Nathan Kroenert

Scaled from a 75-person organisation leading Unix and iSeries platforms, with strong involvement in Storage and Database operations. Rebuilt the leadership team and repositioned the organisation for technical excellence.

• Managed $50M+ annual budget and a team of 75+ engineers and leads
• Zero P1 customer-impacting incidents caused by team actions across a two-year tenure
• Drove dramatic reduction - over 50% - in incidents through automation, monitoring improvements and rigorous review
• Rebuilt the leadership team across Unix and iSeries; established a culture of technical excellence
• Delivered major uplift in monitoring and management stack; introduced Configuration as Code via Puppet and GitHub
• Led integration of security and compliance tooling: CyberArk, MDE, Illumio, and Centrify
• Championed DevOps practices and dramatically improved international team relationships
• Conducted governance and oversight activities around 20+ internal applications for backup, configuration management, automation, OS and cluster management
• Led multi-vendor taskforce to resolve stability issues between Oracle systems, Dell storage and Cisco fabric
• Improved footprint data quality through engagement with ServiceNow teams across multiple platforms

Product Owner for ANZ's Container Platform as a Service (CPaaS), the OpenShift/Kubernetes platform underpinning ANZ's most customer-critical applications including ANZ Internet Banking, ANZ App, ANZ Plus, and the New Payments Platform.

• Led a team of 24 engineers across Australia and Bangalore with a $5M+ platform budget
• Negotiated 30% reduction in core software licensing costs through vendor and procurement engagement
• Drove delivery of OpenShift 4 platform supporting both stretch and shared-nothing cluster architectures
• Championed Config as Code and continuous delivery via ArgoCD - foundational to platform reliability
• Led high-pressure production go-live for Internet Banking and Digital CX under compressed timelines
• Introduced Skupper, OVN, and ingress improvements delivering new Kubernetes networking capabilities
• Championed automated discovery of Kubernetes assets in ServiceNow, dramatically improving CMDB data quality
• Led the team to reduce customer impacting incident rate by over 50%
• Played multiple positions from PO to hands-on technical contributor in architecture and troubleshooting

Deeply technical role assisting engineers to solve complex problems and deliver critical infrastructure projects.

• Constructed and deployed multi-site, multi-cluster Murex platform with 'single click' DR capability
• Decommissioned and migrated legacy hosts, including the most challenging and fragile application sets
• Designed and deployed ControlM V9 stack in new cluster configuration allowing one-touch DR
• Created Grafana dashboards from Prometheus data to visualize infrastructure performance
• Managed hardware across SPARC, Power and x86 systems, including I/O configuration with virtual and SR-IOV interfaces
• Participated in building the fledgling Puppet capability, fully involved across the breadth of Unix puppet implementation
• Applied expertise in troubleshooting, network troubleshooting, kernel crash dump analysis, application profiling and system profiling
• Served as Scrum Master, defined stories, and populated initial Jira story sets for all 4 Unix squads
• Automated application pre-requisites deployment and system automation using Puppet

Owned the Oracle relationship and acted as bridge between Oracle and Frontline/NTT sales and solution architecture teams.

• Acted as Oracle technology advocate within NTT's business, and NTT advocate within Oracle's business
• Refreshed and repaired customer relationships for both NTT and Oracle
• Worked with Legal to provide commercially acceptable and risk acceptable offerings that Oracle could not offer directly
• Led contract and agreement review and adjustment processes
• Embedded new offerings and opportunities with sales/presales teams
• Worked with services teams to develop Oracle-specific service offerings
• Created SPARC cloud service using Oracle technology stack
• Designed around and recommended product replacements where Oracle had removed duplicates in their stack
• Dramatically improved NTT's relationship with Oracle

Managed a national professional services delivery team of 17 engineers and presales staff, with full P&L responsibility for the Systems and Storage Sub Business Unit (SBU).

• Held full commercial control of the Systems & Storage SBU; achieved revenue targets in a challenging market
• Drove PMO process improvement programs to lift consistency of quality delivery across the national team
• Unified previously adversarial presales, delivery, and PMO functions into a high-performing collaborative unit
• Managed vendor relationships, scope approvals, contract negotiations, and escalation resolution
• Delivered profit every year, even whilst building the business to match the growing needs of the product business
• Developed team members' individual and technical skills, along with performance management
• Curated and developed a team that could consistently deliver high quality outcomes across many vendor solutions
• Supported product sales business through the services the team delivered
• Key achievement: unification - bringing together previously adversarial presales, delivery and PMO staff to improve outcomes and customer satisfaction

Built deep technical expertise through progression of roles at Sun Microsystems, starting as a Solaris instructor, progressing to Enterprise Systems support, and eventually to presales Solution Architect.

Senior Systems Engineer & Presales Solution Architect (Mar 2008 - Apr 2009)

• Transitioned into presales Solution Architect role, applying deep technical knowledge to customer engagements
• Designed Solaris and SPARC architecture solutions for enterprise customers
• Provided technical leadership and guidance on complex system implementations

PTS Server ESG Senior Engineer - L3/L4 Support (Nov 2003 - Mar 2008)

• Backline support specialist for high-end, mid-range and SPARC-CMT systems
• Expert in hardware diagnosis, operating system troubleshooting, SPARC virtualisation and performance investigations
• Drove knowledge capture activities in backline groups, led knowledge normalisation initiatives
• Actively engaged user community to improve organisational knowledge standards

Education Services Instructor & Infrastructure Co-ordinator (Mar 2001 - Nov 2003)

• Delivered Asia Pacific Region training for mid-range and high-end hardware: F15K, E25K, F3800 through E6900
• Taught advanced troubleshooting and diagnostics for E25K systems
• Delivered Solaris fundamentals, intermediate and advanced classes
• Taught internal technical training on Sun's Premier systems, the Sunfire Enterprise systems
• Traveled extensively delivering training across Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand and China