Professional Experience

A timeline of my career journey and professional experience as a systems and platform architect, full stack sofware engineer, platform engineering, cloud architecture, site reliability engineering, and systems administration.

Early Career Highlights

• Built my first website at 11, on a legal pad...in my bathroom... four years after the birth of the Internet
• At 17 I was writing HL7 (medical data exchange) protocols in MS DOS-based FoxPro 2.1
• At 19 I accepted a position as Windows Network Administration/SysAdmin of a small office, responsible for domain controllers, workstations, and firewalls
• Launched and ran TACC Support for five years, managing up to five employees

BitBuilder Cloud, LLC

Founder, Cloud Architect, CIO 2021 - Present | Remote | Self-employed

Launched a Cloud Hosting and Consulting private SaaS company with a focus on providing a vendor-agnostic, e2e encrypted, highly-available, and globally distributed hyper-converged platform for cost-efficient resiliency against hostile attackers.

Infrastructure

Built on co-located custom bare metal servers:

• Primary: HPE DL385 Gen10 with dual AMD Epyc 7601, 512GB RAM, 30TB NVMe
• Development: HPE DL380 Gen8 for testing and experimentation
• Total Resources: 2TB+ RAM, 320 cores, 64TB NVMe storage

Key Achievements

• Single-handedly built core services on co-located custom bare metal servers with over 2TB RAM, 320 cores, 64TB NVMe storage
• Containerized and load-balanced several high-profile organizations with 1M+ global visitors/day
• Orchestrated global scaling via multi-cloud hybrid overlay layer based on custom k8s distribution and immutable Linux systems
• Implemented constant monitoring and observability using Grafana, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, NetData, and Jaeger

Technologies Used

Kubernetes Docker Linux Bare Metal ZFS NVMe Grafana Prometheus VictoriaMetrics NetData Jaeger Load Balancing Multi-cloud Hybrid Infrastructure E2E Encryption

Fidelity Investments

Principal Software, DevOps, and Cloud Engineer 2023 - 2025 | Remote | Full-time

Served as a technical leader and cloud architect, designing and implementing enterprise-scale cloud solutions while mentoring teams on AWS best practices and modern DevOps methodologies.

Key Achievements

• Architected comprehensive AWS solutions for enterprise applications, including designing secure networking topologies and multi-account strategies
• Developed and implemented robust IAM policies and CloudFormation templates adhering to strict financial industry security standards
• Designed and built a full AWS CDK platform enabling teams to rapidly deploy standardized, compliant infrastructure
• Engineered Kubernetes-based deployment solutions leveraging EKS, Helm charts, and custom operators for application management
• Rebuilt and optimized the Jenkins Core platform, increasing build efficiency and reducing pipeline execution times
• Created a cloud orchestration CLI tool that simplified cross-account resource management and deployment workflows
• Successfully deployed and managed Discourse forums on Alpine Linux containers in Kubernetes, ensuring high availability and performance
• Implemented infrastructure-as-code practices across multiple teams, significantly reducing configuration drift and deployment errors
• Designed and implemented automated security scanning and compliance checking within CI/CD pipelines
• Led knowledge-sharing sessions and developed documentation to elevate team capabilities in cloud-native technologies

Technologies Used

AWS AWS CDK CloudFormation Kubernetes EKS Helm Jenkins Docker IAM Terraform Python Node.js Discourse Alpine Linux Infrastructure-as-Code CI/CD Security Scanning

RSVP & ACT, Inc

SRE, SysAdmin, and Platforms Engineer April 2019 - 2021 | Remote | Full-time

Site Reliability Engineer, Level II

Directly responsible for identifying capacity and efficiency constraints, as well as engineering secure, highly-available, horizontally scalable platforms to run production environment apps, services, databases, and infrastructure.

Key Achievements

• Worked closely with dev teams and other departments to assess needs, constraints, and manual toil, then crafted automated and efficient solutions specifically designed to address these needs
• Architected, deployed, and managed dynamically scaling, secure, and fully version-controlled bare-metal Kubernetes clusters
• Responsible for all migrations from legacy systems to Kubernetes
• Deployed and managed self-hosted GitLab instance with DevOps build pipelines and automatic blue-green deployments to Kubernetes
• Implemented monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and observability tools
• Implemented and enforced GitLab-based Infrastructure-as-Code procedures and pipelines
• Implemented and maintained ArchLinux and Debian package repos where appropriate
• Managed and performance-tuned +3.5TB PostgreSQL database cluster, as well as numerous MySQL and SQLite databases
• Deployed and managed multiple host, network, and container security tools and vulnerability scanners

Notable Tech Stack

Container Tools: cri-o, containerd, podman, lxc/lxd, kubeadm, ansible, terraform, cloudflare, metallb, cloud-config, ipxe, minio.io

DevOps Tools: linkerd, haproxy, nginx, traefik, trivy, helm, kubevela

Observability: Grafana + Loki + Prometheus, Jaeger, ELK, NetData, Zabbix

Security: nmap, metasploit, wazuh, openvas/nessus, trivy, vuls.io, wireguard, teleport, PKI tools

Linux SysAdmin

Directly responsible for and fully owned the management, maintenance, and support of all internal and external IT infrastructure, including all servers, networking, VPNs, and workstations.

Key Achievements

• Simplified and standardized various independent hypervisors with a centralized Proxmox cluster on ZFS and a 56G InfiniBand FC SAN
• Deployed W2019 AD server environment to centralize user accounts and management of 50+ workstations, 10+ Windows-based servers, and 3 separate shared remote desktop servers
• Managed all internal tech support responsibilities for the first year to maintain a short feedback loop while re-architecting the entire IT infrastructure
• Implemented organization-wide VPN (using Wireguard), VLANs, and several other measures to secure and lock down a multitude of risks and vulnerabilities
• Provided training to existing staff to address knowledge-gaps that caused vulnerabilities
• Mitigated two ransomware hacks within the first month of employment
• Engineered a convenient and easily-managed solution to provide isolated, zero-trust access to 3rd-party external developers
• Implemented customized Windows PE & Linux based iPXE/network boot servers to streamline provisioning VMs and workstations
• Engineered secure, resilient reverse-tunnels & storage services to allow efficient imaging and virtualization of external client devices

Technologies Used

Kubernetes PostgreSQL MySQL SQLite GitLab Docker Proxmox ZFS InfiniBand Ansible Terraform Wireguard VPN VLAN Monitoring Observability DevOps Infrastructure-as-Code

Perspectives.org

IT Director January 2018 - April 2019 | Remote | Full-time

About: Perspectives is an international NGO which provides a college level educational course with an average 250+ classes with 10k students per year.

Key Achievements

• Led the IT team and support department as well as India-based dev team to support existing infrastructure while developing a 5 year vision roadmap to rebuild legacy monolithic .NET 3.5 application into 18 modern department and role-based portals
• Provided oversight, direction, and leadership to the volunteer-based IT team and support department, as well as India-based dev teams
• Resolved performance and efficiency issues:
  • Increased cloud hosting capacity and resources by 10x while reducing budget by 50%
  • Reduced minimum page load time from 5 seconds to an average of 0.8 seconds
• Developed a foundation "seed" template for each portal, including a promo landing site, authenticated webapp, and backend API
• Built a DRM-secured offline-enabled streaming video player desktop app in Go for classes with unreliable internet

Volunteer Contributions (2012-2014)

• Redesigned and developed a modern-replacement for perspectives.org home page and info site
• Created a simple, beautiful, highly streamlined and intuitive online Learning Management System from scratch to modernize existing pen-and-paper-based process, which reduced overhead by over 90%
• Deployed LMS tool to all Texas-based classes and architected an automatic, horizontally scaling container orchestration platform (Docker, Rancher, and iPXE-based RancherOS and AWS Spot Instances) to handle traffic and load spikes

Technologies Used

Go Docker Rancher AWS Cloud Orchestration iPXE Container Orchestration .NET Performance Optimization DRM Video Streaming LMS Horizontal Scaling

AT&T Corp.

Professional Application Developer March 2014 - June 2017 | Dallas, TX | Full-time

Full stack application engineer building custom web-based tools and services for various internal departments.

Key Achievements

• Solely responsible for managing the entire project pipeline (prior to implementing Scrum), including meeting with department heads to assess needs, scope requirements, develop rapid prototypes, and deploy to production
• Led team-wide migration from Rails/MySQL stack to Node.js, Angular.js, and MongoDB - which allowed for significantly faster prototyping and lower barrier-to-entry for new developers
  • (Note: this was the early days of node v0.10.38 and angular was still in beta)
• Engineered a Docker-based DevOps and deployment pipeline that improved efficiencies and reliability both in hosting environment and developer productivity
• Exclusively responsible for architecting and building a large-scale external "Order Status" application and a decoupled microservice pipeline that aggregated orders from over a dozen different legacy sources, including some that had to be screen-scraped
• Learned and mastered functional programming in JavaScript to address the challenges and complexity of building high-performance, parallel-worker pipelines in an asynchronous language

Technologies Used

Node.js Angular.js MongoDB Docker Rails MySQL JavaScript Functional Programming Microservices DevOps CI/CD REST APIs

Prior Experience (> 8 years ago)

TACC Support (2007-2013)

Owned my own computer repair / IT consulting / MSP company for 5+ years, with as many as 5 employees at a time.

Full company name: Technicians Against Computer Cruelty

TicketDashboard (2013-2014)

Launched a business around a redesigned and re-engineered version of the homegrown ticket manager I wrote for TACC Support into a multi-tenant SaaS solution.

Tech stack: MongoDB, Node.js, Python, Angular, Bootstrap

DIAB, INC

International plastics manufacturing plant - Virtualized the entire US-based operations multi-site server infrastructure (of ~30 bare-metal servers) on ESXi.

iPeople.com

Provided technical advice and support to help customers leverage proprietary ODBC drivers to access an archaic database system used by hospitals (Meditech).

Related Pages

• Skills - Technical expertise breakdown
• Resume - Downloadable CV
• Tech Stacks - Preferred tool combinations