Villeurbanne (FR)
2003 – 2005 (24 months)
(Alternating CESI formation - Working at 80%)

When I joined Cartocad, I have been given the chance to prove myself, and I did so by constantly proposing new solutions, especially by leveraging Linux as a dedicated solution to replace some of the proprietary products currently deployed for our customers.

• Complete management of customers infrastructures - Mostly SMBs - from network elements, to backup systems, through OS management, Softwares, ...
• Deployment of CAO hardware - workstations, plotters
• Proof of concept and proposal of using custom made Linux appliances based on Debian and Slackware
  • Custom made firewalls/routers
  • SMTP Gateways
  • AD replacement
• Creation of a Slackware based LiveCD for maintenance tasks that became the official tool of the support team.
• Customers training - CAO: Autodesk products; Desktop: OpenOffice, MS Office; Graphism: Photoshop, The Gimp;

Trainings & certifications

• SaltStack Certified Engineer - ID: 953F8A62 - August 2017
• SaltStack Admin I & II trainings - November 2016
• Elastic search Core training - October 2014
• PostgreSQL 9 immersion course with 2ndQuadrant - February 2014
• Zabbix 2.0 certified specialist & Zabbix 2.0 for large environments - February 2013
• Partnership training on SUN hardware products and Solaris - 2009
• Certified Time Navigator Advanced Administrator - 2008
• VMDSA VMWare ESX 3.5 basic and advanced courses - 2008

Complementary Information

• Born the 23.01.1983, French nationality with C permit, Father of 3, Driver license
• French: Mother tongue; English: Fluent

Past contributor of various open source projects:

• Saltstack
• Rudder
• Alpine Linux
• Void Linux

Github profile:
https://github.com/olivier-mauras

Education

2003 - 2005
Superior Technician in Network Administration diploma (Alterning Work, Equivalent french BTS) - CESI - Lyon (FR)

2001
French Baccalauréat STI – Mechanical Engineering - Lycée Boissy d'Anglas - Annonay (FR)