About Mark

A DevOps professional with pioneering work on the world’s biggest Internet real-time event and web sites across the engineering, operations, content, and marketing disciplines. Mark’s focus is on people and software development along with system design and life cycle thinking: he can build, secure, scale, and manage teams, applications, and infrastructure to work together while planning and nurturing their continuous operations and improvement.

Mark first touched the Internet in 1991 when sponsored to do undergraduate research. After graduating Boston University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and suffering from Internet withdrawal, he joined the first national, commercial Internet Service Provider (before the world wide web).

As a founding or senior web master at Netscape, Silicon Graphics, CNN, and News Corp., Mark was part of developing and growing some of the world’s earliest and largest web properties. He progressed to Netscape Developer Relations as a Technology Evangelist covering JavaScript and LDAP. One compliment, “Mark is an engineer who can speak,” captures his ability to relate technical subjects to anyone.

During his twenty+ years in Silicon Valley, he was a co-founder or early team member of seven startups (Passpoints, Convergence Media Group, Smart Destinations, LetsTalk, Kaazing, Pertino, and Calm.io) where he held management roles in engineering and operations.

When Calm.io was acquired in 2016, he became Nutanix’s first Automation Solutions Architect in Systems Engineering, directly working with some of the largest corporations and government institutions. Over three years, he helped the role grow to seven peers worldwide, partnered with Marketing as a .NEXT and Executive Briefing Center speaker, and collaborated with Global Sales Enablement to deliver content and automation for multiple Technical Summits, Sales Kick Offs, bootcamps, hands-on-labs, and Sales Engineering certification around the world. In 2019, as Principal DevOps Advocate, Mark has returned to the field of Developer Relations to adapt advanced engineering methods, technology, and culture to accelerate the business needs of Nutanix customers, partners, and employees globally.

Mark’s approach mixes software engineering disciplines with emotional intelligence and operations. His system design and life cycle thinking leads to nurturing teams, applications, and infrastructure to work together while planning their continuous operations and improvement. He can build, secure, scale, and manage Internet architectures, real-time media, and software development pipelines. In retrospect, his career and multidisciplinary practice is summarized and complimented by the umbrella term DevOps and its variants of DevSecOps, DataOps, et. al.

Mark’s home is wherever his wife, two children, and dog are, but our traveling family resides in Austin, Texas, USA.

Please review Mark’s career and endorsements on LinkedIn, follow @calm_mark on Twitter and @mlavi on GitHub, and read his blog.