About

Kyle Marek-Spartz

Shipt (Target Subsidiary), 2021-Present

Senior Resilience Engineering Manager, May 2022-Present

Resilience Engineering Manager, October 2021-May 2022

Drafted onboarding plan for myself, conducted listening tour with over 60 people throughout the company in my first 90 days. Drafted roadmap for the team based on feedback from stakeholders. Expanded scope of team by taking on additional services aligned with team strategy: internal documentation platform and functional testing library.

Shifted team to self-sufficient standups. Using a skill map of the team, identified skills and perspectives that would add to the team, revised job description to emphasize those skills. Drafted onboarding plan for new team members. Hired and onboarded 3 full time hires, and an intern. Referred peer manager and a senior engineer for an adjacent team.

Rallied adjacent teams around oncall noise reduction toward minimizing false positives. Hosted game day simulating outage of a critical vendor.

Sketched a financial analysis for an engineering wide initiative. Drafted a guide on “How to run a company-wide initiative” for non-TPMs. Facilitated workshop on externally caused incidents. Presented a monthly training on Documentation.

Actively mentored engineers and 2 engineering managers. Promoted an engineer who was performing at their next level. Facilitated book club for Staff/Principal Engineers. Established biweekly neurodiversity lunches.

Amazon, 2018-2021

Systems Development Manager, 2020-2021

Managed two independent teams:

• An engagement team, automating manual touchpoints on behalf of other teams. This team focused on implementing infrastructure as code for the set of services needed to provision network racks in new regions before EC2 is available, and automated service validations Network engineers manually check before building the network.
• A sustaining engineering team, owning the full development lifecycle of services and tools. This team operated an IP address management service predating AWS, service validation tooling for observing functional parity between regions, and infrastructure as code libraries used across AWS Networking.

Supported others’ career development: weekly 1+1s, guided engineers through the promotion process, hiring (sourcing, interviewing, onboarding), mentored engineers and other managers outside my reporting structure.

Escalation oncall rotation with managers of related teams. Organized operations/metrics reviews across teams.

Systems Development Engineer II, 2018-2019

Directly contributed to launching 7+ new regions, including AWS GovCloud (US-East). Implemented region build automation for dozens of services. Targeted automation improvement by working backward from region build schedule using critical path analysis. Led dedicated engagements with service teams to transform their services and push the limits on automation practices, especially service validation.

Developed a service evaluation framework to assess service quality across AWS Networking. Developed software improvement program to help service owners implement automation, by developing guidance and campaigning adoption across dozens of services.

Standardized interviewing process across AWS for Systems Development Engineer job family by developing standard phone screen template and interview training taken by hundreds of engineers.

Participated in oncall rotation for services essential to network operations. Collaborated with partners around the world (Dublin, Seattle, Sydney). Architecting on AWS certification.

Celador, 2013-2018

Co-Founder

Consulted organizations on various topics:

• data science: time series analysis, recommender systems
• development and maintenance of web and mobile applications
• IT management, business practices, organizational culture change

Coached junior engineers while supporting contracts.

Granicus (formerly known as GovDelivery), 2014-2017

Site Reliability Engineer, 2017

Founding member of SRE team. Helped define the team mission. Guided team toward engineering and agile best practices using informal scrum master approach.

Introduced changes without being dogmatic. Focused on incremental and experimental changes. Coached team toward identifying full queues and bottlenecks in their process.

Participated in on call rotation. Improved alert and incident management automation. Strived for improvement after every unplanned event, which improved our service levels. Increased adoption of monitoring tools by streamlining change process. Templated frequent changes toward reducing change failure rate.

Mentored team members to help balance skill gaps. Established cross-training culture. Connected the team with other parts of the organization.

Software Engineer, 2014-2017

Led cross-department team to promote collaboration, diversity, distributed/remote team skills, and mentorship throughout the company.

Reinforced process improvements by formalizing a definition of done, especially around deployment, documentation, monitoring, load testing, measurement, and data practices. Increased release reliability by investing in test reliability and release frequency.

Enabled customers to segment and engage citizens based on activity and outcomes using a streaming data architecture. Increased subscriber import reliability and performance to reach over 100 million subscribers.

Education

MBA, with concentration in Leadership and Change Management, Hamline University

• Concentration coursework included Perspectives on Conflict, Negotiation, and Leading through Change
• Top paper in Strategic Finance; Winning team for final capstone project

Linguistics BA, with minor in Computer Science, University of Minnesota

Organizations, Service, Certifications, and Honors

Board Member & Finance Committee, Saint Paul Neighbor Network, 2022-Present

Facilitator, Resilience Coffee, 2021-Present

Train the Trainer, Ally Skills Workshop, Frame Shift Consulting, 2018

Leadership Saint Paul, Saint Paul Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 2016

• Met with leaders throughout the Saint Paul area from industry, government, and charitable organizations. Toured facilities to learn how the city ticks. Worked with a focus group to support a charitable organization in an advisory capacity.

Co-Organizer, HaskellMN (user group), 2014-2017

Amateur Radio: KDØGTK, general class license, ARRL member