I am a senior production engineer and SRE with over 25 years of experience delivering production systems across finance, federal defense, healthcare, retail, media, and cybersecurity. Specializing in large-scale OS migrations (RHEL7 to EL8/EL9 across ~10,000 systems), configuration management modernizations (Chef to CINC), and packaging automation (yinst to RPM). I have deep expertise in CI/CD pipeline hardening, Python systems automation, and transitioning legacy observability frameworks (Yamas) to modern cloud-native telemetry (Chronosphere, Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk). I hold a Bachelor of Science in Physics (Atomic) from the University of California, Merced, and I integrate AI-assisted workflows (Claude Code and LLMs) into my daily operations for maximal speed and system integrity.
Career Highlights
10,000+ OS Migrations — Modernized configuration compliance and migrated ~10,000 systems/VMs from RHEL7 to EL8/EL9.
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.
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.
Global Scale Middleware — Architected the world's largest IBM MQSeries queue-manager cluster (4,000+ retail endpoints); co-developed a C++ workload-balancing algorithm merged into IBM's official product.
Cybersecurity Startup — Founding member and first Solutions Engineer at Silver Tail Systems, an Andreessen Horowitz–funded startup acquired by RSA Security.
Senior Information Security Engineer & Software Developer (SRE Focus)
Remediated enterprise security vulnerabilities across both Linux and Windows fleets, supporting over 10,000 systems.
Rewrote the Red Hat 9.5 Linux Gold Image build process completely in Python using the HashiCorp suite (Vault, Consul, Packer, Terraform) to support modern OS migrations.
Hardened CI/CD pipelines, integrated zero-trust secrets management, and automated SCAP, PCI DSS, and CIS Benchmark remediation.
Comcast / NBCUniversalApr 2023 – Dec 2023
Senior SRE & Automation Engineer (Consultant)
Engineered platform automation and automated deployments for the residential Xfinity system using Python, Ruby on Rails, and AWS.
Rewrote and re-platformed the Xfinity Platform Operations Portal onto Docker Compose and Kubernetes to improve platform observability.
Walt DisneyAug 2022 – Mar 2023
Senior SRE & Software Developer (Consultant)
Managed AWS environments using Docker, ECS, and serverless AWS architectures; built a Python/Flask-based RESTful attestation service to harden edge network endpoints.
Developed self-healing AWS Lambda jobs to automate LDAP and database corrections, reducing manual support tickets.
Peraton — U.S. DoD ContractorOct 2021 – Aug 2022
Senior Cloud Technology Developer & Production Engineer (Principal)
Created the Linux kernel 5 build system and golden ISO image for a FedRAMP-certified government cloud platform, upgraded from kernel version 4 to 5.
Built and configured custom RPM packages, replacing legacy configurations, and architected zero-trust microservice stacks on Amazon EKS.
Authored the Terraform/Ansible network and disaster-reconstitution design for Peraton's AWS Federal Treasury bid.
Warner BrothersJun 2021 – Aug 2021
Architect, SRE & Software Engineer (Consultant)
Hardened AWS 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.
CloudPassageDec 2019 – Oct 2020
Architect, Full-Stack & SRE Engineer
Engineered Ruby security software protecting 250,000+ servers; implemented NIST CVSS 3.1 scoring and automated ingestion of Red Hat/Microsoft vulnerability data.
Planned and executed a complex OS migration from CentOS 5/6 to RHEL 7/8 with Chef 12/14 across 1,400+ instances (laying groundwork for open-source CINC transitions).
Refactored and consolidated 68 unique Chef cookbooks to eliminate critical logical issues; automated Vault TLS certificate lifecycle and built custom RPM packages.
Earlier Roles1998 – 2018
Kaiser Permanente — Systems and Reliability Engineering; built custom Chef cookbooks and automated configurations across AWS, Azure, and vCenter.
EMC Corp / Apple iCloud — SRE for Apple iCloud object storage at exabyte scale; master provisioner for VMware vCloud Air 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)