Career Summary
Download Resume ResumeInfrastructure Director & Principal Cloud Architect with 12 years designing, leading, and operating cloud platforms (20 years in IT overall). Deep expertise in AWS Kubernetes and the broader CNCF ecosystem...
Infrastructure Director & Principal Cloud Architect with 12 years designing, leading, and operating cloud platforms (20 years in IT overall). Deep expertise in AWS Kubernetes and the broader CNCF ecosystem with a strong focus on developer efficiency and platform scale. Designs platform services that unify tools into a single end-to-end experience using policy as code, mission control patterns, and fully automated CI/CD pipelines. FinOps specialist who pairs spend analytics with real-time event-driven automation to right-size resources and cut cloud costs by 30 percent or more without impacting reliability. Known for solving complex challenges through simple repeatable engineering patterns, mentoring high-performing teams, and managing stakeholders across business and technology. Advanced leader in AI-driven agentic workflows who built organization-wide coding platforms that combine AI-assisted development with controlled agent execution, generating service catalogs and policy code that triple developer throughput and maintain security, compliance, and consistency. Ready to bring forward-thinking cloud strategy and hands-on engineering leadership to highly regulated enterprises.
Professional Experience
Director of Cloud Infrastructure
First Citizens Bank (formerly Silicon Valley Bank)
Tempe, AZ Hybrid
- ▸ Guided the team through the transition from Silicon Valley Bank to First Citizens Bank, including platform integrations and migrations
- ▸ Built secure AWS Landing Zone (100+ accounts) with centralized logging and IAM federation
- ▸ Cut AWS spend 30% YoY via FinOps dashboards and automated rightsizing
Show 11 more achievements
- ▸ Enforced policy-as-code gates for continuous FFIEC / PCI-DSS / SOC 2 compliance
- ▸ Designed sub-5 ms hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, Megaport)
- ▸ Led and mentored 12-member platform team; founded Cloud Community of Practice
- ▸ Integrated DevSecOps tool chain (Sentinel, Snyk, static & SCA scans) into CI/CD
- ▸ Introduced an 'override-as-code' workflow that embeds risk-acceptance and governance logic directly in Git; every exception now carries a tracked, peer-reviewed audit trail
- ▸ Decomposed a monolithic repo into team-owned repositories with enforced CODEOWNERS, mandatory approver gates, and policy-as-code checks (SAST/SCA, compliance scans, exec-ready reports)
- ▸ Result: security remained airtight while average feature lead time dropped from 6-12 weeks to days
- ▸ Consolidated 'VPC-per-service' sprawl into a shared-services VPC hub using Transit Gateway, Route 53 resolver rules, and centralized interface endpoints -- shrinking the estate from hundreds of VPCs to a few strategic network segments
- ▸ Replaced thousands of duplicate interface endpoints with a single, multi-AZ endpoint hub, dropping VPC-endpoint costs from a top-three line-item to a negligible spend and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually
- ▸ Engineered and implemented an enterprise-grade, bank-hardened Kubernetes platform on Amazon EKS -- multi-AZ, CIS-benchmark hardened, OPA/Gatekeeper policies, and automated node patching for zero-day response
- ▸ Sat on the bank's AI governance board, crafting secure onboarding patterns for GenAI/ML tools, defining data-access guardrails, and fast-tracking compliant adoption of new AI capabilities
Director of Cloud Infrastructure
REPAY Tempe, AZ Hybrid
- ▸ Built green-field AWS platform (Terraform, Packer, Kubernetes); passed PCI with zero criticals
- ▸ Launched Backstage Internal Developer Platform and Documentation-as-Code, ensuring documentation updates accompanied code changes to drive consistency and coverage. This enabled version control for documentation, reduced internal documentation drift by 75%, and served as groundwork for further internal developer platform concepts
- ▸ Grew team from a single engineer to a 10-person SRE team and a 5-person operations team; led a 3-person team of full-stack developers building platform services (authentication, mutex locking, configuration, secrets management). Provided 24/7 on-call support and incident response with PagerDuty; managed enterprise-grade vendor support contracts
Show 4 more achievements
- ▸ Engineered and deployed enterprise observability and monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana) to enhance system visibility and incident response
- ▸ Delivered multi-account Landing Zone with guardrails; automated FinOps saved 30% YoY
- ▸ Built a secure EKS platform with GitOps, admission control, and autoscaling
- ▸ Architected and implemented reusable patterns, enabling teams to rapidly onboard new applications, consume shared services, and integrate with the secure landing zone and edge networking, reducing cloud migration time from months to a single day while leveraging advanced scaling, security, and platform features
DevOps Engineer
Early Warning Services (Zelle) Scottsdale, AZ On-site
- ▸ Launched Zellepay. Large-scale SaaS payments service; scaled to 25 M users with zero downtime
- ▸ Built immutable CI/CD pipelines and containerized microservices (daily releases)
- ▸ Automated blue-green rollouts and A/B tests, reducing RTO to under 5 min
Principal Cloud Architect
Thinkvine (now Crossover)
Remote from Chandler, AZ Remote
- ▸ Migrated Windows & Linux workloads to AWS; cut hosting cost by 45%
- ▸ Converted legacy infra to Terraform IaC with CI/CD; 75% faster deployments
Lead DevOps Engineer
OWNZONES Media Network Remote from Scottsdale, AZ Remote
- ▸ Designed green-field AWS infra; saved USD 300k/yr via S3 lifecycle + Glacier
Applications Developer
State of Arizona - Dept. of Administration Phoenix, AZ On-site
- ▸ Introduced Git and automated unit testing to mainframe COBOL systems
Director of Cloud Infrastructure
First Citizens Bank (formerly Silicon Valley Bank)
Tempe, AZ Hybrid
- ▸ Guided the team through the transition from Silicon Valley Bank to First Citizens Bank, including platform integrations and migrations
- ▸ Built secure AWS Landing Zone (100+ accounts) with centralized logging and IAM federation
- ▸ Cut AWS spend 30% YoY via FinOps dashboards and automated rightsizing
Show 11 more achievements
- ▸ Enforced policy-as-code gates for continuous FFIEC / PCI-DSS / SOC 2 compliance
- ▸ Designed sub-5 ms hybrid connectivity (Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, Megaport)
- ▸ Led and mentored 12-member platform team; founded Cloud Community of Practice
- ▸ Integrated DevSecOps tool chain (Sentinel, Snyk, static & SCA scans) into CI/CD
- ▸ Introduced an 'override-as-code' workflow that embeds risk-acceptance and governance logic directly in Git; every exception now carries a tracked, peer-reviewed audit trail
- ▸ Decomposed a monolithic repo into team-owned repositories with enforced CODEOWNERS, mandatory approver gates, and policy-as-code checks (SAST/SCA, compliance scans, exec-ready reports)
- ▸ Result: security remained airtight while average feature lead time dropped from 6-12 weeks to days
- ▸ Consolidated 'VPC-per-service' sprawl into a shared-services VPC hub using Transit Gateway, Route 53 resolver rules, and centralized interface endpoints -- shrinking the estate from hundreds of VPCs to a few strategic network segments
- ▸ Replaced thousands of duplicate interface endpoints with a single, multi-AZ endpoint hub, dropping VPC-endpoint costs from a top-three line-item to a negligible spend and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually
- ▸ Engineered and implemented an enterprise-grade, bank-hardened Kubernetes platform on Amazon EKS -- multi-AZ, CIS-benchmark hardened, OPA/Gatekeeper policies, and automated node patching for zero-day response
- ▸ Sat on the bank's AI governance board, crafting secure onboarding patterns for GenAI/ML tools, defining data-access guardrails, and fast-tracking compliant adoption of new AI capabilities
Director of Cloud Infrastructure
REPAY Tempe, AZ Hybrid
- ▸ Built green-field AWS platform (Terraform, Packer, Kubernetes); passed PCI with zero criticals
- ▸ Launched Backstage Internal Developer Platform and Documentation-as-Code, ensuring documentation updates accompanied code changes to drive consistency and coverage. This enabled version control for documentation, reduced internal documentation drift by 75%, and served as groundwork for further internal developer platform concepts
- ▸ Grew team from a single engineer to a 10-person SRE team and a 5-person operations team; led a 3-person team of full-stack developers building platform services (authentication, mutex locking, configuration, secrets management). Provided 24/7 on-call support and incident response with PagerDuty; managed enterprise-grade vendor support contracts
Show 4 more achievements
- ▸ Engineered and deployed enterprise observability and monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana) to enhance system visibility and incident response
- ▸ Delivered multi-account Landing Zone with guardrails; automated FinOps saved 30% YoY
- ▸ Built a secure EKS platform with GitOps, admission control, and autoscaling
- ▸ Architected and implemented reusable patterns, enabling teams to rapidly onboard new applications, consume shared services, and integrate with the secure landing zone and edge networking, reducing cloud migration time from months to a single day while leveraging advanced scaling, security, and platform features
DevOps Engineer
Early Warning Services (Zelle) Scottsdale, AZ On-site
- ▸ Launched Zellepay. Large-scale SaaS payments service; scaled to 25 M users with zero downtime
- ▸ Built immutable CI/CD pipelines and containerized microservices (daily releases)
- ▸ Automated blue-green rollouts and A/B tests, reducing RTO to under 5 min
Principal Cloud Architect
Thinkvine (now Crossover)
Remote from Chandler, AZ Remote
- ▸ Migrated Windows & Linux workloads to AWS; cut hosting cost by 45%
- ▸ Converted legacy infra to Terraform IaC with CI/CD; 75% faster deployments
Lead DevOps Engineer
OWNZONES Media Network Remote from Scottsdale, AZ Remote
- ▸ Designed green-field AWS infra; saved USD 300k/yr via S3 lifecycle + Glacier
Applications Developer
State of Arizona - Dept. of Administration Phoenix, AZ On-site
- ▸ Introduced Git and automated unit testing to mainframe COBOL systems
Additional Experience (6 positions)
Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Assistant
Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL On-site
- ▸ Assisted in teaching computer science courses at undergraduate and graduate levels
Mainframe Technical Analyst Intern
Bank of America Illinois On-site
- ▸ Mainframe development and support during internship periods in 2013 & 2014
Help Desk Manager
Universal Technical Institute Arizona On-site
- ▸ Managed help desk operations and support team
Help Desk Manager
J-Curve Technologies Arizona On-site
- ▸ Managed help desk operations and support team
Systems Support Analyst
Bank of America Arizona On-site
- ▸ Provided systems support and analysis for banking operations
Desktop Repair
Geek Squad Arizona On-site
- ▸ Provided desktop computer repair and technical support services
Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Assistant
Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL On-site
- ▸ Assisted in teaching computer science courses at undergraduate and graduate levels
Mainframe Technical Analyst Intern
Bank of America Illinois On-site
- ▸ Mainframe development and support during internship periods in 2013 & 2014
Help Desk Manager
Universal Technical Institute Arizona On-site
- ▸ Managed help desk operations and support team
Help Desk Manager
J-Curve Technologies Arizona On-site
- ▸ Managed help desk operations and support team
Systems Support Analyst
Bank of America Arizona On-site
- ▸ Provided systems support and analysis for banking operations
Desktop Repair
Geek Squad Arizona On-site
- ▸ Provided desktop computer repair and technical support services
Key Technical Achievements
Annual Savings
$2.8M
Through FinOps automation
Developer Productivity
3x Faster
With AI-driven workflows
Cloud Spend Reduction
30% YoY
AWS optimization at scale
Team Scale
300+ Devs
Platform users at $215B bank
Awards & Recognition
DECA National Competition - First Place
DECA
First Place in Extemporaneous Speaking; Top 10 Overall Finalist
Mar 2004
DECA Illinois State Competition - First Place
DECA Illinois
First Place in Extemporaneous Speaking; Third Place Overall
Feb 2004
Education
Master of Science (MS), Computer Science
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL
2015
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL
2013
Professional Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect -- Associate
Amazon Web Services Dec 2019
AWS Certified Developer -- Associate
Amazon Web Services Dec 2019