Oliver Fross
Senior Director of Software Engineering at Slack
Oliver Fross
Senior Director of Software Engineering at Slack
Berkeley, California
Overview
Work Experience
Senior Director of Software Engineering
2023 - Current
I'm responsible to a few teams at Slack! We try to tend to the garden and keep things ship-shape.
Director of Software Engineering
2021 - 2023
Responsible to a quite lovely, globally distributed team of security minded software engineers.
Engineering Manager
2018 - 2022
I am responsible to the Development and Operations teams of the Security Organization at Slack.
Senior Staff Engineer
2015 - 2018
I tried very hard to keep Slack on the internet. It mostly worked.
Director IT, Enterprise Management
2012 - 2015
Building a new practice through a devops team inside of a traditional Corporate IT organization to evangelize and implement solid data-driven metrics-based engineering. Focusing on fault-monitoring & metrics-collection at first, then expanding to configuration management, automation and all the good bits! Generally, mixing things up and making them better, while trying to automate myself out of a job.
Infrastructure Architect
2007 - 2012
Decision maker for strategic hardware and software choices at top ten online retailer. Individual leadership of operational deployment initiatives as well as technical management and oversight on audit and ongoing projects. Technical lead on middleware opensource migration. Contributor to in-house centralized deployment/configuration engine solution that vastly decreased deployment cycles in an Agile team. R&D on bigdata solutions. General hackery with an ability to chat seamlessly with the business.
Founder
2005 - 2012
Senior consultant working on projects ranging from small startups to top 25 retail. Focus on three tier web application environments. Technologies similarly ranging from LAMP to WebSphere/Oracle. From small scale to big data and bigger warehouses.
Professional Services - Build Engineer
2005 - 2006
Brought in to execute on short-timeframe, high-value WAS/IHS/IBM Blade/RHEL based three tier e-commerce project launch under high pressure. Launched (more like birthed) site, engineered new buildouts including adding an entire new brand to a major retail site's application stack.
Senior Systems Administrator
2000 - 2005
Worked at an awesome little web 1.0 startup called Unsurface owned by Sony Music. We were going to have a digital locker for all of your music so that you could listen to it anywhere. Silly idea, and looks like no one else had it either. Oh wait. Still, it was a great little team of a dozen or two, and I ended up being the only member of technical staff in the entire incubator (remember those things) that was invited to work at the mothership. I went to New York City, learned a lot about sysadmining java apps, running foundry networking gear, and really started to learn how to automate things. I was young!
System Administrator
1997 - 2000
UNIX System Administrator: managing heterogeneous enterprise production design environment of 2000+ workstations and fileservers, with 4000+ users, including 24x7 support. Focused on HP support, including Ignite-UX, Series 700 & 800 class machines, troubleshooting, kernel tweaking, scripting, LVM, and (if you can remember), Y2K hardening.
Education
BS
1993 - 1997