Rich Stokes

Rich Stokes has a diverse work experience in the field of infrastructure engineering and management. Rich started their career at Centerprise International as a Hardware Engineer in 2004. Rich then worked at Computacenter as a Field Engineer, gaining experience in various operating environments and supporting Windows-based networks and servers. In 2007, they joined HP CDS as a Technical Consultant, providing technical support and consultancy to Ericsson's R&D office. Rich then worked at DediPower Managed Hosting as a System Administrator, where they designed and supported managed-hosting solutions for clients on both Windows Server and RedHat Linux. In 2010, they became a Senior ICT Engineer at NEC Technologies, responsible for supporting and implementing IT infrastructure from end-user machines to the company's WAN/LAN/WLAN. From 2013 to 2018, they worked at Perforce Software, initially as an IT Manager and later as an Infrastructure Manager. During this time, they managed infrastructure and implemented various IT projects. In 2018, they joined Instant Labs Inc. as a Senior Operations Engineer, where they designed and built platforms for their SaaS application and enabled DevOps practices. Currently, they are working at Rocket Money as a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, where they are involved in building, scaling, and securing the infrastructure for their personal finance app, Truebill.

Rich Stokes attended Basingstoke College of Technology from 2001 to 2003, where they obtained a BTEC National Diploma for IT Practitioners. In terms of additional certifications, Rich received a CompTIA Security+ certification from CompTIA in May 2013, as well as a Certified Ethical Hacker certification from EC-Council in the same month and year. Rich also acquired an ITIL Foundation certification from AXELOS Global Best Practice in December 2014. Continuing their education, Rich obtained a Silver Peak SD-WAN Professional certification from Silver Peak in June 2017, followed by an Accredited Configuration Engineer (ACE) PAN-OS 8.0 certification from Palo Alto Networks in October 2017. In November 2017, they obtained the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute, and in December of the same year, they received the AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification from Amazon Web Services. In February 2018, Rich obtained the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) certification from the ISC2 Silicon Valley Chapter. Most recently, in January 2019, they acquired the Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification from the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation).