Phil 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 Cloud Governance / FinOps, Reliability & Observability, Identity and Access Management, and Data Center Infrastruture Management teams for CARFAX
Proven track record of managing and leading a cross-functional organization of 21+ engineers with a $15M+ annual budget (Cloud, CapEx, OpEx). 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 ~$15M.
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 IT Security team 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