Phillip Christensen
CLOUD, INFRASTRUCTURE, IDENTITY, RELIABILITY
Executive Summary
Strategic Technology Executive with a 9-year trajectory of expanding scope and responsibility at CARFAX, consistently trusted to turn around underperforming functions and build new enterprise capabilities from scratch. Currently leading critical "Day 1" readiness initiatives for the company’s transition to an independent public company, specifically architecting the integration of CARFAX's Identity Access Management (IAM) systems with the new entity's greenfield infrastructure and consolidating vendor relationships.
Proven track record of managing an $18M+ annual budget (Cloud, CapEx, OpEx) and leading a cross-functional organization of 21+ engineers. Expert in balancing operational reliability with fiscal discipline, delivering rigorous FinOps frameworks that maximize ROI on a $10M+ annual cloud spend.
Core Competencies
Professional Experience
CARFAX
Columbia, MOConsistently promoted to manage an expanding portfolio of critical enterprise functions. Currently leads a 21-person engineering unit (including 2 managers and 19 engineers) with strategic oversight for Cloud Operations, Identity Management, and Data Center Infrastructure. Manages a total budget of ~$18M.
Mobility Divestiture & Spin-Off Leadership
- Identity Integration Strategy: Spearheading the strategic integration of CARFAX’s established identity ecosystem with the new entity’s greenfield IAM infrastructure. Architecting a unified identity fabric that ensures seamless interoperability between legacy systems and modern greenfield platforms, enabling cross-entity collaboration while eliminating hardware redundancy ("two laptop" scenarios) for transitional staff.
- Strategic Vendor Consolidation: Managing the divestiture of vendor relationships, rolling up disparate legacy contracts into unified enterprise agreements for the new public company. Negotiating terms to ensure Day 1 readiness and favorable long-term commercial positioning for critical infrastructure and software dependencies.
- Cloud Architecture Strategy: Serving as a strategic contributor to the low-level design of new Cloud Landing Zones, advising on "Secure-by-Design" and "Cost-Aware" principles to prevent sprawl and ensure OPEX targets are met immediately post-launch.
Enterprise Identity & Security
- Strategic Security Partnership: Acting as the primary operational partner to the Security Office (CISO/SecOps) to operationalize Zero Trust principles. Led a comprehensive company-wide permissions restructuring and cleanup to eliminate toxic combinations of access.
- Modern Authentication Rollout: Designed and implemented robust IAM processes and procedures, including the deployment of phishing-resistant MFA, trusted device verification, and sophisticated conditional access policies to secure the hybrid workforce.
- Risk Reduction: Implemented Privileged Access Management (PAM) and standardized permission sets across the enterprise, directly addressing audit findings and hardening the security posture against insider threats.
Cloud Governance & FinOps
- Financial Engineering (FinOps): Built the AWS FinOps practice to manage a $10M+ annual cloud spend. Partner deeply with engineering teams to conduct cost investigations and architectural reviews, while centrally managing Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans to maximize effective rates and ROI.
- Governance at Scale: Architected automated compliance policies for AWS environments, ensuring development teams could deploy rapidly without violating security or budgetary constraints.
Reliability Engineering & Infrastructure
- Modernizing Operations: Transformed a legacy monitoring function into a proactive Observability / SRE unit. Consolidated tool sprawl (SaaS + Open Source) to provide a "single pane of glass" into system health, reducing Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR).
- Incident Command: Owner of the Major Incident Management process. Lead monthly availability reviews with the CIO and CTO, translating technical uptime metrics into actionable business reliability improvements.
- Hybrid Efficiency: Manage a hybrid footprint including $2-3M in CapEx and $3-5M in OpEx. Directed a multi-year data center consolidation and hardware refresh, modernizing the physical footprint while simultaneously driving cloud adoption.
IBM
Columbia, MO- Service Delivery: Led multiple delivery teams (up to 30+ engineers) supporting strategic outsourcing customers in healthcare and transportation sectors.
- Turnaround Leadership: Took over a struggling service area and implemented Six Sigma/Lean methodologies to reduce a backlog of 1,000+ work orders to under 150, significantly restoring client trust.
- Global Management: Directed cross-functional initiatives for a 250+ employee distributed team (US and India), improving process adherence and SLA compliance.
- Served as the escalation point and technical lead for 30 system administrators, managing critical outages and driving continual service improvement for enterprise email systems.
Prior Experience
Full P&L responsibility for all IT systems, budget creation, and infrastructure.
Education
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Business Administration
Emphasis in Accounting & Financial Services