Husband, father, software engineer, tech nerd in Minneapolis, MN. He/him.

Interested in my experience and looking for some of my time? I am available for advisory and project based contracts through CirrusNorth.

About Me

• 12+ years of software engineering experience.
• Multi discipline experience with architecture, tech leadership, development, devops, and security/compliance.
• Enthusiastic; committed to continuous improvement and gaining new skills.

Clouds: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure

Skills: DevOps, MLOps, DevSecOps, Platform Engineering, Software/Cloud Architecture

Languages: PHP, Typescript/JS, Java, Python, Go, HTML/CSS, Bash Scripting

Monitoring: Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, CloudWatch, ELK, DataDog, many others

CI/CD Tools: ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, many others

Infra. Automation: Ansible, Terraform, Cloud Build, Cloud Formation

Container orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS), ECS/Fargate, Cloud Run, OpenShift

Compliance Frameworks/Regulations: SOC2, HIPAA, HITRUST, GDPR ometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Kibana/ES, New Relic, DataDog, Splunk

Certifications

Certified Kubernetes Administrator / Linux Foundation - April 2024

Professional Experience

DevOps Consultant at Vandeweghe Consulting via CirrusNorth - Jan 2024 - Present

Software consultant through the CirrusNorth agency focused on cloud an DevOps projects in all three major clouds.

Lead DevOps Engineer at Ellipsis Health - Aug 2023 - Present

• Lead engineer focused on platform engineering in a high velocity startup environment in a high-regulation industry.
• Led and built DevOps standards/culture for engineering (including product, ML and Data teams) as the first platform hire.
• Provided cloud architecture in a multi cloud environment.
• Platform and pipeline architecture for high throughput ML model delivery while managing high-cost GPU resources.

Senior Platform Engineer at Optum - Aug 2021 - Aug 2023

• Built, maintained, and improved high-scale Kubernetes cluster automation with dozens of clusters containing hundreds of nodes.
• Completed 20+ migrations of high-scale, production clusters with no down time.
• Provided design consultation, implementation assistance, and training on cloud solutions for dozens of development teams with hundreds of developers, and other operations focused teams, including the primary method for network crossing messaging traffic.
• Coordinated change with dozens of stakeholders, including developers, security teams, other infrastructure teams.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at SilverCloud Health - Nov 2020 - August 2021

• Defined standards for the engineering team at large as the first platform hire.
• Migrated the engineering and product teams to git from mercurial; managing training, providing one-on-one assistance, and then performing the technical migration.
• Established a culture of pull requests and code review for software and infra changes.
• Containerized the core monolithic application and made their first microservice possible, deployed to both EKS and AKS through GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines.
• Managed platform migration from bespoke provider to both AWS to Azure.
• Changed process from manual infrastructure to infrastructure as code with Terraform.

Senior Software Engineer at PinkLion AI - Feb 2020 - Mar 2020

• Architected and built a data pipeline leveraging messaging architecture with FaaSs.
• Pipeline functions and data stores were deployed using Terraform and were highly scalable - moved millions of documents through an AI pipeline in minutes
• The pipeline piped the data into a RESTful API deployed to a Kubernetes cluster I also deployed with Terraform on GCP.

Senior Software Engineer at Kipsu Inc. - Feb 2014 - Jan 2020

• Leveraged Ansible to deploy infra and configure applications to our AWS cloud.
• Migrated workloads to AWS from a legacy hosting provider.
• Responded to incidents, triaged downtime, and monitored systems using CloudWatch.
• Set up log streaming to ElasticSearch/Kibana to gain deeper application insights.
• I designed a set of microservices that replaced core messaging functionality and deployed to ECS with Fargate using Ansible.
• Four separate times I lowered the primary DB utilization by 50% through system profiling, targeted refactoring, code improvements, and caching mechanism.
• Started the security working group to help the growing organization stay secure. I discovered and reported code vulnerabilities, including many of a critical - level. I designed the system used to rank, report and resolve vulnerabilities by impact.
• Mentored engineers and guided leadership on development, devops, design, and security; presented stack, devops, and security topics to the team to spread knowledge.
• Designed, built, deployed and monitored major core systems, leading development on many backend systems.
• Maintained core systems, including major language level changes across all parts of the software lifecycle; pushed for continuous improvement at all times.

Freelance Web Developer - Mar 2012 - Jan 2014

• Projects varied from changes to ISP billing systems to deploying and administering linux servers, to scraping thousands of retail supplier data records for a retailer

B.S. Computer Science / Metropolitan State University - 2017