About
Senior platform engineer with 7+ years building and operating GitOps-driven infrastructure on AWS and Kubernetes. I turn manual, push-based ops into self-service platforms — Terraform and Crossplane for infrastructure as code, ArgoCD and FluxCD for delivery, ephemeral preview environments so nobody waits on somebody else's cluster — while cutting cloud spend (30% off an EKS bill) and shipping compliance-ready systems (CMMC and FedRAMP on AWS GovCloud). AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate. Never losing sense of humor.
Former professional opera singer, Cavalry Scout (19-D) — United States Army, martial arts teacher, personal trainer, restaurateur, bodyguard, and volunteer animal rescuer. Allergic to stagnation and mediocrity, but lover of all things with 4 paws. Always hungry to grow.
Where I've been
Built a CMMC-compliant, self-managed GitLab platform on AWS GovCloud from scratch: EKS, Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, S3, Pod Identity, Cilium Gateway API, cross-account ACM Private CA, Route 53, and an OKTA-backed NLB bridge into the corporate network. Designed a multi-account Crossplane control plane and authored nine function-pythonic composition steps across the full GitLab dependency chain. Migrated a Wiz FedRAMP tenant from Terraform to pure Crossplane with Upjet — 12 resource types. Delivered a CMMC L1/L2 gap analysis against all 14 NIST SP 800-171 Rev. 2 control families.
Brought Terraform and Terragrunt under GitOps with Burrito, moving deployments off developer workstations into one controlled place. Stood up automated drift detection to keep state continuously reconciled.
Replaced Terraform-automated infrastructure with Crossplane modules for a Kubernetes-native control plane. Moved push-based deployments to pull-based GitOps with ArgoCD and Helm, and secrets from AWS Secrets Manager to HashiCorp Vault. Led the move to ephemeral environments. Built Datadog dashboards and alerting for a corporate Jira platform.
Built the company's entire platform on Amazon EKS with modular Terraform kept DRY via Terragrunt. FluxCD and ArgoCD app-of-apps, extensive Helm charts driving automated isolated preview environments, canary and blue/green with Argo Rollouts and Image Updater. Cut EKS spend by 30%.
Ran EKS applications and infrastructure in a high-volume environment with FluxCD, ArgoCD and Helm. Designed and adopted Karpenter for node autoscaling. Added SOPS to the release cycle and envelope encryption across the EKS environment. Built a cross-functional incident-response system spanning engineering, product and legal, and mentored junior engineers.
Built and managed entire AWS environments with modular Terragrunt-style Terraform, plus the Kubernetes clusters and GitOps CI/CD inside them. Authored Jenkins and GitLab pipelines and automated operational work in Bash and Python.
DevOps Engineer at MiTek Industries (2019–2020); Systems & DevOps Administrator at Blue Spruce Capital (2018–2019); Systems Engineer at Integritechs (2017–2018); and progressive IT and systems roles across Travelopia, California Resources Corp. and Gold's Gym from 2013.