DevOps Engineering Manager at Live Oak Bank
September 2022 - Present
Earlier roles:- Staff DevOps Engineer February 2025 - February 2026
- Senior DevOps Engineer September 2022 - February 2025
- Lead the DevSecOps team and own its AI strategy for software delivery, serving an 85-person engineering org and business users (citizen developers) across a 1,000-person bank from one governed platform. 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 complementary 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.
- 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, reducing pipeline variance and time-to-production.
- 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, 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
Earlier roles:- 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, 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
