About Mark
6/Mar 2015
Mark is a DevOps leader with pioneering work on the world’s largest Internet real-time event and web sites across software and hardware operations, technical and field product management, as well as content and marketing disciplines. Mark’s focus is on agile 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 nurturing their continuous improvement.
When sponsored to do undergraduate research, he first touched the classified Internet in 1991, graduated from Boston University with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and then suffered from Internet withdrawal. In 1993, he started his career by joining 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 and teach technical subjects to anyone.
During his twenty+ years in Silicon Valley, he was a co-founder or early team member of seven startups where he held management roles in engineering and operations: Passpoints, Convergence Media Group, Smart Destinations (acquired by Big Bus), LetsTalk, Kaazing, Pertino (acquired by Cradlepoint), and Calm.io (acquired by Nutanix).
In 2016, he became Nutanix’s first Automation Solutions Architect in pre-sales/Systems Engineering, working with Fortune 1 corporations and government institutions globally. Over three years, he helped his role grow to seven peers worldwide, partnered with Marketing as an industry and Executive Briefing Center speaker, and collaborated with Global Sales Enablement to deliver content and automation for multiple Technical Summit, Sales Kick Off, boot-camp, hands-on-lab, and Sales Engineering certification events and programs around the world. In 2019, as Principal DevOps Advocate, Mark returned to the field of Developer Relations to adapt advanced engineering methods, technology, and culture to accelerate the business needs of customers, partners, and employees globally.
Mark’s leadership approach mixes agile software engineering, operations, and emotional intelligence. In retrospect, his career and multidisciplinary practice is summarized and complimented by the umbrella term DevOps and its variants of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevSecOps, DataOps, et. al.
Mark’s home is wherever his spouse, 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 Mastodon & X/Twitter, and @mlavi on GitHub & GitLab, see his CNCF Community profile, and read his blog.