MICHAEL TRAINOR

Senior Support Engineer, GitLab

Jul 2023 - Present

All responsibilities of Support Engineer, with additional focus on team development, knowledge sharing, and subject matter expertise.

• Act as Support Stable Counterpart for GitLab Runner — serving as the subject matter expert and liaison between engineering, product, and support teams
• Develop detailed training modules to uplift team capability and accelerate onboarding
• Mentor team members through complex investigations, providing detailed technical analysis and guidance

Support Engineer, GitLab

Oct 2021 - Jul 2023

Provide technical support for GitLab customers worldwide for self-managed, SaaS, and dedicated hosted platforms.

• Support self-managed GitLab deployments spanning the full range of installation types, architectures, and cloud providers, requiring broad and deep knowledge across each
• Build matching test environments to reproduce and solve customer problems
• Author detailed bug reports with reproducible test cases, enabling engineering teams to efficiently triage and resolve product issues
• Debug customer issues at the code level, reading and navigating the GitLab codebase and upstream dependencies, and contributing fixes directly via Merge Requests

Splunk Operations Specialist, eHealth Queensland

Aug 2019 - Oct 2021

Organisational Splunk expert responsible for identifying data sources, ingesting and indexing operational data, and building monitoring and analysis solutions. Provided stakeholders across eHealth and Queensland Health with the visibility and insights needed to manage mission-critical health systems.

• Authored detailed reproducible procedures for planning and implementing upgrades in highly-available clustered Splunk environments
• Contributed a patch to upstream Splunk app to support proxies
• Delivered monitoring and alerting solutions for mission-critical health applications, providing actionable visibility for clinical, operational, and executive stakeholders
• Designed and implemented detailed service health metrics in Splunk ITSI, forming the foundation for alerting thresholds and executive dashboards

Principal Systems Engineer, Public Safety Business Agency

Jan 2017 - Aug 2019

Technical leader of 24x7 technical support and critical response team (Tier 2), providing support for emergency service agencies (Police, Fire, Ambulance) throughout the state of Queensland.

• Served on the Architecture Review Board, ensuring projects met organisational standards and reduced technology sprawl across integrated emergency services systems
• Defined and enforced handover standards for project teams, ensuring systems delivered to operations included required deliverables for long-term supportability
• Set technical direction for the Tier 2 support team, establishing practices and frameworks for critical incident response and system transition
• Coordinated Tier 2 response to major infrastructure upgrades, including a statewide multi-agency SD-WAN rollout, ensuring continuity of critical emergency service systems

Developer, International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities (IALA)

Aug 2015 - Jan 2017

Tasked with designing, implementing, and supporting custom web application to facilitate a global survey of vessel ports.

• Sole developer responsible for the full stack, provisioning infrastructure, and designing a database schema to support complex survey question dependencies and downstream reporting
• Added infrastructure and service monitoring, stakeholder progress reporting, and implemented database backups
• Survey received responses from 31 countries and 115 maritime authorities, representing the first international study of its kind for Vessel Traffic Services
• Results were presented at the 13th International VTS Symposium in Kuala Lumpur in 2016, and continue to be used for organisational decision making