Dave C

Technology leader who built IT governance and Delivery Engineering at Oaktree Capital Management, a global alternative investment firm with over $220 billion in assets under management, rising to Senior Vice President over IT governance, change and release management, DevOps, and DevSecOps. Authored the firm's technology controls and served as the point of contact for auditors and clients across SOX, SOC 1 (SSAE 16 and 18), and GDPR, while enabling teams to own their delivery in a regulated environment.

Senior Vice President, Head of Delivery Engineering at Oaktree Capital Management (2009 – 2026)

Joined as Assistant Vice President and rose to Senior Vice President, building IT governance and change and release management first, then adding DevOps, platform engineering, and DevSecOps as Delivery Engineering. Led teams of up to 15, combining 3 to 12 full-time staff with onshore and offshore consultants, across roughly 175 live applications and nine development teams.

• Converted an informally run IT department with no governance into a structured IT general controls (ITGC) program covering change, access, and operations, fully compliant with SOX, SOC 1 (SSAE 16 and 18), and GDPR.
• Served as primary point of contact for all internal and external SOX and SOC 1 audits, meeting weekly with external auditors, internal audit, and internal controls to provide and explain evidence and lead control, system, and narrative walkthroughs.
• Authored the firm's technology controls manual and policies, maintained its IT operational controls, performed periodic reviews and sign-offs, reported control status to IT leadership, ran controls awareness training, and answered all client inquiries on governance controls.
• Founded and chaired the weekly Change Advisory Board, defining risk tiers and standard and emergency change paths, and personally reviewed every emergency change for appropriateness, content, and risk.
• Selected and procured Saviynt identity governance (IGA), then owned the implementation end to end, replacing a homegrown approval and helpdesk workflow with automated provisioning and deprovisioning across 120+ endpoints in 18 months. Automated access review campaigns cut each review cycle from three months to 21 days. Privileged admin roles stayed manual by design.
• Introduced Terraform infrastructure as code (IaC), a first for the firm, promoting a complex API-driven Azure stack through sandbox, dev, QA, UAT, and production, plus a dedicated AI track with added guardrails.
• Shifted CI/CD and Terraform pipeline ownership to all nine application teams through a developer enablement program and handbook, while Delivery Engineering kept the platform and enforced access guardrails.
• Led Delivery Engineering through an external SRE and delivery maturity assessment that rated change governance and release management the firm's strongest domains, directed same-year remediation of the gaps it found, and initiated an SRE program with a reliability KPI model.
• Coordinated IT disaster recovery (ITDR) exercises with internal audit as liaison between the BC/DR team and the system administrators executing failover, and introduced DR classification for new applications.
• Procured GitHub EMU for centrally governed, SSO-controlled source control, and made the case for consolidating Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
• Enforced private networking and least-privilege access through Azure Policy and PIM, and secured SAST budget through a structured vendor evaluation.
• Led the team's adoption of AI-assisted engineering with Claude, GitHub Copilot, and ChatGPT across code, troubleshooting, reporting, and documentation.
• Owned release management for roughly 2,600 production releases a year with no rollbacks, fixing forward when issues arose, and gated production pipelines on an approved Change Advisory Board record.
• Single-handedly introduced DevOps around 2018 to a firm where 100% of releases were manual, standing up automated build and release pipelines and the practices around them.
• Moved about 780 production releases a year, 30% of the firm's total, to fully automated CI/CD, reducing go-backs and production issues and freeing senior engineers by delegating routine releases.

Senior Production Engineer (Principal) at Downey Savings / U.S. Bank

Stayed on a year after U.S. Bank's acquisition.

• Ran release management, authored SCRM policies, and built a single-command build and deploy framework.

Senior Operations Engineer and Release Manager at Paxonix (a MeadWestvaco division)

• Ran builds, releases, and ClearCase for a high-availability Java platform, and wrote FDA 21 CFR Part 11 procedures for a pharmaceutical platform subject to HIPAA.

Senior Network Engineer at Combio Corporation

• Ran a 24/7 high-availability production network.

Manager of Information Technology at Alvarado Smith and Sanchez

• Led IT staff supporting 100+ professionals through Y2K and a Novell to Windows migration.

Founder and Consultant at Adept Computer Services

• Ran an independent IT consulting business serving legal, medical, and fintech clients.