Staff-level software engineer and platform engineer in Gulf Breeze, Florida. I build backend systems, internal platforms, developer tools, CI/CD workflows, cloud infrastructure, and practical automation for teams that need working software more than theater.

U.S. citizen. Recently held TS clearance. CompTIA Security+.

Most recent work has been in defense and mission software: Platform One Big Bang, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab/GitHub automation, air-gapped delivery, ATO/compliance evidence, and secure developer workflows. Earlier work spans high-scale backend systems, chaos engineering platforms, Ruby/Rails consulting, eCommerce, business intelligence, and technical writing.

Current Focus

• Backend and platform engineering
• Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, CI/CD, and production operations
• Developer tooling, CLIs, ChatOps, and automation
• Secure delivery, DevSecOps, restricted environments, and compliance support
• Agent-assisted software development with tests, guardrails, and human review

Recent Experience

Radius Method - Principal Platform Engineer

April 2024 - June 2026

Platform One Big Bang and RepoSync engineering.

• Led RepoSync engineering: a TypeScript/Node event-driven service synchronizing Git content across roughly 100 projects between DoD GitLab Enterprise and the Platform One GitHub organization.
• Moved inherited GovCloud infrastructure from fragile clickops toward Terraform, Helm, CI/CD, managed secrets, container publishing, and repeatable deployment paths.
• Helped execute an ATO-driven AWS account migration under deadline pressure, including Terraform-managed resources, S3/RDS data movement, Secrets Manager configuration, and architecture documentation.
• Served as a Big Bang anchor engineer, reviewing and improving work across Kubernetes packages, CI templates, policy migration, security automation, and release workflows.
• Authored 150+ merged Repo1 merge requests and 28 merged merge requests in Big Bang’s pipeline-templates CI monorepo.
• Built reusable ShellCheck/BATS/JUnit/Cobertura quality gates, Renovate improvements, token scanning, release fixes, and CI/deploy automation.
• Built and published GitLab Kiosk, a Go CLI workbench for safe, public-only Repo1/GitLab inspection by humans and coding agents.
• Improved SocketZero artifact integrity and container delivery with GHCR image sourcing, digest pinning, Renovate-compatible updates, Iron Bank-compatible images, and SHA256 checksums.
• Worked on Kyverno CEL policy migration, k3d/k3s local development workflows, Iron Bank VAT triage, and package-validation tooling.

Metronome - Senior Full Stack Software Engineer

January 2024 - April 2024

• Served as a go-to Platform One Big Bang resource for service deployment, hosting, reliability, capacity planning, and platform management.
• Built TypeScript, Apollo GraphQL, React, and InfluxDB product features.
• Built Node.js bindings around existing C library code to reuse validated mainframe/Unix weather and math logic instead of rewriting complex domain behavior from scratch.

Rebellion Defense - Staff SWE / Runtime Lead / Senior Backend Engineer

March 2021 - January 2024

• Led Runtime team work to bring an AWS-first product into its first air-gapped DoD deployment using Docker containers on a prebaked virtual machine image.
• Ported SBIR experimental software from an ECS/EKS-tested model to an air-gapped RHEL delivery path, using pydoit to reshape code, package artifacts, and support DVD transfer.
• Built GitHub Actions workflows for air-gapped delivery so required artifacts were assembled from main-branch automation instead of local-only handwork.
• Helped migrate Rebellion from GitLab Enterprise to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, including ARC-backed GitHub Actions self-hosted runners on AWS EKS.
• Led design and delivery of a load-tested and failure-tested shared Kubernetes hosting service on AWS EKS using Terraform, Helm, Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki.
• Served as a go-to ATO/compliance sensemaker and artifact producer, writing explanations and producing screenshots/diagrams showing how software behavior or AWS configuration satisfied specific requirements.
• Worked on defense product architecture and integrations using Python, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, TypeScript, React, chatbots, and LLM-enabled workflows.
• Worked heavily on FIPS compliance for Keycloak setups and earned CompTIA Security+ when required for hands-on mission work.

CrowdStrike - Senior Engineer

June 2020 - March 2021

• Built backend services, operations systems, and event processing at over half a trillion events daily.
• Worked with Go, protobufs, API gateways, Spark, Kubernetes, AWS, ElasticSearch, Terraform, Kafka, Cassandra, Redis, Splunk, and ElastiCache.
• Supported Spinnaker canary releases, EC2-to-Kubernetes migration patterns, and production incident triage.

Gremlin - Senior Platform Engineer

June 2018 - April 2020

• Provided AWS-first platform and infrastructure strategy for a chaos engineering company using Lambda, Kubernetes, Terraform, CloudFormation, and Linux.
• Built custom tooling in Go, Python, and Ruby when off-the-shelf tools were not a fit.
• Created automated serverless build/deployment workflows and low-friction ChatOps tooling for multiple engineering teams.
• Served as primary on-call owner for infra/ops systems and used Datadog heavily for production operations.

Earlier Work

Clear Function - Senior Software Engineer

2015 - 2018

• Piloted Kubernetes and serverless research across AWS, Google, and Microsoft cloud environments.
• Built consulting solutions across Ruby, Heroku, C#/.NET, Stripe/payment-adjacent systems, Docker Compose, Vagrant, Ansible, and legacy PHP.
• Instrumented applications with APM, background jobs, and fault-detection analytics.
• Built custom integration tooling around difficult WSDL/XSD contracts so customer integrations could move forward.

Railsdog / Coroutine / Freelance Consulting

2009 - 2015

• Led boutique consulting delivery, product strategy, engineering process, staffing, and technical leadership for eCommerce and custom web application projects.
• Delivered Ruby on Rails and Spree storefronts for retailers with multi-million-dollar annual revenue.
• Built payment, shipping, label generation, tax, asset storage, background job, and deployment workflows.
• Worked with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, Redis, Memcached, AMQP, RSpec, Chef, Ansible, Heroku, AWS EC2, Rackspace, and Linode.

Earlier Enterprise, Startup, and BI Work

• Cofounded Motega and built a Python/MongoDB data pipeline for bringing machine-learning models from academia toward enterprise use.
• Served as Senior Business Intelligence Programmer/Analyst at Fred’s Inc.
• Built business intelligence, reporting, enterprise collaboration, SAP planning, XML interchange, and financial reporting systems at International Paper.
• Started professionally in IT systems, reporting, PHP/MySQL, C++, Visual Basic, and federated criminal justice database research.

Public Work and Writing

• Long-running GitHub user with 150+ public repositories and extensive public gists across workflow tools, CI experiments, CLIs, Ruby/Rails, Go, and developer automation.
• Built public tools and experiments including GitLab Kiosk, repo1-scanner, snag, tagflow.wow, and other small workflow tools.
• Contributed upstream fixes and proposals to projects including k3d, Charmbracelet gum, Cobra, and OpenAI Codex.
• Authored public Codex product feedback and diagnostics around host-faithful local execution, command observability, approvals, sandboxing, Bubblewrap/AppArmor behavior, and agent workbench ergonomics.
• Published Build Chatbot Interactions: Responsive, Intuitive Interfaces with Ruby with The Pragmatic Bookshelf, covering chat automation, integrations, deployment workflows, automated testing, and human-in-the-loop bot patterns.

Skills

TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, Go, Python, Ruby, Rails, React, GraphQL, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL Server, Redis, Kafka, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Spark, AWS, GovCloud, EKS, S3, RDS, SQS, Lambda, IAM, Kubernetes, k3d, k3s, Helm, Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, GitHub Apps, GitLab API, Linux, Bash, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Splunk, Datadog, Renovate, Semgrep, TruffleHog, ShellCheck, BATS, JUnit, RSpec, TDD, technical leadership.

Education

• The University of Alabama - MS, Computer Science
• The University of Alabama - BS, Management Information Systems

Certifications

• CompTIA Security+