Matt Feenstra

Senior DevOps Platform · Site Reliability · Information Security Engineer

About

I am a senior engineer with 25+ years delivering production systems and infrastructure across finance, federal defense, healthcare, retail, media, and cybersecurity. My work spans DevOps platform engineering and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible, HashiCorp Vault/Consul/Packer) at fleet scale — including a Python-based enterprise Gold Image pipeline and configuration compliance across ~10,000 systems — software development in Python and Ruby on Rails, Kubernetes/Docker platform engineering, and compliance-driven security automation (FedRAMP, NIST, PCI-DSS, HIPAA). I hold a Bachelor of Science in Physics (Atomic) from the University of California, Merced, and I continually integrate AI-assisted tooling — Claude Code and other LLMs — into my engineering workflow for measurable efficiency gains.

Career Highlights

Infrastructure as Code at Fleet Scale — Architected the enterprise Ansible Automation Platform and a Python/Terraform/Packer/Vault image pipeline driving configuration compliance across ~10,000 systems.
FedRAMP Government Cloud — Created and delivered the FedRAMP-compliant Linux distribution (kernel 5 golden image) for a U.S. government cloud platform used by the Department of Homeland Security, the Navy, the Army, the Coast Guard, and the Pentagon.
Enterprise Security — Engineered Ruby-based security software protecting 250,000+ servers for AT&T, Netflix, Sony, and Intel, implementing NIST CVSS 3.1.
Kubernetes & Container Platform Engineering — Rewrote and re-platformed the Xfinity Platform Operations Portal onto Docker Compose and Kubernetes for Comcast/NBCUniversal.
Scale Infrastructure — Automated Cloudera Hadoop clusters behind the Zelle payment network — 68 Chef cookbooks, 100+ petabytes across 1,400+ instances — with full PCI DSS compliance.
Cybersecurity Startup — Founding member and first Solutions Engineer at Silver Tail Systems, an Andreessen Horowitz–funded startup acquired by RSA Security.

Skills

Python Ruby / Rails Terraform (HCL) Ansible / AAP HashiCorp Vault & Consul Packer / Image Engineering Kubernetes & EKS Docker & Docker Compose Chef / CINC GCP / AWS / Azure / VMware GitLab CI/CD & Jenkins Linux Kernel & OS Build Systems Prometheus / Grafana / Chronosphere Splunk & SIEM logging Zero-Trust Architecture SCAP / CIS Benchmarks FedRAMP / NIST 800 PCI DSS & HIPAA SRE / Incident Response AI-Assisted Engineering (Claude Code)

Experience

US Bank (US Bancorp) Dec 2023 – Present

Senior Information Security Engineer & Production Engineer

Designed and implemented the enterprise Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, driving infrastructure-as-code compliance across ~10,000 systems in Linux and Windows fleets.
Re-architected the Red Hat 9.5 Linux Gold Image build entirely in Python with the HashiCorp suite (Vault, Consul, Packer, Terraform), delivered through hardened GitLab CI/CD pipelines across Azure, AWS, VMware, QEMU/KVM, and bare metal.
Automated SCAP, PCI DSS, and CIS Benchmark remediation across the fleet with zero-trust secrets management.

Comcast / NBCUniversal Apr 2023 – Dec 2023

Senior SRE & Automation Engineer (Consultant)

Rewrote and re-platformed the Xfinity Platform Operations Portal onto Docker Compose and Kubernetes to improve deployment reliability and platform observability.
Engineered platform automation and automated deployments for the residential Xfinity system using Python, Ruby on Rails, and AWS.

Walt Disney Aug 2022 – Mar 2023

Senior SRE & Software Developer (Consultant)

Built self-healing AWS Lambda jobs to automate remediation of database and LDAP data issues, reducing manual operational support tickets.
Managed AWS environments using Docker, ECS, and serverless architectures; built a Python/Flask attestation service to harden edge network endpoints.

Peraton — U.S. DoD Contractor Oct 2021 – Aug 2022

Senior Cloud Technology Developer & Production Engineer (Principal)

Architected a reusable zero-trust HashiCorp microservices stack (Vault, Consul) on Amazon EKS, and authored the Terraform/Ansible network design for a Federal Treasury bid including failover and disaster-reconstitution runbooks.
Created the Linux kernel build system and golden ISO image for the FedRAMP-certified Cloudseed private government cloud.

Warner Brothers Jun 2021 – Aug 2021

Architect, SRE & Software Engineer (Consultant)

Hardened AWS automation pipelines (Chef, Puppet, Ansible) and provided Tier-2 incident response for critical media feeds powering HBO Max, TNT, and NBA TV.
Created reusable AWS S3/EBS integration libraries for IBM Aspera Orchestrator workflow automation.

CloudPassage Dec 2019 – Oct 2020

Architect, Full-Stack & SRE Engineer

Built infrastructure-as-code automation with Chef, Docker, and Elasticsearch in AWS for Ruby security software running on 250,000+ servers; implemented NIST CVSS 3.1 scoring.

Early Warning Services (Zelle) Jan 2019 – Nov 2019

Senior Technical Lead, DevOps & Configuration Management

Provisioned Cloudera Hadoop infrastructure into VMware vCenter and AWS with Terraform: 18 instance types, 30 roles, 40 environments, 100+ petabytes across 1,400+ instances.
Planned and executed the CentOS 5/6 → RHEL 7/8 migration with Chef 12/14 and automated the TLS certificate lifecycle with HashiCorp Vault.

Earlier Roles 1998 – 2018

Kaiser Permanente — Systems and Reliability Engineering; built custom Chef cookbooks and automated configurations across AWS, Azure, and vCenter.
MedHost — Architected HIPAA-compliant AWS infrastructure and configured Splunk/Sumo Logic/Logstash observability stacks serving 2,000+ healthcare units.
EMC Corp / Apple iCloud — SRE for Apple iCloud object storage at exabyte scale; master provisioner for VMware vCloud Air private cloud offerings.
Realtor.com, Wells Fargo, Consensus (Target) — Led DevOps, SRE, custom RPM packaging, and web fraud prevention.
Silver Tail Systems — Deployed anti-fraud platforms at PayPal, Sears, and DoD as the first Solutions Engineer at this security startup.
Gap Inc, Barclays, IBM Global Services — Middleware SRE at global scale; co-developed the workload-balancing algorithm for the world's largest IBM MQSeries cluster.
McKesson HBOC — Began career in NOC operations, Unix systems, and Perl development (1998).

Education

University of California, Merced — Bachelor of Science, Physics (Atomic)

Code & Writing

More than 40 original code repositories: github.com/mfeenstra · github.com/matt-books
Technology newsletter and Linux tips: mattnote.blogspot.com