DevOps Engineering Manager at Live Oak Bank
September 2022 - Present
Previously:- Staff DevOps Engineer February 2025 - February 2026
- Senior DevOps Engineer September 2022 - February 2025
- Lead platform strategy and roadmap for a DevOps team supporting multiple engineering groups, aligning infrastructure decisions with business and compliance requirements.
- Drive cross-team standardization of tooling and delivery practices, reducing per-team pipeline variance and improving time-to-production across the engineering org.
- Architect CI/CD and platform infrastructure that scales across teams while maintaining auditability and governance controls for a regulated banking environment.
- Built a release orchestration tool in Go that reduced manual release steps and improved rollback safety across production deployments.
- Developed and open-sourced a Terraform provider and Go API client for a third-party integration, enabling self-service infrastructure for downstream teams.
- Established observability practices for CI/CD pipelines, giving engineering leadership visibility into delivery performance for the first time.
Key technology:
AWS, CI/CD, DataDog, Devcontainers, Docker, GitLab, GitOps, Go, Golang, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Platform Engineering, Python, Shell, Terraform, Traefik
Lead DevSecOps Engineer at Ventera, Inc (US Geological Survey)
June 2022 - April 2023
- Contracted to USGS Water Resources Mission Area to modernize critical national water data services used by researchers and the public.
- Built AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines for serverless Python applications and static websites, reducing deployment time and operational overhead.
- Integrated automated security scanning and compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines, reducing manual review burden on development teams.
Key technology:
AWS, CloudFormation, GitLab, Python
Lead DevOps Engineer at Apogee Engineering, LLC (US Geological Survey)
September 2015 - May 2022
Previously:- Senior DevOps Engineer September 2015 - December 2019
- Owned platform architecture and infrastructure for dozens of USGS scientific data products serving millions of public users.
- Led migration of 200+ projects from legacy CI/CD systems to GitLab, standardizing delivery practices across a large multi-team organization.
- Deployed configuration management at scale using Puppet and Ansible across hundreds of Linux systems, eliminating configuration drift and reducing incident response time.
- Migrated dozens of applications from on-premise to AWS using Docker, cutting infrastructure costs and enabling teams to scale workloads independently.
- Mentored engineers and scientists in DevOps practices, enabling teams to own and operate their own infrastructure without platform team dependency.
Key technology:
AWS, CI/CD, GitLab, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Platform Engineering, GitOps, Puppet, Python, Nginx, Traefik
Professional Services Engineer at Puppet Inc.
September 2013 - April 2015
- Delivered consulting and hands-on training on Puppet and DevOps practices to enterprise clients across multiple industries.
- Developed reusable Puppet modules and automation tooling adopted by client teams after engagements closed.
- Consistently earned strong client feedback for practical, no-nonsense technical guidance.
Key technology:
Puppet, Linux, Ruby, Git, Shell
Linux/Unix Systems Administrator at Douglas School District
January 2010 - September 2013
- Managed Linux/Unix infrastructure and server operations for a K-12 district environment.
- Introduced system automation and monitoring, reducing manual maintenance toil and improving uptime.
- Provided technical support and maintained core network services.
Key technology:
Linux, Unix, Puppet, Nginx, MySQL, KVM, PHP
