DevOps Engineering Manager at Live Oak Bank
September 2022 - Present
Roles:- DevOps Engineering Manager February 2026 - Present
- Staff DevOps Engineer February 2025 - February 2026
- Senior DevOps Engineer September 2022 - February 2025
- Lead DevSecOps and AI strategy for software delivery, building a platform that lets engineering teams and business users (citizen developers) adopt AI-driven development consistently and within enterprise standards and governance. Remain a hands-on technical lead and contributor.
- Established the team's operating model, including planning, a roadmap aligned to business priorities, and regular updates and demos across the org, earning the team a reputation as a trusted delivery partner.
- Led the team's delivery of AI tools on that platform, including a cloud coding agent, enterprise plugin distribution, and integrations that give users and their agents governed access to delivery systems, with the same guardrails and auditability as the rest of the platform.
- Led design and development of a shared knowledge base with an MCP server and agent skills that work across AI agents and platforms, including Microsoft Teams, so people and agents draw on the same context.
- Drove standardization of software delivery across hundreds of projects and more than a dozen engineering teams with a modular CI/CD platform that balances consistency and governance with team flexibility.
- Led the design of platform-as-code for AWS account structure, shared services, and Terraform modules, enabling self-service with built-in auditability.
- Built a Go release orchestration tool and open-sourced a Terraform provider and Go API client; added CI/CD delivery metrics that gave leadership its first view of delivery performance.
Key technology: AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Go, Python, MCP, Claude, Cursor
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. Full-time, then part-time from September 2022.
- Built AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines for serverless Python applications and static websites.
- Integrated automated security scanning and compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines.
Key technology: AWS, CloudFormation, GitLab, Python
Lead DevOps Engineer at Apogee Engineering, LLC (US Geological Survey)
September 2015 - May 2022
Roles:- Lead DevOps Engineer January 2020 - May 2022
- Senior DevOps Engineer September 2015 - December 2019
- Led 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.
- Migrated dozens of applications from on-premise to AWS using Docker, 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, GitLab, Docker, Terraform, Puppet, Ansible
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.
Key technology: Puppet, Linux, Ruby
Linux/Unix Systems Administrator at Douglas School District
January 2010 - September 2013
- Managed Linux/Unix infrastructure for a K-12 district, introducing configuration management and monitoring that reduced manual toil and improved uptime.
Key technology: Linux, Puppet, KVM
