Résumé

Experience & background

Full career history, technical skills, and leadership highlights. Download or print below.

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David Hutchins

Assistant Director of Identity Solutions · University of Virginia

Summary

Systems architect and technology leader with over 20 years of experience in identity and access management, infrastructure engineering, and team leadership in higher education. I build and steward systems that help organizations operate securely, reliably, and at scale — while helping the people behind those systems succeed.

Experience

Assistant Director, Identity Solutions [ Year ] – Present
University of Virginia · Information Technology Services

Title change earned through expanded responsibility — the role I'd grown into during the interim leadership period below.

  • Lead the team responsible for identity, authentication, and access management infrastructure serving UVA's student, faculty, and staff population
  • Oversee IAM platform strategy, governance, and technical operations for NetBadge — UVA's primary authentication service
  • Direct PAM (privileged access management) expansion across the identity portfolio, reducing risk surface and improving audit posture
  • Led the migration of identity's observability workloads from a homegrown Graylog / TICK / Elasticsearch stack onto enterprise Splunk and LogicMonitor platforms as UVA's central services matured — consolidating onto shared infrastructure without degrading operational visibility
  • Provide technical leadership, organizational strategy, and staff mentorship; partner with peers across UVA ITS on cross-portfolio initiatives
Manager, Identity Architecture & Solutions [ Year ] – [ Year ]
University of Virginia · Information Technology Services
  • Led the team designing and operating UVA's enterprise identity and access management platform
  • Co-led the Identity portfolio at director level for ~18 months during an extended director search, partnering with a peer manager to provide stability, strategic direction, and stakeholder representation across UVA ITS — drawing on prior Director-level experience (UVACollab) and MOR Associates leadership training
  • Drove NetBadge modernization — rehoming UVA's authentication platform and aligning for tighter identity integration
  • Designed and implemented identity governance frameworks for access provisioning, lifecycle management, and de-provisioning
  • Carried the proven UVACollab infrastructure pattern into Identity — adapted from bare metal to Docker Swarm running on VMware VMs from UVA's central virtualization group, again paired with the Graylog/TICK observability stack until enterprise services arrived
  • Contributed to IAM standards adoption (SAML, OIDC, SCIM) across the institution
Director, UVACollab Applications 2020 – [ Year ]
University of Virginia · promoted from Systems & Software Engineering Manager
  • Led the technical organization responsible for UVACollab — UVA's primary collaboration and learning platform serving the entire university community
  • Continued stewardship of the bare-metal Docker Swarm infrastructure I had designed in the prior role — the platform operated reliably through the entire wind-down without a single self-induced outage
  • Helped guide the multi-year platform-retirement effort, partnering with the UVACollab Retirement Steering Committee to migrate users to modern collaboration services with minimal disruption
  • Managed platform reliability, performance, and availability for a large, diverse university user base through the wind-down period
  • Coordinated development, operations, and stakeholder communication across a complex multi-year program
Computer Systems Senior Engineer 2016 – 2020
University of Virginia · UVACollab
  • Re-architected UVACollab's deployment and supporting infrastructure shortly after joining UVA — designing and implementing a 12-node Docker Swarm cluster on bare metal across two Dell M1000e blade chassis in two physical data centers, giving the platform true site-level redundancy
  • That infrastructure carried UVACollab in production from 2016 until retirement — only ever absorbing downtime that originated in adjacent systems or networks; the Swarm itself never crashed
  • Designed and implemented a complete rewrite of UVACollab's search subsystem — moving from Sakai's deprecated ES-embedded pattern to an external Elasticsearch backend with a redesigned indexing pipeline (multiple find-then-extract passes for better content fidelity) and a custom Java Elasticsearch plugin that pushes Sakai's authorization checks into the search aggregation layer, so results respect site- and tool-level access controls with correct counts and result sets. Code at github.com/dnhutchins/es-plugin
  • Originated the homegrown observability stack (Graylog, TICK, Elasticsearch) on the UVACollab platform — there was no enterprise log/metrics service available at the time, and a platform of that scale needed real visibility. This is the pattern I later carried into the Identity portfolio
  • Senior engineering responsibility for the broader UVACollab platform — application stacks, performance, and day-to-day operations
  • Bridged hands-on systems engineering with team leadership and architectural decision-making, setting the stage for the management roles that followed
Systems Administration & Web Application Development 2002 – 2016
Norfolk State University · Manager (2013–2016), Senior Systems Administrator (2002–2013)
  • Built career foundations in systems operations, infrastructure reliability, and service delivery — managing servers, networking, and end-user computing for the university community
  • Promoted to lead the systems administration and web application development function — managing staff, infrastructure strategy, and platform development
  • Developed the operating instincts that have shaped everything since: careful change management, rigorous documentation, and treating reliability as a service to people, not a property of machines

Speaking & Standards Work

ARMS & SARM — Originator & Co-author 2025 – Present
Internet2 / InCommon community proposal
  • Originated and co-authored SARM (System for Attestation & Recertification Management), a draft interoperability specification modeled on SCIM — addressing the IAM governance gap that no existing standard covers
  • Developed ARMS, the open-source reference implementation, including a protocol inspector that lets any institution validate their data source against the spec
  • Drove community engagement and cross-institutional collaboration across the higher-ed identity community
  • Presented at InCommon BaseCamp 2026 to strong turnout; the project has since attracted cross-institutional collaborators

Technical Skills

Identity & IAM

  • SAML / OIDC / OAuth
  • CAS / Shibboleth
  • SCIM provisioning
  • PAM platforms
  • Identity governance

Infrastructure

  • Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu)
  • Docker / Docker Swarm
  • Networking fundamentals
  • Cloud platforms
  • Virtualization

Observability

  • Splunk
  • LogicMonitor
  • Graylog
  • TICK Stack (InfluxDB)
  • Elasticsearch
  • Platform migration

Software Development

  • Java (Sakai codebase)
  • Elasticsearch (incl. custom plugins)
  • Architectural rewrites
  • API & integration design
  • Open-source code stewardship

Leadership

  • Team management
  • Technical mentoring
  • Strategic planning
  • Stakeholder communication
  • Program management