Ian Flores Siaca

Hola, I’m Ian!


I am currently a Senior DevOps Engineer at Voltron Data. I specialize in implementing mainly cloud-based solutions to support workloads ranging from CI/CD to Security & Monitoring. I also have an interest in optimizing cloud financial spending and I am a FinOps Certified Practitioner. In addition to this, I have a knack for filesystems and have explored everything from NFS to WekaFS. Furthermore, I also have previous experience working across multiple regulated industries accomplishing effective solutions to improve data science workflows and possess a Master of Data Science from the University of British Columbia. Outside of work, I am a certified free diver, I love to surf, and travel Latin America.



Experience


Voltron Data

Senior DevOps Engineer

April 2022 - Present

  • Lead the development and release of the GitHub Actions Controller Infrastructure, a solution to provide an Actions Runner Controller to support GitHub Actions workflows with a Kubernetes cluster that can auto-scale according to the needs of the workflows: https://github.com/voltrondata-labs/gha-controller-infra
  • Reduce BuildKite (CI service) spending by 40% in Q4 22’.
  • Identify and implement rightsizing opportunities to reduce cloud spending in AWS, including migrating workloads to autoscaling groups and newer compute instance types.
  • Develop and release {ghapp}, an R package to facilitate using GitHub Apps for authenticating with the GitHub API within R production deployments: https://github.com/ian-flores/ghapp
  • Develop and support Pulumi Go modules to standardize Infrastructure as Code deployments across the company.
  • Build and deploy Jenkins pipelines to reduce Docker image build times by 75%.
  • Integrate Lacework as a security platform with the container strategy of Voltron Data.

Posit

Solutions Engineer

October 2020 - March 2022

  • Develop, test and support the AWS CloudFormation template offerings of RStudio, providing updates and adding functionality to the deployment of the enterprise products.
  • Advise customers in long-term relationships as a Technical Account Manager about best practices regarding environment management, architecture implementations, and RStudio product management.
  • Assist more than 150 clients in the deployment of RStudio enterprise products both in on-premises and cloud environments. The work has been focused on enabling Kubernetes and Python functionality.
  • Write pulumi stacks to replicate customer environments for troubleshooting purposes.
  • Create support articles, blog posts, and demos about technologies at the intersection of data science and cloud infrastructure such as GitHub Actions, High Availability deployments, and {targets} pipelines.
  • Develop and maintain 5 R packages related to infrastructure management and scientific communication.

Data Science Education Intern

May 2020 - July 2020

  • Established the glosario project in collaboration with The Carpentries, an open-source glossary of terms used in data science that is available online in 14 languages and also as a library in both R and Python.
  • Collaborated with a team of professors from Carnegie-Mellon University, University of St.Thomas, and the University of California on the planning and implementation of a project about error identification by data science students and data science professionals. The objective of this study was to see how does ability to catch errors varies by level of experience as well as familiarity with the data and type of analysis.

Jumping Rivers

Data Scientist

December 2019 - March 2020

  • Automatized the process of creating Virtual Machines for training purposes using Packer, Ansible, Docker Compose, and GitLab CI.
  • Deployed data science infrastructure such as RStudio Enterprise products and JupyterHub in Amazon Web Services using Terraform.
  • Developed 2 R packages and web applications for Systems Administration

Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics

Information System Consultant

March 2018 - August 2018

  • Developed an open-source web application to visualize expenses from the Government of Puerto Rico.
  • Produced reports with RMarkdown for the PR Violent Death Reporting system reducing report-generation time from 6 hours to 15 minutes.
  • Implemented a database migration from on-premise MS SQL Server to a cloud CouchDB instance deployed in Amazon Web Services.
  • Maintained and completed a React application used for data collection purposes that ensured data quality through the UX.
  • Wrote documentation of the data infrastructure for technical and non-technical stakeholders.

National Ecological Observatory Network

Eco-Informatics Intern

May 2016 - July 2016

  • Developed an open source application to visualize the spatial distribution and temporal patterns of animals in the continental United States.

  • Researched the use of scientific visualization techniques to make data insights more accessible to non-scientific users.

Education


The FinOps Foundation

FinOps Certified Practitioner

December 2022 - December 2024

Verification Badge

Posit PBC

Certified Tidyverse Instructor

October 2019

Verification Page

The University of British Columbia

Masters of Data Science

September 2018 - June 2019

  • Courses in Statistical Inference, Regression Analysis, Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Collaborated with Dr. Greg Wilson and RStudio as part of my final project applying graph embeddings to understand which workflows users follow on the GitHub platform when versioning their code.
  • Recipient of the Master of Data Science International Scholarship

University of Puerto Rico

Bachelor of Science in Biology

August 2013 - June 2018

  • Courses in Probability, Numerical Linear Algebra, Quantitative Ecology, Demography, and Ecology of Infectious Diseases
  • Research Projects on Bat Mobility on Urban Spaces, Malaria Spatial Distribution and Modelling, and Deep Learning Species Classification