Clay Haynes is a dedicated engineer with over fifteen years of experience in network security and engineering. He has demonstrated excellent technical, analytical, and communication skills throughout his career. Clay holds prestigious certifications, including Juniper Networks Certified Internet Expert in Security (JNCIE-SEC #69) and Enterprise Routing & Switching (JNCIE-ENT #492). He is also an active member of the elite Juniper Ambassador group, reflecting his deep expertise and commitment to the field.
Since September 2016, Clay has been serving as a Senior Network Engineer at Twitter, Inc. In this role, he has significantly increased network capacity to cloud providers from 1 Gbps to 100 Gbps while maintaining a strong security posture. He reduced SSL VPN issues by 50% through the implementation of Passthrough Proxy and Anycast services. Clay overhauled internal stateless filters and security enforcement points, enabling automation teams to dynamically update hosts as needed. He also developed a visualization tool that converts XML output from Juniper routers into HTML, making it accessible for non-technical users. Additionally, Clay designed, deployed, and enforced network security across four sites for third-party vendors in the Trust & Safety department using an SSL VPN solution. During a PCI audit, he deployed mitigations to address security issues in PCI-scoped networks.
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Prior to his tenure at Twitter, Clay worked as a Senior Network Engineer at Nexum, Inc. from March 2015 to September 2016. He designed and deployed multiple datacenter security solutions utilizing high-end SRX clusters (SRX5k series) and led various network and security design assessments, including configuration analysis and proposed mitigation solutions. Clay presented at CHINOG 06 and BOSNOG on Ethernet VPN and served as an active instructor for Pulse Secure and Palo Alto Networks, receiving high ratings from students. He overhauled lab and training virtual environments to efficiently utilize datacenter resources and wrote automation scripts to automatically deploy VM environments for training classes using Python, Chef Knife, and Bash.
From June 2006 to March 2015, Clay was a Senior Systems Engineer at CentraComm Communications. He architected mass deployments of Juniper SRX firewalls with managed nodes across four continents and deployed multiple global SSL VPN solutions utilizing both MAG and SA Series for over 20,000 concurrent users. Clay mentored junior engineers in solving complex customer issues and deployments, designed and deployed a Splunk solution for long-term log management, and developed and maintained a CRM solution powered by Salesforce to provide business intelligence, automation, and accountability across the organization. He performed deep-dive discussions and presentations on topics such as virtualization security, disaster recovery, and mobile security, wrote scripts (Bash, PowerShell, Python) to automate repetitive tasks, and deployed and maintained MX Series, EX Series, and SRX Series solutions for multiple customer environments. Clay also served as a technical liaison between customers, vendors, and account managers, leading customer deployments from pre-sales to post-installation operations, and overhauled physical infrastructure to migrate to a 95% virtualized environment.
Earlier in his career, Clay held positions as a System Administrator at Northwest Ohio Orthopedics and Sports Medicine from March 2004 to June 2006, where he designed, built, and implemented servers, fiber-channel SAN, and external storage for a document management system. He researched, implemented, and managed a core switch replacement, installed, configured, and maintained a Juniper SSL VPN system, and designed and built ten small form factor computers for daily use. Clay also implemented and maintained anti-virus, anti-spam, and content filtering systems. As a SWIFTY at Bluffton Exempted Village Schools from June 2003 to May 2005, he assisted in system migration from Novell 4.1 to Windows Server 2003, developed in-house solutions for patch management, computer image deployment, and application deployment, maintained infrastructure, and assisted students and teachers with various technological questions.
