Steven Pethan

8596 South Jason Court, Oak Creek, WI 53154

414-795-9045
stevenpethan@gmail.com

Professional Summary
An experienced DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, and Infrastructure Engineering transformation
leader with a passion for building highly performant teams, relentless improvement processes, and
antifragile systems.

Personal Skills & Team Core Competencies and Technologies

SRE, SLO’s & Error budgets, Infrastructure Reliability Engineering, Kubernetes ecosystem, PaaS,
OpenShift, Google Cloud, DevOps, Cloud, SRE Transformations, Chaos Engineering, Enterprise
Open-Source Advocate, Agile Methodologies, Product Management, Configuration Management,
Coaching, Team Leadership, On & Off-Shore Vendor Management, CICD, Jenkins, Ansible,Everything as
Code, Infrastructure Test Automation, GitOps, Telemetry, Prometheus, Alert Manager, Grafana

Experience

2020 - Present Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

Senior Manager - DevOps/SRE

▪ Lead and manage a high-performing and geographically distributed engineering team

▪ Lead all infrastructure teams to prepare and execute reliable systems while always taking a DevOps
approach to their engineering
▪ Practices such as the following are foundational to our engineering: Everything as Code, Operator
framework, GitOps, DevOps mindset, code/branch management, configuration management and
test automation frameworks/practices for infra languages like Ansible, Python, YAML, and Go
▪ Act as the Incident Commander for major infrastructure related incidents
▪ Partner with other SRE department leads to continuously improve Kohl’s incident management
process
▪ Partner with multiple infrastructure teams to embedded SRE engineers
▪ Embedded engineers would focus on 1st building foundational reliability capabilities and then more
mature capabilities like SLO’s and Error budgets
▪ Quickly organized a frustrated and ineffective team into a performing team with mature
observability, SLI’s, and SLO’s
▪ The momentum previous Holiday Seasons has led to increased maturity in GCP Networking SLO’s as
well as autonomously deployed observability for newly provisioned networks
▪ This team has learned how a GitOps approach, a well maintained code base, and quality engineering
can steadily increase a small team’s velocity sprint over sprint
▪ Partnering with other Kohl’s SRE teams to architect and build an SRE Practice
▪ The SRE Practice will drive a consistent approach and understanding of SLOs, Error Budgets, Post
Mortems, INC Response, Toil Reduction and Engineering Best Practices
▪ Our observability tool chain included Prometheus, Alert Manager, Grafana, Dyanatrace, and Big
Panda

2016 - 2020 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

Senior Manager - Platform as a Service

▪ Managed a team of 18 associates/consultants to engineer cluster provisioning and operations

 automation for OpenShift clusters
▪ Kohl’s is a #24 corporate upstream contributor to Kubernetes
▪ OpenShift has recently been designated as Kohl’s core Kubernetes offering
▪ This team now engineers and operates:
o 30+ hybrid Kubernetes clusters across Google Cloud and on-prem data centers
o Over 20,000 configurations managed each hour, with Ansible and Jenkins and now
transitioning to our open source GitOps Kohl’s Operator (eunomia)
o Over 25,000 containers managed across 1300 nodes and growing rapidly
▪ Zero configuration drift, via GitOps processes requires only a few resources to support
▪ Robust monitoring and logging solutions provisioned using Prometheus, Alert Manager, Grafana, and
Splunk. Dynatrace is recently being introduced to the ecosystem
▪ Reliability for all OpenShift clusters and related automation are second to none and used as the
benchmark for all future infrastructure engineering
▪ Control Plane cloud costs are tightly managed while all Application Compute, Network, and Storage
are charged back to internal customers monthly
▪ 2018, 2019, & 2020 Holiday Seasons were very successful for all applications running on this
platform with zero issues

2019 - 2020 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

Senior Manager - Cloud Network Engineering

▪ Managed 8 associates/consultants to sunset old code and automation that were tough to make
changes against and operate
▪ Introduced network engineers mostly familiar with core networking to everything as code/GitOps,
Kubernetes Operators, CICD, automated testing, branch and release management as some ways to
install reliability while also keeping tech debt low
▪ This team has migrated over the course of the 1+ year from provisioning and maintaining a code
base that was unpredictable and frustrating to a code base that is clean, concise, and easy to triage
and maintain
▪ This team of network engineers have learned advanced concepts surrounding the kubernetes
ecosystem, properly installed monitoring/alerting, proper use of DevOps tooling, and being ok with
weekly support rotations because very few issues arise

2019 - 2020 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

Senior Manager - Public Cloud Engineering

▪ Managed 8 associates/consultants to standardize security and provisioning automation across GCP,

Azure, and AWS
▪ Introduced mostly cloud administrators to everything as code/GitOps, Kubernetes Operators, CICD,
automated testing, branch and release management as some ways to install reliability while also
keeping tech debt low
▪ This team has lead the way to a completely new GitOps approach with Google Config Operator &
Kohl’s Config Operator to provision, configure, and manage all Google Cloud resources
▪ This team also partnered with the PaaS & Network Engineering teams to introduce Policy as Code to
support self service capabilities with proactive guardrails vs forcing approval workflows and reactive
security scrutiny

2014 - 2016 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

DevOps Manager - Omni Channel Fulfillment

▪ Advocated to Senior leadership to start the first DevOps team in the Milwaukee office
▪ Reorganized production changes to follow a strict CICD pipeline
o Year 1 focused on building out a mature CI pipeline
o Year 2 focused on maturing the CD pipeline and Test Automation
▪ Zero downtime deployments accomplished after the CICD pipeline was complete and all
environmental configurations were newly managed by Puppet
▪ This team became the template for other DevOps teams across the Milwaukee office
▪ Transformed all work related to Builds/Deploys, Environments, Data, Configuration Management,
 Test Automation & Releases into a set of streamlined and automated processes

2012 - 2014 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

IT Project/Program Manager - Construction

▪ Project and program manager for all IT related software used by the construction department
▪ Planned and executed an RFP for the top three construction project management applications
▪ Managed the implementation of the SaaS application that was chosen from the RFP
▪ Implemented a team to administer this new SaaS application
▪ Developed a process to port all data from the legacy application to the new application
▪ Supported the construction department as the IT Account Manager once the application was live
▪ After implementation of this SaaS application, then became responsible for aligning IT capabilities
with business strategies for the Construction, Facilities, and Loss Prevention departments

2010 - 2012 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

QA Manager - Logistics

▪ Managed QA project assignments and daily activities for 25-45 on-shore and off-shore consultants
▪ Accountable for each Test Plan, Test Scenarios, Test Data, and Test Execution across multiple large
and small IT projects
▪ Responsible for Statements of Work (SOWs) by determining rates, project roles, responsibilities, and
length of engagement for each new consultant
▪ Partnered with our global provider and 3rd party vendors to create a very reliable and effective QA
organization that was trusted and respected within one year of implementation
▪ Created and enforced multiple QA & QC processes and best practices
▪ Responsible for department metrics, resource changes, HR or Kohl’s policy changes, high-level
project status, process improvement implementations, and other appropriate information

2008 - 2010 Kohl's Corporation, Menomonee Falls, WI

Consultant - QA Program/Project Lead
2006 - 2008 Miller Brewing Company, Milwaukee, WI
Consultant - QA Architect
2006 - 2006 Compuware, Milwaukee, WI
Consultant - QA Team Lead & Specialist
2005 - 2005 Rockwell, Milwaukee, WI
Consultant - QA Architect
2004 - 2005 Northwestern Mutual, Milwaukee, WI
Consultant - QA Project Manager
2002 - 2004 Metevante, Brown Deer, WI
Employee - Business Analyst

Education
1997 University of Wisconsin - Whitewater, Whitewater, WI
BBA - Finance with Real Estate Emphasis