Derek Downey

Principal Product Designer

Shopify

Oct 2025 - Current (11 months)

Vice President of Customer Engineering

PlanetScale

Apr 2025 - Current (1 year 5 months)

Chief Technology Officer

DataRook Inc

Feb 2025 - Current (1 year 7 months)

Database and Remote Work Enthusiast

Distributed Database Administrators

Jun 2020 - Current (6 years 3 months)

Helping aspiring database administrators learn the skills needed to succeed in remote work environments.

Head of Design

Hypermode

Oct 2024 - Oct 2025 (1 year 1 month)

Head of Design

Clerkcom

Aug 2023 - Jan 2025 (1 year 6 months)

Product Design / Design Engineering

Zed Industries

Jun 2023 - Oct 2023 (5 months)

Product Design / Design Engineering

Tailwind Labs

May 2023 - Jul 2023 (3 months)

Product Design / Design Engineering

CampSite

Jan 2023 - May 2023 (5 months)

Developer Relations Engineer

Google

May 2021 - Jan 2025 (3 years 9 months)

Senior Product Designer

PlanetScale

Dec 2020 - Dec 2022 (2 years 1 month)

Director of Customer Success

SolarWinds

Jan 2020 - May 2020 (5 months)

SolarWinds is a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT infrastructure management software. SolarWinds acquired VividCortex to extend our database performance monitoring offering to better support technology professionals as they continue to manage the move to hybrid IT environments with applications and databases sitting on-premises and in the cloud. We continuously engage with all types of technology professionals—IT operations professionals, DevOps professionals, security operations professionals, and managed service providers (MSPs)—to understand the challenges they face maintaining high-performing and highly available IT infrastructures.

Director, Customer Solutions

VividCortex

Oct 2019 - Jan 2020 (4 months)

Senior Product Designer

Percy

Nov 2017 - Aug 2021 (3 years 10 months)

Director of Customer Service Delivery, Open Source Databases

Pythian

Nov 2017 - Oct 2019 (2 years)

The Director of Open Source Database Practice oversees the teams responsible the remote delivery of Open Source Databases Managed Services around the world, 24/7, 365 days a year. The Director must understand the direction of open source data technologies, leveraging insight and experience from the top technical people in their field, and enable the delivery teams to maintain their skillset to help our clients meet the challenges of scale and fast-changing requirements through automation and cloud-based solutions. The Director is a member of the Managed Services Leadership Team delivering on Pythian’s commitment to provide an exceptional quality of service to our clients. This role requires active change leadership to ensure the teams ar

OSDB Practice Advocate

Pythian

Feb 2016 - Nov 2017 (1 year 10 months)

As Practice Advocate for the Open Source Database practice at Pythian, I work closely with the VP of Managed Services to define initiatives to ensure the quality of technical delivery and engagement of the MySQL, MongoDB and Cassandra Managed Services teams. These initiatives included developing a technical training framework, improvements to processes to ensure consistent delivery, and improving the opportunities to contribute back to the open source community through sharing our experiences using the tools and technologies necessary to provide managed services to our clients.

DevOps Consultant

Pythian

Sep 2015 - Feb 2016 (6 months)

As a DevOps consultant, I joined a client team to help drive continual improvement for their microservice architecture. Participating in the client's Agile development model, I helped convert various components of their application stack to leveraging Docker containers in development and QA. This effort led to streamlining releases to more closely mimic production environments, reducing potential issues during deployment. I led a research spike on leveraging Hashicorp's Vault to provide dynamic MySQL secrets to developers, applications, and DBAs to determine if the product would be viable for the client requirements.

Principal Consultant - Open Source Databases

Pythian

May 2014 - Aug 2015 (1 year 4 months)

As a Principal Consultant for Pythian's Open Source Database Practice, my role is to provide technical thought leadership to ensure our team delivers expert level services to our clients. Responsibilities include: - Provide a technical escalation path for Pythian's MySQL and MongoDB clients - Develop strategies for client environments to plan for growth in their Database Infrastructure - Collaborate with Team Managers and Lead Database Consultants to set training goals for team members - Assist in hiring of new Database Consultants - Participate in the sales cycle to develop client relationships

MySQL Lead Database Consultant

Pythian

Sep 2013 - Apr 2014 (8 months)

As Lead Database Consultant for one of Pythian's MySQL teams of expert DBAs, I assist the Team Lead in ensuring deliverables are met to the satisfaction of the clients. This includes reviewing action plans for technical detail, performing capacity planning, and providing technical oversight of resolving difficult performance issues. Other responsibilities include participating in an oncall rotation, initial health audit and recommendations when new clients are onboarded to the team, researching technologies and providing proactive recommendations when applicable to client needs, and working with other Lead Database Consultants to ensure training initiatives are available for team members continual development as MySQL technology evolves.

MySQL Database Consultant

Pythian

Feb 2013 - Aug 2013 (7 months)

As part of a global team of expert MySQL DBAs, I work very closely with our clients to develop an understanding of their environment and needs. We provide recommendations on best-practices in terms of disaster recovery planning, designing high availability strategies, and ensuring proper tuning of client MySQL systems. We develop and design version upgrades and database migrations. Taking part in an oncall rotation, we ensure that database issues are resolved in a timely manner and take steps to prevent repeat incidents. Our clients work with many of the technologies in the MySQL ecosystem: MySQL Communtiy and various flavors (PerconaServer, MariaDB), MySQL Enterprise, MySQL Cluster, Galera Cluster, Tungsten Replicator, and MHA

A

Product Design / Design Engineering

All others

Jan 2010 - Nov 2017 (7 years 11 months)

MySQL DBA, SysAdmin

Dealer HD

Nov 2007 - Jan 2013 (5 years 3 months)

Developed an online inventory management system as part of an all-inclusive Dealer website templating engine. My focus was primarily on the importing of vehicles from various sources into our backend. To ensure high availability of the system, I headed up the initiative to migrate our MacOS XServe environment into a CentOS-based LAMP stack on Rackspace private cloud. As part of the migration, we setup HAProxy to split website traffic to a number of nodes. HAProxy was monitored by keepalive.d to ensure HAProxy availability. Media content was stored on separate servers running NGINX. The main focus after this was on the MySQL performance tuning and disaster recovery. I laid the groundwork to split read traffic to slaves and developed the au

P

Web Developer

Prime Market Targetting

Nov 2004 - Nov 2007 (3 years 1 month)

Developed custom automotive websites for Advertising clientele.

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