Philip J. Hollenback

philiph@pobox.com
San Francisco, CA
www.linkedin.com/in/philiph

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Staff-level SRE who owns reliability for production infrastructure at scale - recently the certification and deploy tooling behind LinkedIn’s 100,000+ host bare-metal fleet. Builds the automation and libraries other engineers actually adopt, sets the SLO, observability, and on-call standards that keep critical services up, and takes the lead in the incidents and design reviews where a clear owner is needed. Strong Python, deep Linux, networking, and distributed-systems fundamentals, with a track record of putting reliability practices in place that last.

Skills

Languages: Python, Go, Bash

Reliability: Site reliability engineering, on-call/incident response, post-mortems, SLO/SLI design, capacity planning

Infrastructure: Linux internals, bare-metal and data-center fleets at scale, AWS, containers, distributed systems, infrastructure automation, CI/CD (Jenkins, Gerrit, Artifactory), release engineering

Observability: Grafana, metrics pipelines, dashboard design, alerting

Identity & Security: LDAP, SSO, OAuth, IAM, host access control, security operations, vulnerability management, 2FA rollouts

Experience

LinkedIn, Sunnyvale, CA (September 2019 - May 2026)

Staff Software Engineer, August 2023 - May 2026

Technical lead on a 6-person infosec infrastructure team building software services around identity and authentication standards (LDAP, SSO).

• Led migration of a clustered Java LDAP service from Windows to Linux. Brought the service into LinkedIn’s standard deploy/monitoring stack, unblocked IPv6-only downstream consumers, and moved it from the business network into prod with tighter access controls.
• Rewrote LinkedIn’s internal Python LDAP client library; adopted by 200+ services. DNS TXT records carry both server discovery and per-service routing config, enabling per-service cluster targeting and whole-fabric failover. Multithreaded connection management lets long-running clients move between servers without restart.
• Drove an SSO integration program across the company: helped 500+ services migrate to SSO in six months, coordinating across 10+ partner engineering teams.
• Operated and extended an internal system for host access. This system used short-lived SSH certificates tied to user identity in place of standing credentials.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer, September 2019 - August 2023

Technical lead on an infrastructure tooling team. Designed and built an automated framework for certifying new Linux OS releases against the LinkedIn software stack.

• Certified 10 OS releases destined for a 100,000+ host production fleet. Framework integrated 50+ test suites contributed by other engineering teams.
• Replaced a manual two-week certification cycle with an automated process completing in under one day. Implemented in Python.

Oracle, San Francisco, CA (November 2016 - August 2019)

Senior Security Operations Engineer

Technical lead in Security Operations for Oracle Cloud, focused on vulnerability management, identity hardening, and patch automation.

• Stood up Oracle Cloud’s first vulnerability scanning program (OpenVAS, several hundred core hosts) to support compliance efforts.
• Led Yubikey-based 2FA rollout to ~300 employees, eliminating non-2FA logins from the authentication infrastructure.
• Wrote a Fabric-based monthly patching system for the internal identity management fleet of 50 servers.
• Built Grafana dashboards for security operations metrics and ran biweekly operational excellence reviews.

Lookout, San Francisco, CA (July 2015 - November 2016)

Senior Production Engineer

Release engineering team member at a mobile security company. Managed Jenkins, Gerrit, and Artifactory. Automated service deployments using NixOS on AWS.

• Built end-to-end automated deployment for Artifactory. The one-step deploy fully provisioned and configured all associated AWS components.

Goodreads, San Francisco, CA (April 2014 - July 2015)

Senior Systems Engineer

Half of a two-person operations team at Goodreads, sharing on-call and incident response for a top-100 site. Built automation and monitoring in Bash, Ruby, and Perl.

• Automated MySQL database failover in Ruby. Replaced a manual 45-minute process with a 5-minute automated one.

Earlier roles on LinkedIn.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, The University of Montana. Emphasis in Artificial Intelligence. Minor in English Literature.