Erik Carlin

Governing Board

FinOps Foundation

Jan 2023 - Current (3 years 10 months)

Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer

ProsperOps

Sep 2018 - Current (8 years 2 months)

(Acquired by Flexera in January 2026)

We're building the roboadvisor for cloud computing.

Current cost optimization tooling is recommendation based which places the operational burden on already busy devops and finops teams. This leads to lag, is error prone, and fundamentally limits what is possible to that which a human can reasonably execute.

We believe cloud cost optimization is best handled by AI, optimization algorithms, and real-time execution engines. Like roboadvisors in the financial investing space, ProsperOps enables customers to answer a few high level questions about their cloud use after which technology takes over to handle ongoing, day-to-day cost optimization activities.

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VP, Product & Engineering, Managed Public Clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP)

Rackspace Technology

Oct 2017 - Aug 2018 (11 months)

.● Role expanded to include responsibility for product development of management software and offers on top of the 3 hyper-scale public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. Upon my departure, we had grown the managed public cloud business from $0 to $228 million in annual recurring revenue after only 3 years in market.
● Founding member of the Rackspace Managed GCP team. Developed partnership with Google and launched as Google's first GCP Managed Services Provider partner and exclusive Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) partner.
● Member of the Technical Career Track (TCT) Board of Directors. TCT members are Rackspace's titled and most senior technical leaders.

VP, Product & Engineering, Fanatical Support for AWS

Rackspace Technology

Nov 2015 - Sep 2017 (1 year 11 months)

● Startup business in Rackspace with full autonomy.
● Fastest growing business in the history of Rackspace!!
● Responsible for overall managed services product design, evolution, and success including software development and operations.
● Built and led a talented, distributed team of product management and engineering Rackers to combine technology & human expertise in powerful, novel ways.
● Ran on AWS leveraging microservices, containers, serverless, IaC, chatops, CI/CD, event-driven architecture, Spotify team model, etc.
● Tech stack included node.js, python, go, C#, react, terraform, and docker.

Senior Director, Product Strategy & Co-Founder, Fanatical Support for AWS

Rackspace Technology

Nov 2014 - Oct 2015 (1 year)

● As the Rackspace strategy shifted from being "The Open Cloud Company" to "The #1 Managed Cloud Company", my co-founder colleague and I were compelled to take Fanatical Support (the world's greatest service) to the AWS platform (the world's leading public cloud).
● We forged a partnership with AWS, built the business plan, and considered various organic and inorganic options for entering the market.
● We chose to build and I took responsibility for and built out the initial product and engineering team. We developed and brought an offer to market in just 6 months.

Director, Product Management, Rackspace Cloud Infrastructure Product Line

Rackspace Technology

Dec 2012 - Oct 2014 (1 year 11 months)

● My product leadership role expanded to include responsibility for the entire line of Rackspace public cloud compute, storage, and networking products including Cloud Servers, Cloud Files, Cloud Block Storage, Cloud Load Balancers, Cloud Networks, and RackConnect.
● Member of the Rackspace Cloud senior leadership team.
● One of a six member team to manage a $20+ million Rackspace-wide strategic investment fund (i.e., an internal VC fund). Heard pitches, evaluated opportunities, selected teams to fund, and served as their advisor/mentor.

Director, Product Management, Cloud Servers

Rackspace Technology

Nov 2011 - Nov 2012 (1 year 1 month)

● Shifted into a product leadership role, with overall responsibility for Rackspace Cloud Servers, the flagship public cloud product.
● Completely rebuilt the product team.
● Launched Cloud Servers powered by Openstack, the world's largest deployment of Openstack nova.
● Grew the business to over $250 million in annual recurring revenue.

Chief Architect, Rackspace Cloud

Rackspace Technology

Nov 2008 - Nov 2011 (3 years 1 month)

● To accelerate Rackspace's entry into public cloud, we acquired Slicehost and I joined forces with the founders to launch Cloud Servers, Rackspace's public compute cloud product.
● Member of the founding Rackspace Cloud team.
● As we introduced more cloud products, my role broadened to Chief Architect where I focused on loosely coupled service architectures, global scalability, product strategy and integration, etc.
● Served as senior technical spokesman with press, analysts, and customers.
● Member of the founding OpenStack team.
● Led the initial launch of the quantum (now neutron) OpenStack networking-as-a-service project.
● Identified and developed early partnership with Nicira (acquired by VMware). Rac

Senior Architect, RackLabs

Rackspace Technology

Jan 2008 - Oct 2008 (10 months)

● Hired into the Rackspace R&D group to research and explore new product opportunities for Rackspace.
● My belief in the concept of "Instant IT," which later become known as Cloud Computing or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), led me to the idea of on-demand computing.
● Led the initial Rackspace team to develop our first Xen-based compute cloud prototype.

Principal, Chief Architect

SRA International

Jun 2006 - Jan 2008 (1 year 8 months)

Most senior technical leader on a 225 person, $341 million program (the largest in SRA’s history to date) to engineer and operate the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) technical infrastructure. Responsible for overall maturation and technical advancement of systems, storage, voice, video, and data networking infrastructures that support 6,000 users in 90 offices across the United States.

Director, Technology

AgustaWestlandBell

Feb 2006 - May 2006 (4 months)

Directed technology activities for a joint venture startup of two leading helicopter manufacturers with a $1 billion+ contract to build the next Marine One fleet of United States Presidential helicopters. Responsible for managing the existing outsourced IT relationship while building up the internal technology capabilities of the company.

Principal, Deputy Director, Technical Architecture

American Management Systems

Sep 1995 - Dec 2004 (9 years 4 months)

Deputy Director of Technical Architecture for a $1 billion global business and IT consulting firm. Participated in numerous technical activities focused on overall integration of global IT systems and deployment of new technologies. Provided technical leadership across a 300 person organization.

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Erik Carlin

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