Zeb Palmer

I was brought on at Lacalle Group with goal of helping lead the company through a major digital transformation. My department is responsible for Site Reliability and Operations, Database Administration, Data Analytics, DevOps, Information Security and internal user support.

I started at Clearwater as their first Systems Engineer, initially responsible for implementing monitoring and automation to increase the reliability of a data intake & processing pipeline – this pipeline was soon tracking 1 trillion dollars in assets per day. As the company grew I recruited and lead a team of Sysadmins, Systems Engineers and SREs responsible for the monitoring, scaling, operations and overall reliability of all Clearwater Systems. We built an in-house IaaS automation stack that together with in-house or highly customized monitoring, configuration management, service discovery, CI/CD and automated operations tools allowed us to grow from a few hand-configured servers to thousands of on-prem servers across multiple datacenters, supporting hundreds of microservices.

Recruited for my diverse background in networking, computer automation and radio/telephone systems, I worked with Gem State designing, building and maintaining RF sites & towers, maintaining critical radio, data, voice, pager and trunking systems for various public safety organizations (911, Police, Fire, EMS, Sheriff, State, Gas/Power Company, etc).

Worked with the development team that built and operated several nationally deployed applications used by all USDA Forest Service employees. I was responsible for any issue that was not solved by the five lower levels of internal and outsourced end user support personnel. Worked to triage and reproduce issues, wrote support documentation for common issues, automated testing and information gathering and worked with the developers to test and deploy fixes and new features. During this assignment I also remained active in National Incident response, responding and establishing emergency radio and data communications in the disaster area of Hurricanes Bonnie, Charlie, Francis and Ivan.

I started working with the USDA Forest Service when I was 14. Initially, I managed the web presence for the second largest National Forest in the lower 48 states – including content creation, photography and all web development. Working alongside the telecommunications team I began to take on additional responsibilities in networking, RF systems, VOIP/POTS and other telecom systems. I completed my COMT (Emergency Communications Technician) certification and started working on regional and National level incidents.