Don O'Neill

Don O'Neill is the VP of Engineering, Operations and Infrastructure at TripAdvisor. Don has been with the company since January 2011. In their current role, they manage a team of 70 full-time engineers and 20+ contractors to drive uptime, performance, and scaling to achieve a consistent 99.99% service level agreement (SLA) with no maintenance windows while enabling multiple releases per day. Don also manages a $38M budget while overseeing agile development, customer and user experience, operations, QA, and support. Additionally, they are responsible for executing recruiting, hiring, and performance management for teams in Needham, Boston, Oxford, London, Paris, Barcelona, Dublin, and Singapore. Don reports directly to the CTO.

During their time at TripAdvisor, O'Neill has made several notable achievements. Don transitioned the group from a traditional IT Ops team to a DevOps culture by hiring software engineers to build operations systems and tools across all teams including IT Desktop Support. Don also moved from a single content delivery network provider to a multi CDN configuration to increase redundancy and ensure optimal pricing for TA’s seven plus petabytes per month of CDN traffic. Furthermore, they implemented a Canary release process with comprehensive data analytics and anomaly detection to reduce risk to uptime. Additionally, they built a modern security platform based on user behavior using log aggregation, ML models, and data analytics on top of open source tools including Kubernetes, ElasticSearch, Kibana, RabbitMQ, and Next Gen endpoint protection (Falcon).

O'Neill has also been responsible for leading the technical build-out of the 290,000 square foot TripAdvisor HQ with over $11M of IT infrastructure including a 1 MW data center for development and testing, event space, and over 40 video enabled meeting rooms. Additionally, they created and managed security program including quarterly third-party network scans, penetration tests. internal and external red vs blue exercises, DDoS simulations, phishing simulations, and public and private bug bounty programs using BugCrowd. Finally, they built out a data lake using Hadoop, SQL Server, Presto, and Spark with 6+ petabytes of data under management.

Don O'Neill has a Masters in Software Engineering from Brandeis University and a Diploma in Software Engineering from Munster Technological University.

They are on a team with Jim Sweeney - Diagnostics President, Nick Brown - VP, Strategic Partnerships, and Brandon Eldredge - CFO. Sean Wallace - Software Engineer, Elliot Miller - Software Engineer, and Evan Williams - Principal Software Engineer report to Don O'Neill. Don O'Neill reports to Andrew H. Beck, Co-Founder & CEO.