Daniel Bodnar

SRE | Infrastructure Engineer | Solutions Architect | Linux Evangelist

Introduction

About: Self-motivated, passionate, and incredibly curious automator with 30 years experience in full-stack software engineering and 22+ years infrastructure / systems engineering. I am constantly growing, evolving, and improving. My curiosity and innovation thrive on the cutting edge, but my seasoned-experience anchors my solutions to the boringly-stable.

Why you may want me on your team: I have an insatiable drive to solve complex challenges. My greatest strength is not merely my current knowledge or prior experience, but my ability to quickly grasp new concepts and learn anything by diving into the deep end and mucking around, and then bringing order out of chaos. I come alive when given the opportunity to automate mundane, repetitive tasks and thrive in continually evolving environments or with frequent change.

Why I may not be your guy: I struggle with the mundane, routine maintenance period that comes after implementing a streamlined, efficient system and can't help seeking out problems to solve. I am not the ideal tool for the job if you're looking for someone to simply run and maintain a stable system.

Professional Experience

Fidelity Investments

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

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: AWS, AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, EKS, Helm, Jenkins, Docker, IAM, Terraform, Python, Node.js, Discourse, Alpine Linux

BitBuilder Cloud, LLC

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

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 (HPE DL385 Gen10 with dual AMD Epyc 7601, 512GB RAM, 30TB NVMe; plus HPE DL380 Gen8 for development/testing)

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: Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, Bare Metal, ZFS, NVMe, Grafana, Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, NetData, Jaeger, Multi-cloud, Hybrid Infrastructure

RSVP & ACT, Inc

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

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
  • Notable tech: Container tools (cri-o, containerd, podman, lxc/lxd), kubeadm, ansible, terraform, cloudflare, metallb, cloud-config, ipxe, minio.io, and various rancher services
• Deployed and managed self-hosted GitLab instance with DevOps build pipelines and automatic blue-green deployments to Kubernetes
  • Notable tools: linkerd, haproxy, nginx, traefik, trivy, helm, kubevela, and misc custom scripts in makefiles / bash
• Implemented monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, and observability tools to assess and preemptively address limitations, bottlenecks and performance restraints
  • Stack: Grafana + Loki + Prometheus, Jaeger, ELK, NetData, and Zabbix
• Implemented and enforced GitLab-based Infrastructure-as-Code procedures and pipelines using Terraform, Packer, Ansible, and iPXE/cloud-config scripts
• 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
  • Tools: nmap, metasploit, wazuh, openvas/nessus, trivy, vuls.io, wireguard, teleport, private certificate-authority, and misc PKI tools

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 without risking exposure of sensitive internal servers and services
• 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 for internal R&D use

Technologies: Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, GitLab, Docker, Proxmox, ZFS, InfiniBand, Ansible, Terraform, Wireguard, VPN, VLAN

Perspectives.org

IT Director | January 2018 - April 2019 | Remote

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

AT&T Corp.

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

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: 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).

Professional Development

Homelab: I have a really nice homelab consisting of a HPE DL385 (gen10) with dual Epyc 7601, 512GB RAM, and 30TB NVMe storage (all cherry-picked off ebay) and an older but similarly spec'd DL380 (gen8) that serves as a safe non-production playground to learn, explore, and experiment on.

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References available upon request