Author Image

Hi, I'm James

James Poulin

Lead Cloud Software Engineer at Kinaxis

I specialize in making complex tech challenges disappear – and building high-performing teams to do the same. With 15 years of experience, I’ve had a hand in everything from writing Infrastructure-as-Code to deploy and manage infrstructure that supports hundreds of environments globally (because apparently, I enjoy time zones). My experience includes not only the technical deep dives like deploying k8s applications, building out a 100 Gigabit fibre network, managing VMware clusters, wrangling fibre channel storage, and orchestrating performance tests that generate millions of system interactions, but also the human element – I’m good at talent management, from hiring, developing skills within a team, and managing teams across global locations. I’m passionate about building robust and scalable solutions, and I bring that passion to every project, where I focus on designing and implementing cloud infrastructure that delivers results. (And yes, I still remember how to rack a server, though I prefer my infrastructure to be a bit more…cloud-like these days).

Experience

1
Kinaxis

Dec 2022 - Present

Ottawa

Kinaxis builds industry leading supply chain management software.

Lead Cloud Platform Engineer

Sept 2024 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Supervise 4 team members, providing performance feedback and managing day-to-day tactical and long-term strategic activities
  • Participate in the new candidate hiring process for our team, interviewing candidates for various roles and levels
  • Serve as the subject matter expert for the JFrog platform deployment for our team
    • Deploy JFrog platform and edge node instances on Kubernetes (K8s)
    • Develop Terraform (TF) modules to manage the configuration of the platform
Staff Cloud Software Engineer

Dec 2022 - Sept 2024

Responsibilities:
  • Serve as the subject matter expert for all Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform in our public cloud landing zones for both Azure and GCP
    • Leverage landing zone IaC to deploy cloud infrastructure across over 20 regions globally
    • Completed extensive refactoring to improve reusability and accelerate the deployment of new regions
  • Provide subject matter expertise for a global cloud mail relay solution processing over 4 million emails monthly
  • Completed a Proof of Concept (POC) of Cloud Custodian to enhance tagging enforcement of public cloud resources
  • Develop a configuration templating and generation CLI tool using Python and Typer to streamline input into IaC code
  • Deploy cost management automation in Azure that shuts down all VMs outside of business hours, resulting in cost savings of over $25,000 per month
Alessa

Feb 2020 - Dec 2022

Ottawa

Alessa builds AML compliance and fraud prevention SaaS solutions.

Cloud Operations Manager

Feb 2020 - Dec 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Managed a team of 4 CloudOps engineers
  • Implemented Agile/Scrum methodologies for the CloudOps team
  • Doubled deployment velocity from 5 to 10 deployments per month between 2021 and 2022
  • Designed a hub & spoke cloud network architecture with 5 global hub regions and VPN connectivity
  • Designed and maintained various deployment automation pipelines utilizing ARM Templates and Azure CLI scripts to onboard new customers to the cloud
  • Automated TLS certificate deployment across all Azure environments, enhancing end-to-end encryption for improved security and minimizing outage risks associated with manual certificate management
  • Implemented Ansible for configuration management of over 250 virtual machines (VMs)
  • Responsible for infrastructure support, maintenance, and deployment of over 3000 Azure resources
  • Architected and designed an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) deployment to migrate monolithic services to a new cloud-native architecture
  • Managed and reported on cloud finance / Azure spend
  • Managed and maintained the Azure DevOps for all engineering teams
  • Managed the Azure AD tenant and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) for all Azure resources
  • Completed the migration of all users from on-premises Microsoft Domain Controllers to Azure AD
  • Implemented an Azure AD Domain Services deployment
  • Implemented infrastructure monitoring and synthetic testing using Datadog
  • Completed a cloud migration of 15 customers from an on-premises datacenter to Microsoft Azure
2
3
Mitel

May 2016 - Feb 2020

Ottawa

Alessa builds AML compliance and fraud prevention SaaS solutions.

Lead Software QA Developer

May 2016 - Feb 2020

Responsibilities:
  • Recognized among the top 10% of employees in the Verification Engineering division
  • R&D Lab Support Team Lead
    • Led the support of all R&D labs at Mitel
    • Supervised 2 team members, providing performance feedback and managing day-to-day tactical and long-term strategic activities
    • Administered the R&D VMware virtualization infrastructure, encompassing over 2,500 VMs and 100 hosts across multiple global datacenters
    • Managed hardware, software, storage, and networking infrastructure within multiple global R&D datacenters
    • Expanded virtualization infrastructure, achieving a 185% growth in users and a 61% increase in compute capacity
    • Negotiated savings of $390,452 in hardware spending during the 2017 fiscal year
    • Served as the primary architect for the R&D VMware virtualization expansion in Bangalore, India
    • Led as the primary architect for the 2018 project to redesign the core network for R&D
    • Redesigned the virtualization storage architecture, resulting in a cost reduction of $61,563
  • Contact Center Performance Team Lead
    • Supervised 4 team members, providing performance feedback and managing day-to-day tactical and long-term strategic activities
    • Directed release planning for 10 major and minor releases annually across multiple contact center products
    • Led the effort to expand configuration density in performance testing across all contact center products, resulting in an 18.57% increase in the total number of devices used
    • Spearheaded efforts to integrate performance and manual testing, significantly improving overall test coverage