Kubernetes Platform Architect
who builds platforms that scale with
with k8s + IaC + Cloud + Agents

HMH Education Company

Remote

Principal DevOps Engineer

Promoted: Senior → Staff → Principal

March 2019 – Present

Platform engineer on a six-engineer platform team building internal developer platforms serving 400+ engineers and tens of millions of daily end users. Promoted three times as my scope grew.

• •Co-architected production Kubernetes platform across multiple clusters supporting hundreds of engineers. Cut time to first deploy from days to hours, with zero customer-impacting incidents since 2021
• •Built an internal Claude Code plugin marketplace and codified agentic engineering workflows, from PR orchestration to repo governance, that the whole team can install
• •Run observability as code: golden-signal monitors, SLOs, and error budgets for hundreds of services with thresholds derived from historical data and AI-assisted onboarding
• •Automated staffing and on-call health: hourly classification of every service on team staffing and on-call readiness, published into Datadog scorecards. Service ownership coverage rose from 2% to 83% in two weeks
• •Built an enterprise Terraform practice with reusable modules and TFE workspace patterns that cut provisioning from days to hours
• •Standardized ML platform onboarding for an AI-powered personalization product with self-service patterns. New tenants went from a year to production-ready in under two weeks
• •Led infrastructure migrations across the platform stack with a track record of zero downtime
• •Architected HashiCorp Vault infrastructure covering dynamic and static credentials, least-privilege access patterns, and integrations across AWS and Concourse
• •Invested heavily in documentation and runbooks so teams can self-serve instead of filing tickets
• •Drove continuous cost and performance improvements across the Kubernetes platform
• •Part of a six-engineer platform team with outsized organizational impact, delivering standardized patterns in thin, quickly iterated slices

This work lives in internal repositories I cannot link to, so these case studies are how I make it visible: real problems, real decisions, real outcomes. Ask the chat in the corner to go deeper on any of them.

MXOtech

Chicago, IL

Senior Systems Engineer

Promoted: Systems Administrator → Internal Systems Engineer → Senior Systems Engineer

October 2014 – March 2019

Managed services provider in Chicago supporting 100+ client environments. Grew from client-facing systems administrator into the engineer trusted with the infrastructure underpinning the company itself.

• •Ran on-site assessments and built the proposals that followed. Handled implementation and onboarding for new clients
• •Became the on-site engineer clients specifically requested, building the kind of trust that turns support visits into lasting relationships
• •Operated company data centers hosting client workloads, including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, under HIPAA requirements
• •Took a leading role in achieving HITRUST certification, going well beyond the scope of the role to get it done
• •Introduced CI pipelines that moved internal developers from shipping straight to production to a consistent promotion workflow
• •Slated for promotion to Director of IT at departure

Gestalt Community Schools

Memphis, TN

Director of Information Technology

July 2011 – July 2014

Charter school network in Memphis. Hired out of consulting to replicate Power Center Academy's proven one-to-one technology model across four more campuses, building the IT organization from scratch along the way.

• •Scaled a proven one-to-one technology program from one school to five campuses on an aggressive timeline, largely solo: imaged a thousand laptops and managed hundreds of iPads with Jamf
• •Ran the full teacher and scholar experience: curriculum tools, single sign-on, web filtering that kept kids safe, and reliable Wi-Fi for a one-to-one program that was still novel outside private schools
• •Delivered $1.5M in savings in a single year by assessing digital curriculum alongside teachers and administrators and cutting overlapping services. Unified access through Clever (then brand new) so everyone reached content, the LMS, and PowerSchool with one set of credentials
• •Replaced consumer-grade equipment with enterprise networking from Cisco, Aerohive, and Barracuda supporting 2,000+ students and staff
• •Handled everything a school throws at IT along the way: printing, phones, faxing, and all the rest