Gerald Tuimaleali'ifano

Workday is a Fortune 500 company with over 20,000 employees and a global leader in enterprise software, used by large-scale organizations for human capital management, accounting and business operations in a unified, AI-driven platform. I provide strategic Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and platform support for Workday’s largest and most rapidly scaling Kubernetes platform, ensuring the resilience, security, and scalability of thousands of critical internal services used by Workday engineering.

• Enterprise Resilience & Architecture: Engineered and managed the deployment of a highly available, multi-region EKS cluster on AWS, which achieved 99.99% uptime and reduced operational overhead by 50% through infrastructure optimization.
• Digital Transformation & Efficiency: Established Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) as a core tenet of platform deployment using Terraform/Terragrunt, drastically reducing infrastructure deployment time (from hours to minutes) and increasing engineering velocity.
• Delivery Strategy & Process Governance: Architected and delivered robust, production-grade CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins) that accelerated service delivery by 60% and improved overall team velocity by 50%.
• Project & Team Leadership: Served as Scrum Master and Technical Product Owner, responsible for leading strategic sprint planning, prioritizing team deliverables, and managing project execution.
• Capacity Development & Advocacy: Acted as a Technical Evangelist, delivering keynote presentations and training on Kubernetes and AWS to promote platform adoption and enhance internal team technical capacity.

Developed and maintained a critical, end-to-end platform enabling tenant lifecycle management for Workday customers, focusing on large-scale automation, service reliability, and streamlining operational configuration processes.

• Quality & Reliability Strategy: Implemented a new automation framework (Python, Cucumber/Gherkin) for API testing, achieving a 70% reduction in regression testing time and establishing a higher quality standard for platform releases.
• Customer-Centric Service Delivery: Modernized the platform’s user interface (PrimeReact) to enhance usability and service consumption, resulting in a major usability upgrade for over 100 customers.
• DevOps & Process Automation: Streamlined the entire end-to-end release workflow by leveraging CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins and Kubernetes), demonstrating proficiency in automating enterprise-wide service delivery.
• Code Governance & Workflow: Established and maintained best practices for code collaboration, security, and version control using enterprise-level tools (GitHub, Bitbucket).

Kiwiplan, with over 200 employees, stands as a global frontrunner in ERP and MES software, focusing on automated production scheduling and supply chain solutions for the global corrugated and packaging sectors. I provided strategic guidance to the ICT team, acting as the primary technical liaison, communicating team capabilities and aligning IT initiatives with the priorities of business stakeholders.

• Budget & Resource Management: Took ownership of the annual IT budget and procurement processes, ensuring strategic allocation of resources for new hardware, operational services, and improvements to enterprise security infrastructure.
• Strategic Team Leadership: Led a team of five engineers, successfully delivering projects that boosted business performance, including mentoring and professionally developing IT engineers through industry certifications and training programs.
• Policy Development and Execution: Helped develop and successfully deliver a comprehensive five-year IT Business Policy addressing Performance, Security, Disaster Recovery, Usage, and Infrastructure Scalability.
• Negotiation and Stakeholder Engagement: Maintained constant communication with global C-suite management and clients to negotiate contracts and secure buy-in for technical proposals.
• Business Continuity & Resilience: Within 24 hours, implemented Kiwiplan’s critical business continuity plan, enabling over 200 employees to transition to full remote operations during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Managed and supported Kiwiplan’s essential IT infrastructure and daily operations, advancing from Junior Engineer to Lead Engineer. My responsibilities encompassed infrastructure maintenance, process automation, data center modernization, and taking on a strategic leadership role to oversee budgets and client relationships.

• Leadership & Governance: Implemented IT Business Policy, maintained primary customer relationships, and co-developed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with stakeholders, which included traveling internationally to business offices and client sites.
• Modernization & Cloud Migration: Successfully directed the complete migration of the business from on-premises MS Exchange to MS 365, while modernizing data center infrastructure utilizing Dell and Cisco hardware.
• Automation & Efficiency: Streamlined critical processes through automation with Group Policy, Bash, and PowerShell, significantly reducing manual effort and enhancing operational efficiency.
• Operational Excellence: Led process enhancements by launching the first IT Helpdesk platform (Freshservice), centralizing 100% of support requests within 60 days, and providing expert support across a diverse infrastructure stack (VMware, Cisco Networking, Linux, MS Active Directory, and Checkpoint firewall).