Tim Soderstrom
timsresume at moocowproductions dot org
Work Experience
October 2025–Present
Remote
ZocDoc, Inc.
Staff Database Reliability EngineerOctober 2025–Present
Manage MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, OpenSearch, and Redis data solutions. Architect solutions which increase database reliability and avoid interruptions and downtime.
Work closely with SRE on establishing SLO/SLI/SLAs for the data environment. Work with data engineering on better ways to ETL data from production databases
into datalakes. Provide guidance to engineers on relational and general database design principles with emphasis
on microservices over monolithic development. Adopting agentic AI workflows.
May 2020–October 2025
Remote
Fastly, Inc.
Staff Database Reliability EngineerApril 2024–October 2025
Senior Database Reliability EngineerSeptember 2021–March 2024
Database Reliability EngineerMay 2020–August 2021
Architected solutions to increase database reliability and minimize downtime across MySQL, ClickHouse, and RDS environments on both bare metal and virtualized infrastructure. Managed multiple MySQL and ClickHouse clusters and several RDS instances. Provided guidance to engineers on relational database design and scaleout. Evaluated Kubernetes integration within a large data ecosystem.
November 2019–April 2020
Remote
Eventbrite, Inc.
Senior Database Reliability Engineer IINovember 2019–April 2020
Architected solutions to increase database reliability and avoid interruptions and downtime. Provided guidance to engineers on relational database design and scaleout.
August 2014–November 2018
Remote
TeamSnap, Inc.
Senior Data EngineerNovember 2018–November 2019
Operations Lead / Senior Database AdministratorApril 2016–November 2018
Senior Database AdministratorAugust 2014–April 2016
Architected modern, scalable, and redundant database systems with emphasis on performance tuning, disaster recovery, and day-to-day deployments. Maintained infrastructure security and managed the operations team. Designed modern data warehousing systems and provided architectural guidance for customer-facing and backend applications. Helped architect a containerization (Kubernetes) model.
November 2010–August 2014
Remote
PhotoBiz, LLC
Senior Systems ArchitectNovember 2010–August 2014
Administered production level deployments with an emphasis on MySQL, including architecting new solutions, maintaining databases, deploying changes and optimizations, and managing disaster recovery, availability, backups, and fail-over. Also managed Internal IT Operations including Active Directory, backup and recovery, physical server maintenance, and a small on-site support staff.
June 2005–November 2010
San Antonio, TX
Rackspace
MySQL Database Administrator IIIAugust 2008–November 2010
MySQL Database Administrator IIMarch 2007–August 2008
Level II/III Linux Systems AdministratorJune 2005–March 2007
Fanatically served as front-line support and escalation point for Linux systems before transitioning into MySQL DBA roles. Provided MySQL-centric solutions including configuring replication, index optimization, fail-over, high-availability, and disaster recovery. As senior DBA, participated in cross-departmental meetings on new products and improvements, handled escalations, and worked with account managers and customers to architect solutions.
August 2002–May 2005
Austin, TX
University of Texas
Learning Technology Center
Technical Infrastructure Specialist (Student Technician)August 2002–May 2005
Managed computers and equipment for the student
computer labs. Provided end-point assistance on network and wiring.
Maintained automated software deployment and imaging for Windows PCs.
Skills
- Database Schema Design
- MySQL/MariaDB Scaling/HA (Galera, ProxySQL, Replication, Orchestrator, MySQL Cluster)
- MySQL/MariaDB Tuning & Optimization
- Clickhouse For Timeseries and OLAP With Sharding/Replication
- Google BigQuery
- Observability Using Prometheus, MQTT, Grafana, Datadog
- Orchestration Using Ansible, Terraform
- SphinxSearch, ElasticSearch
- Agentic Workflows with ClaudeCode, Ollama
- Kubernetes (K3s), Hashicorp Nomad, OpenStack, LXC/LXD, Docker
- Web Development (Python/Flask, LAMP, HTML, CSS, JS, Some Go)
- Unix/Linux System Administration
- Storage Management with ZFS, LVM, MDRAID, DRBD, rsync, mt/tape, Bacula
- Networking Administration (Miktroik, iptables, QoS, VLANs, StrongSWAN, OpenVPN, Wireguard)
- Active Directory Management
- ColdFusion Server Management
- Managing Federated Social Servers (Pleroma/ActivityPub and BlueSky PDS)
Certifications
- Certified MySQL 5.0 Database Administrator
- Red Hat Certified Engineer 5
Education
2001-2005
Austin, TX
University of Texas
Bachelor of Arts In Computer Science
- Operating Systems
- Computer Architecture
- Digital Logic Design
- Data Management
- Game Development
- Software Engineering
- Data Structures
- Automata Theory
- Calculus
- Linear Algebra
Interests and Hobbies
- Designing and Building Eurorack synthesizer modules
- Making electronic music (DAW and DAWless including on tape)
- Microcontroller Applications (e.g. Arduino, Pi)
- 6502 Assembly Programming Using the Commander X16
- Animated Holiday Lights To Music
- SSI Scuba Divemaster
- Large Format Analog Film Photography
- Developing webapps for my own use, such as FilmLog