Senior Systems Administrator#
December 2022 – Present
I own the infrastructure-as-code codebase for a multi-site production environment — Terraform for provisioning, Ansible for configuration, with RKE2 Kubernetes clusters running production workloads under Rancher and Flux. The scope covers everything from VM template pipelines to cluster provisioning to the PKI and secrets layer that underpins it all.
The credential model is zero static tokens: GitLab pipelines authenticate via JWT federation, OpenBao validates against project and ref, and every secret has a defined lifecycle. Certificate issuance is fully automated — a JWT login bootstraps the process, Ansible delivers a response-wrapped AppRole secret-id, and OpenBao Agent handles per-host renewal from there. Nothing in a pipeline variable, nothing in an Ansible vault.
DNS is treated the same way: a hidden BIND primary with OctoDNS and Terraform as the only write sources, DNSSEC with keys stored in OpenBao, and a clean split between dynamic machine-identity records and static production service records. The Packer template pipeline builds and versions Debian VM templates on Proxmox, with a dedicated CI stage that clone-tests against the real Terraform module before any template is promoted.
The Ansible execution environment is a minimal image built on python:3.13-slim-trixie — only ansible-core and critical collections baked in, everything else installed per-job with --require-hashes. The result is a fast, auditable pipeline that doesn’t trust its own cache.
Enterprise Systems Engineer#
October 2021 – December 2022
Moved into the enterprise application platform space to work on SharePoint Online and the tooling around it. Built React-based SharePoint Web Parts to replace manual staff workflows, established Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines for automated solution deployment, and automated administration through PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph API. The environment wasn’t used to applying software delivery discipline — establishing it was a meaningful part of the role.
Systems Administrator#
February 2021 – October 2021
An earlier role where serious automation work began. Wrote PowerShell modules integrating Microsoft Graph and Snipe-IT to eliminate manual asset management processes, deployed Azure resources with Bicep, managed Windows MDM with Intune and Autopilot, and administered VMware vSphere infrastructure. The preference for platform-native IaC — no external state, no extra operational surface — developed here.
Network Technology Specialist#
2015 – January 2021
Six years running network and server infrastructure across a large school district — Windows Server 2012/2016, iOS MDM with Intune district-wide, PowerShell automation for device provisioning and inventory at scale. The constraints of the environment (many sites, mixed hardware, thin staffing) made automation the only viable approach and set the direction for everything that followed.