Benton Roberts                                    benton@bentonroberts.com 
Systems administrator and software engineer       mobile: 646.783.9673
                                                  http://bentonroberts.com 

========== Professional Proﬁle 
I am a veteran computer professional with the business and 
communication expertise needed to effectively apply cutting-edge digital 
technology to an organization's bottom line. I offer the hardcore 
technical expertise of an old-school programmer, combined with the 
informal, no-nonsense attitude of a pragmatic project manager. 

========== Objective 
I am currently open to interesting system administration or programming 
challenges. I live in Manhattan, but am willing to travel and / or telecommute. 
I live in Manhattan, and am willing to travel and / or telecommute. 

========== Skills Sampler 
---------- Computer Systems Administration 
Installation, conﬁguration and maintenance of UNIX, Windows, and Macintosh hardware and software 
systems. Particularly deep experience in the following areas: 
* Scalable clusters and parallel computing: Amazon EC2 and other cloud computing platforms; Xen, 
VMWare, and other virtualization systems; HAProxy and other load-balancing tools and techniques; 
transaction-based and queue-based architectures 
* High-availability deployments: Heartbeat and other failover software; monitoring, alerting, and data 
collection systems; software and hardware RAID, distributed storage solutions; redundant MySQL; global 
24/7/365 support team leadership 
* Platform and product life-cycle: Software development-QA-release process optimization; zero-downtime 
software upgrades; cluster benchmarking and load testing 
* Networking: hosting and infrastructure capacity planning; local and wide-area troubleshooting; ﬁrewall and 
router conﬁguration; VPN solutions; DNS administration; ISP relationship management 
* Back-ofﬁce infrastructure: commercial-grade email systems; groupware portals, wikis, and and other 
content management systems; issue management / trouble ticket software; cross-platform ﬁle-sharing 
tools 

---------- Computer Software Development 
Software system design and implementation for UNIX, Windows, Macintosh, and mobile platforms 
* Solid academic grounding in programming theory and best practices: repeatable, object-oriented design 
patterns; UML modeling and planning techniques; quantitative performance analysis; test-driven 
development 
* Pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to applying all such “best practices” selectively and realistically 
* Familiar with common IDEs, such as Visual Studio and Eclipse – but prefer a powerful text editor, a shell 
window, and a suite of solid command-line developer tools, like ant or rake 
* Languages include Ruby, Java, Perl, C/C++, SQL, HTML, PHP, and Javascript 
* Familiar with a variety of web-centric application frameworks and middleware: Rails, J2EE, Zope, etc. 
* Revision control systems: RCS < CVS < SVN < git. 

---------- Technical Communication 
The ability and eagerness to communicate complex technical ideas to both neophytes and fellow experts 
* Strong teaching, training, and technical writing skills (English / French) 
* Project leadership and customer relationship management abilities 
* Open-source contributor and advocate 

---------- Digital Media Production and Post-production 
* Operation, maintenance, and troubleshooting of a wide variety of professional-grade recording and 
broadcasting technology; expertise in digital production and post-production techniques 
* Media archiving and delivery systems; expert in codecs, transcoding, and streaming techniques


========== Recent Work Experience
---------- Present
Chief Operations Officer, Aranetic LLC (New York / D.C.) – Litigation support tools and services.
* Applying the latest agile technical and business practices to reducing data support costs.
---------- 2008-2010 
Head of System Operations, Starcut USA, Inc. (New York City) – Digital services for mobile devices. 
* Ultimately responsible for the 24/7 uptime and support for several hundred high-proﬁle mobile web 
properties for “no-compromise” clients, including NBC Universal, ABC, MTV, and Maxim. 
* Built a self-assembling, automatically-scaling compute cluster to drive NBC's 2008 Beijing Olympics 
mobile web site. Replicated and extended the same technology for all other customer sites. 
* Perform regular and diverse coding tasks: e.g., trafﬁc analysis, data archiving, infrastructure migration. 

---------- 2007 
Operations and Development, Cliqk LLC (New York City) – Digital Lifestyle Consulting. 
* Developed a scalable, centralized IT infrastructure for conﬁguration, monitoring, and management of 
customer networks. 
* IT infrastructure maintenance: backups, networking, and primary administrative responsibility. 

---------- 2006 to 2007 
Senior Systems Administrator, MeMedia Inc. (New York City) – Contextual Internet advertising. 
* Responsible for the 24/7 uptime of the company's main application, and other systems, running across 
60+ server computers in a dual-data center environment. Provisioned hardware, reconﬁgured networks, 
maintained backups, and other regular sysadmin duties. 
* Coordinated a 5-month, business-critical data center migration project with the development team. 

---------- 2003 to 2006 
US Support Manager, Orad Inc. (New York City) – Manufacturers of high-end graphics computing clusters for 
virtual-reality and television. 
* Responsible for all support activities for US and Canadian customer base. Extensive ﬁeld installation, 
support, and live demo experience for cluster installations in major corporate, government, and academic 
institutions. Clients include the ESPN, the US Navy, and U.C. Irvine 

---------- 2001 to 2003 
Freelance Media Technology Consultant (New York City) – Provided expertise in digital media production and 
communication technology, from video editing to network infrastructure. 
* Clients included Showtime television, Liz Claiborne fashions, and Pﬁzer pharmaceuticals. 
* Services included media streaming systems and custom web software development. 

---------- 2001 
Software engineer, AIRS Inc. (Hanover, NH) - E-recruitment and training specialists. 

---------- 1996 to 2000 
Multimedia Software Developer, Dartmouth College Interactive Media Laboratory (Hanover, NH) – Developers 
of interactive medical education and training software.


========== Education 
---------- 1998 to present 
Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 
Computer Science Department 

---------- 1988 to 1990 
Columbia University, New York City 
Mathematics Department 

---------- 1984 to 1988 
Indian Springs High School, Helena, AL 
A small, private school in rural Alabama