Biography

I am currently looking for a new opportunity. My core strength resides in running global Cloud Engineering and Operations teams that build & run SaaS environments. I am also considering focused roles that leverage some of the skills I have used along my journey.

• Technical Operations
• Technical Vendor Management
• Incident Management
• Cloud FinOps
• Risk Management
• Information Security Operations
• Technical Program Management

I am pursuing remote opportunities for an organization anywhere in the USA. As a resident of Marietta, Georgia, I am open to hybrid and onsite positions in the metro Atlanta area. I am open to relocation elsewhere in the USA, Canada, the UK, or Ireland. During my tenure at RedPrairie (now Blue Yonder), I accepted a 2-year assignment to our UK office in Stokenchurch, England, to assist the organization with strategic customer initiatives. It was a wonderful experience for my family, and we have returned to visit many times since 2013.

I do not have preference for the size of the company I join. I've had great success at small to medium size organization where flexibility and initiative have been critical to support business growth. And I have had success helping mid-size organizations that recognize 'what got us here will not keep us here,' and have helped deliver operational stability for our customers.

As much of my recent career experience has been leadership oriented, I am not as 'hands-on' as I used to be when I was building physical desktops or servers, configuring Cisco routers & switches, setting up F5 or Citrix load balancers, or administering VMware platforms. As expected in regulated industries such as healthcare or payroll services, the separation of duties is important. Because my career started with hands-on duties, I have been able to communicate with the Systems Engineers & Administrators to help drive engineering discussion, troubleshoot issues, and simply relate to what they do every day to keep the business running. I have a passion for Root Cause Analysis documentation and understanding what really went wrong so we prevent it from happening again - with process updates, better monitoring, improved infrastructure, or code fixes.

My Resume

Cloud Engineering and Operations Leader

Select Accomplishments

• Expanded Global Cloud Hosting Capabilities to Support 7x Customer Growth: Scaled a mission-critical SaaS platform from 600 to over 3,800 customers across North America, EMEA, and APAC by expanding production and disaster recovery environments in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia. Built and led globally distributed infrastructure teams to meet 24x7 availability, compliance, and performance standards.
• Optimized Cloud Spend with FinOps and Resource Governance: Applied FinOps principles to identify inefficiencies in Azure-based infrastructure, delivering 45% cost savings and reclaiming over $450k annually. Collaborated with engineering and security teams to enforce governance on IaaS/PaaS provisioning, improve storage lifecycle management, and align capacity with real usage patterns.

• Built 24x7 Incident Response Framework for Health Plan SaaS Platform: Led the creation of a global Incident Management program for a health plan management system, coordinating teams across the U.S. and India. Implemented structured triage, escalation paths, and root cause analysis processes, reducing SLA-impacting incidents and customer escalations within six months.
• Transformed Reactive Operations into Proactive Monitoring Culture: Introduced real-time alerting, dashboards, and log analytics across cloud-native infrastructures, enabling faster incident detection and response. Partnered with engineering and support organizations to remediate recurring issues, automate response playbooks, and drive cultural adoption of blameless postmortems and continuous improvement.

• Streamlined Vendor Management and Cut Operating Costs: Led a multi-phase transition from a Managed Services Provider to internal operations, replacing over 80% of U.S.-based contractors with offshore and nearshore talent while maintaining service quality. Negotiated vendor terms and staffing models to align with compliance, budget, and scaling needs.
• Established Performance-Based Vendor Governance Model: Created and enforced KPIs, SLAs, and compliance controls across cloud, hosting, and staffing vendors supporting global SaaS operations. Conducted quarterly business reviews, led contract negotiations, and introduced risk management assessments to ensure service delivery and regulatory compliance with business operations.

• Unified Operational Communication During Major Incidents: Served as the central operations leader during high-impact incidents, coordinating internal and external stakeholders across development, support, and compliance. Delivered consistent, timely updates that improved executive trust and minimized customer confusion and churn during service disruptions.
• Automated Communications Pipeline for Customer Environment Changes: Built internal tooling and data pipelines to inform go-live scheduling, workload planning, and capacity forecasting for implementation teams. Integrated project data with infrastructure planning, reducing miscommunications, improving change control compliance, and enabling faster, smoother customer onboarding.

• Transformed Help Desk and Incident Management Post-Acquisition: Successfully transitioned a health IT help desk from an MSP model to internal staffing across the U.S. and India within four months post-acquisition. Redesigned ticket triage and escalation workflows, improving time-to-resolution and customer satisfaction for a 24x7 SaaS platform.
• Implemented Scalable Configuration and Change Management Practices: Developed a self-service data copy automation tool for customer environments, enforcing compliance, GDPR rules, and security controls. This significantly reduced manual effort for implementation teams and improved environment integrity while supporting high-volume customer onboarding and go-live programs.

Recent Activity

A common probe during interviews is to understand what I've been up to since I was laid off from UST HealthProof in July 2024. While I have enjoyed some downtime to travel, read, and nap, I have been pursuing certificates to demonstrate that I have competence in many of the skills I have learned and employed as a technical leader.

• Amazon Certified Cloud Practitioner (AWS) – Amazon (2025)
• Amazon Certified Systems Architect Associate (AWS) – Amazon (2025)
• Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) – ISACA (2025)
• FinOps Certified Practitioner – Linux Foundation Program (2025)
• ITIL v4 Foundation in IT Service Management – PeopleCert (2025)

• Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
• Azure Security Technologies (AZ-500)
• Azure Administrator (AZ-104)
• Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900)

Contact Information

Email: darren.mcmichael@gmail.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/darren-mcmichael