Aries Systems Corporation

Tell us a little about yourself – how long have you been working for Aries? What did you do before joining Aries?

I joined Aries as the Director of Cloud Operations in September of 2021, tasked with modernizing the on-premise infrastructure as well as consolidating End User Compute (EUC) and backend business operations. Before working for Aries, I had responsibilities for a number of products within our parent company Elsevier, namely Clinical Path which is a world-leading oncology decisions support software as well as Elsevier’s Global Medical Education portfolio which includes Complete Anatomy. While I didn’t know it at the time, those two very impactful products ultimately relied on the clinical research and publications that products like Aries’ Editorial Manager and ProduXion Manager provide.

Prior to Elsevier and Aries, I have held roles within the University of Pittsburgh, Zippo Manufacturing, and a smaller company supporting data archiving and litigation support tools. These roles founded a wide range of technology and education from Networking, Active Directory, Email, and many third-party software as a service (SaaS) products which prepared me well for leadership roles within Elsevier and now Aries.

What have your roles at Aries been?

My initial role within Aries was to improve the performance and stability of our core solutions, Editorial Manager and ProduXion Manager, and reduce redundancy of the EUC and backend systems within the Elsevier framework where possible. For the next two and a half years, we worked tirelessly completing the major migration off of Aries’ legacy co-located datacenters into a cloud native product on Amazon Web Services (AWS). I am pleased to say that we’re now 100% Infrastructure as Code and can automatically respond to usage spikes and events through the efforts undertaken in that time.

 Moving forward, I’m excited to continue to modernize the application and its infrastructure to help deliver the best and most resilient product our customers could ask for.

How have your previous roles helped you in your current position?

It’s important to me to always learn and take away something from every opportunity you have. My first job ever was as a farm hand for a local crop farmer just down the road from growing up. Starting at about twelve years old, this job taught me a work ethic I’ve been able to apply through many aspects of my career and life since. As a waiter, I started to learn customer service and what at the time, felt like very high-pressure situations.

Within my tech career at university and beyond I’ve continued to add to my tool belt through being a technologist jack of all trades, which has served as the basis of my professional career for over 20 years. I’ve also had some amazing mentors along the way that helped me learn how to grow and build teams in inclusive and mindful ways.  

How do you stay informed of customer needs?

I tend to rely on my colleagues in the Client Services (CS), Product Management, and commercial teams. At Aries, we have amazing employees who live and breathe the software and advocate for our customers and their needs. Having such passionate experts working alongside me keeps me motivated to continue to deliver improved solutions day in and day out.

Tell me about your department and the people you work most closely with.

I lead the Aries Technology, Infrastructure, and Operations (TIO) team. This means my teams are responsible for the underlying infrastructure and operating model for all other departments as well Aries’ products. As such, I meet with leaders and individual contributors of every team within Aries every day discussing and determining strategy for innovative technologies, features, and operational improvements. My team and I take this feedback and turn it into actionable work creating the most value for our customer base and internal staff.

How do you collaborate with other departments within Aries?

We collaborate with all of them! Every department within Aries has some dependency within my team. While we look to enable our development partners with CI/CD automation, easier to use environments, and automated pipelines for deployment we also work with our Client Services team to enhance internal dashboards, monitoring, and alerting of the software and infrastructure performance as well as support our Product and commercial teams in any efforts they may need as part of modernization or prioritizations. Our TIO team continually looks to help improve our operational efforts in any context.

Describe your typical workday.

My typical workday as a Technology Director mostly involves what I would consider strategy sessions. I have weekly 1 to 1 meetings with all my direct reports as well as peers within Aries to keep a pulse on the day-to-day operations. From there I usually spend the rest of my day in strategy sessions, reviewing any incidents that may have arisen, guiding my teams’ priorities in an ever-changing environment, serving as a mentor within my team, and researching how to best continually improve our operations and infrastructure teams.

What do you most enjoy about your job? What do you enjoy most about working for Aries?

What I enjoy most about my job as a leader is seeing my teams grow as individuals and as a team. While I don’t get to experience the satisfaction of finally solving a complex piece of code, I find it much more fulfilling when someone on my team has a similar breakthrough. My most rewarding moments in the past 1ten years have been when I see that I’m no longer needed to guide an emergency outage or help solve a technical problem. However, on the other side of that coin, I still love when someone messages me to bounce ideas off each other – whether it’s technical or leadership development related.

What are you currently reading, listening to, or watching?

Almost daily on my commutes I listen to the Stuff You Should Know podcast, which I highly recommend! This is my major conduit into interesting (but usually useless) information about anything and everything.  Outside of that, I tend to watch a variety of TV shows. I’ve just finished Vikings, so on my current list are House of Dragons, Cobra Kai, season 20 of Deadliest Catch and Grey’s Anatomy, and a re-watching of The Soprano’s. I’m looking forward to the last season of Stranger Things and Yellowstone.

Tell me about some of your hobbies/interests outside of work.

Outside of the office in the summer, you’ll usually find me trolling (fishing) for Walleye in Lake Erie. It’s a constant puzzle to figure out what speed, color and type of lure, depth, water temperature, and migration pattern it takes to catch them. It always keeps me guessing and usually frustrated. In the winter, you can either find me in my woodshop building some sort of furniture or on the mountain snowboarding.