Experience
Professional experience spanning military service, enterprise IT, and DevOps consulting.
Site Reliability Engineer
Cornerstone OnDemand, Dublin, CA
Cloud Operations SRE for Cornerstone's learning platforms — EdCast, Galaxy and Galaxy 2.0 — on multi-region AWS EKS and GCP, including a federal environment in AWS GovCloud. Handled 315 production incidents and 110 tickets on primary on-call, and built tooling, logging, and cost-analysis systems that improved reliability and cut cloud spend.
- Led a 7-account AWS cost-optimization project to eliminate $183K/year in wasted spend, building the billing-driven analysis pipeline (Bash, Python, Cost Explorer) and its automated checks against live AWS.
- Designed 34 containerized tool environments (AWS/EKS, GCP, Terraform, PagerDuty, Jira) with production safety gates and audit logging, unifying access to 18 EKS clusters (280+ nodes) and later 17 Galaxy 2.0 clusters in 13 AWS accounts.
- Fixed a silently failing Elasticsearch retention job; the fix purged 480 stale indices in 68 seconds and cut cluster disk use from ~90% to under 50%.
- Rebuilt the dev logging pipeline for the skills/AI platform (Filebeat, Elasticsearch, Kibana), handling 7.8M+ log events per day from 17 applications.
- Resolved production incidents, re-enabling 14 paused KEDA autoscalers to clear Sidekiq job backlogs and recovering Elasticsearch clusters from disk exhaustion (920 GB freed in one incident, no data loss).
DevOps Engineer
Nonagon Media, Oakland, CA
Founded Nonagon Media as an independent DevOps consultancy, specializing in AWS architecture, automation, and CI/CD solutions.
- Recovered ~$1,610/year auditing an AWS estate after a teardown left two NAT gateways and three EIPs stranded.
- Developed a Terraform template library, standardizing infrastructure provisioning and reducing setup time.
- Built Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and Alertmanager from nothing; a host-down event suppresses its dependent service alerts.
- Runs an in-house R&D platform (Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins) to build and prove services before offering them to clients.
DevOps Engineer
BitPusher, LLC, San Francisco, CA
Returned to BitPusher to work across client AWS infrastructure. The engagement ended when the company was acquired.
- Shipped client releases through a standardized Terraform and Chef pipeline, entering each client's environment through their bastion and routing changes by node class.
- Carried on-call across client estates, delivering hotfixes through the same Terraform and Chef path as scheduled releases.
- Handled ad-hoc client work from the ticket queue: system patching, Terraform module changes and deployments.
DevOps Engineer
Zoox, Foster City, CA
Enhanced existing infrastructure automation workflows using Terraform, SaltStack, and Bamboo, reducing provisioning errors and improving deployment efficiency by 60%.
- Managed virtual machines (VMs) across AWS and vSphere, enhancing resource allocation efficiency and reducing downtime.
- Led the migration of the SolidWorks license server across data centers, ensuring zero downtime through detailed planning and rollback procedures.
- Optimized SaltStack configurations, eliminating redundant pillar and stack file steps, reducing execution time by 40%.
- Implemented and maintained DNS records with IPAM and PowerDNS, enhancing network reliability and reducing resolution errors.
Lead DevOps Engineer
Healthbucks, Miami, FL
Overhauled application infrastructure across development, staging, and production environments to improve security, efficiency, and documentation. Implemented HIPAA-compliant security measures to enhance deployment processes and mitigate risks.
- Migrated proof-of-concept software from Google Cloud Platform to AWS, improving system performance and scalability.
- Designed and implemented a CI/CD pipeline, accelerating deployments and reducing manual intervention.
- Automated infrastructure provisioning using Terraform, improving consistency and repeatability across environments.
- Integrated HIPAA-compliant security controls, ensuring secure deployment practices and reducing compliance risks.
- Led system architecture improvements to enhance infrastructure reliability and operational efficiency.
DevOps Engineer II
Mphasis/Stelligent, Reston, VA
Developed and automated AWS-based infrastructure using Terraform and CI/CD pipelines to streamline deployments and reduce manual intervention. Designed scalable systems architecture to improve reliability and efficiency.
- Developed an AMI automation system, reducing software deployment time by 60% and improving system uptime.
- Implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, minimizing configuration drift and improving system consistency.
- Led the adoption of CI/CD pipelines, accelerating software releases and reducing deployment failures by 40%.
- Architected AWS-based infrastructure, optimizing resource allocation and ensuring high availability.
- Achieved AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification, validating expertise in cloud architecture and automation.
Application Technician
Crystal Equation, Fremont, CA
Developed and maintained data pipelines for processing and visualizing Splunk usage data, integrating with Tableau to improve analytics. Provided hands-on support for a large-scale Splunk installation, managing 4.5TB of monthly events.
- Designed and maintained a data pipeline that processed 4.5TB of Splunk logs per month, improving analytics and reporting.
- Migrated Splunk workloads to in-house tooling, reducing licensing costs on a Splunk estate that ran to nearly $10M a year.
- Developed Tableau-integrated dashboards, reducing report generation time by 70% and improving data accessibility.
- Automated data transfers using SFTP and CentOS, improving system efficiency and reducing manual workload.
- Optimized Splunk query performance, improving log search speed and reducing resource consumption.
DevOps Engineer
BitPusher, LLC, San Francisco, CA
- Supported 20+ client AWS estates, each with its own configuration, carrying a 24x7 on-call rotation across all clients.
- Managed both internal and client codebases with Chef and Terraform, and designed solutions for chronic cross-client issues.
- Built a Lambda pipeline rotating client logs from the web stack through CloudWatch and S3 to Glacier.
Telecommunications Operator/Maintainer (74G)
United States Army, 86th Signal Battalion, Fort Huachuca, AZ
Army communications. Completed Advanced Individual Training as a Telecommunications Operator/Maintainer (74G) at Fort Gordon, GA (now Fort Eisenhower), then served with the 86th Signal Battalion at Fort Huachuca, AZ, operating and maintaining the systems that moved message traffic between commands and qualifying in Message Switch Center Operations (ASI Z2). The work required a Top Secret clearance, since deactivated.
- Operated and maintained automatic message switching systems and the satellite and radio circuits they depended on.
- Handled cryptographic equipment and keying material under COMSEC procedures.
- Enforced information, operational, and physical security at the communications site.
- Worked to strict message-handling and routing protocols, where a formatting error could misroute or delay traffic.
- Wrote and debugged system-specific code for message routing and formatting.
- Performed electronics maintenance: preventive checks, fault isolation, and repair on communications and test equipment.
Additional Professional Experience
DevOps Engineer
Auris Robotics, Redwood City, CA
Developed a structured retention policy for Artifactory, automating cleanup processes to optimize storage and improve system performance. Managed AWS infrastructure across 50+ servers and supported CI/CD workflows using GitLab and Bash.
Site Reliability Engineer
IT Renew, Newark, CA
Created Ansible playbooks for software installation and updates, automating deployments for hardware testing and development teams. Managed over 50 servers, leveraging IPMI, Golang, and custom Ansible variables to optimize infrastructure management.
DevOps Engineer
Stitcher, San Francisco, CA
Implemented a foundational Docker container framework to standardize code generation across development teams. Led rollback strategy development, AWS cost evaluations, and monitoring improvements using New Relic and Jenkins.