Thomas La Porte

Senior DevOps & Platform Engineer with over 25 years of experience focused on reliability, automation, and scale. I have spent my career designing and managing the infrastructure behind mission-critical systems at companies like SpaceX, Capital Group, and Disney. I build tools that let developers move faster, architect systems that don’t fail, and lead teams that value operational excellence.

Professional Experience

Capital Group | Los Angeles, CA

SRE Manager | 2022 - 2026

• Built and led a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team within the Investment Group’s technology division, focusing on observability and operational excellence.
• Architected an automated monitoring deployment system using Terraform and Python-based init-containers for Datadog agents. This solution auto-discovered Postgres and Kafka dependencies, reducing new application monitoring setup time from days to under one hour.
• Led a comprehensive observability initiative to baseline 27 critical applications. Identified 21 applications with monitoring gaps and implemented critical monitors to bring 100% of the portfolio to baseline standards.

SpaceX | Hawthorne, CA

Senior Site Reliability Engineer | 2020 - 2022

• Served as a Site Reliability Engineer within the Flight Software Group, holding a Top Secret security clearance.
• Architected and managed infrastructure for the flight software build farm, utilizing Terraform to deploy and orchestrate over 200 virtual machines for continuous integration and testing.
• Optimized performance of critical Postgres databases and associated software interfaces, ensuring reliability for flight software coordination.

Walt Disney Studios / Blue Pisces Consulting | Glendale, CA

Senior Site Reliability Engineer / Principal Consultant | 2018 - 2020

• Drove Kubernetes/Openshift strategy for studio production technology group, focused on building relationships with development teams and promoting DevOps culture; mentored our team’s manager.
• Helped reduce cloud storage costs by $100K/month (40% savings) by identifying pipeline inefficiencies and guiding cleanup effort.
• Worked with application developers to bring 12-factor methodologies into application design.
• Completed successful upgrade of Openshift from 3.9 to 3.11 in a complex environment. Resolved issues that required engagement from RedHat’s top tier support.
• Completed transition of Openshift cluster from on-prem data center to AWS.

DreamWorks Animation / NOVA LLC | Glendale, CA

Principal Engineer | 2014 - 2017

• Helped design and develop operating strategies and infrastructure for SaaS product in private, OpenStack cloud; created subsidiary company.
• Led IT separation project to make NOVA a standalone company, eliminating dependencies on DreamWorks corporate infrastructure.
• Moved PostgreSQL database into containerized cluster running in OpenShift with Patroni and etcd, increasing performance and service reliability.

DreamWorks Animation | Shanghai, China

Senior Director of Digital Operations, China | 2013 - 2014

• Managed design, procurement and installation of IT infrastructure for new office facility to support over 200 employees. Oversaw building of 100 sq. m. data center at remote colocation facility, setting up WAN, LAN and wireless networks.
• Directed resources on 3 continents, helping build and support new animation studio technology infrastructure to produce Mandarin language version of Kung Fu Panda 3.
• Transitioned 150 employees from 3 facilities into 1 new office building over long weekend, minimizing studio downtime, with 0 major complications.

DreamWorks Animation | Glendale, CA

Senior Oracle DBA | 2009 - 2013

• Coordinated DBA group assignments to implement performance tuning and query optimization.
• Deployed several dozen 11i RAC and Streams-based replication implementations, delivering on major SOA initiative.
• Designed architecture and completed rollout of Oracle Identity Management framework, and robust, multi-site, multi-OMS Enterprise Manager installation, streamlining management of new Oracle RAC environments.
• Created training for software developers, improving overall code quality of participants.

DreamWorks Animation | Glendale, CA

Systems Engineering Manager | 2008 - 2009

• Guided global group of 24 senior systems administrators across 3 geographic sites. Oversaw technology architecture, development and design, and infrastructure of digital operations, including network, OS provisioning, Oracle and SQL Server databases, e-mail and instant messaging, Blackberry, batch computing and intranet services.
• Completed major Exchange (2000 - 2007) and Active Directory (2000 - 2003) migrations in 4 months, moving company to modern, stable environment.
• Revised change management procedures to more closely align with ITIL / ITSM standards, reducing downtime and improving relations between systems team and end users.
• Supervised building of 1.2K sq. ft. data center in Bangalore, India, supporting new remote studio.

DreamWorks Animation | Glendale, CA

Systems Architect / Tech Lead | 2007

• Supervised group of 6 DBAs and senior sysadmins across 2 sites. Monitored private, on-premise cloud and all database environments to support studio.
• Designed and implemented strategy to integrate acquired company’s 300-person user base into Kerberos / LDAP environment, enabling single sign-on across studio.

DreamWorks Animation | Glendale, CA

Oracle DBA / Systems Administrator | 1995 - 2006

• Worked as a DBA and sysadmin within the systems group, with responsibility to admin database hosts down to the bare metal.
• Was one of the earliest Oracle customers to migrate database infrastructure to Linux and early adopter of NetApp storage for Oracle infrastructure, leading to increased performance and stability while reducing complexity.

Education

• Master of Arts (MA), History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
• Master of Information and Library Studies (MILS), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
• Bachelor of Arts (BA), History, Williams College, Williamstown, MA

Technologies

• Platforms: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, OpenStack, AWS
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, Puppet
• Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server
• Languages: Python, Go, Bash
• Operating Systems: Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu), macOS
• Tools: Git, Jenkins, JIRA