About
I'm a Linux Systems Engineer with 5+ years of experience automating large-scale Linux and FreeBSD environments at Verisign, where I own OS release pipelines and help stabilize complex authentication infrastructure. I work primarily in Python, Ansible, and Jenkins-driven CI/CD, provision infrastructure with Terraform on OpenStack, and orchestrate workloads with Kubernetes (CKA in progress). I like writing practical automation that quietly removes operational toil.
Experience
Linux Systems Engineer · Verisign
2021 – Present
Identity & Authentication Team
- Joined directly out of college as primary on-call for a large-scale, understaffed FreeIPA/Kerberos environment in active crisis.
- Diagnosed and eliminated circular dependencies in the user/group structure, cutting on-call pages from nearly twice daily to roughly once a month; the environment has remained stable for years post-handoff.
- Served as primary point of contact in the team's internal support channel, resolving permissions and authentication issues for customers across the organization.
- Maintained Splunk dashboards for operational visibility across authentication infrastructure.
- Sustained 24/7 on-call coverage, resolving critical incidents under tight timelines.
Builds & Operating Systems Team (moved via team reorg)
- Took ownership of a legacy Node.js/MongoDB CMDB REST API deployed across 304 hosts spanning four environments and four global regions, frequently swung in and out of service.
- Orchestrated full teardown-and-rebuild cycles (~3x/month) using Terraform for OpenStack infrastructure provisioning and Ansible for configuration, with Jenkins automation throughout.
- Built end-to-end FreeBSD release automation using Jenkins pipelines, poudriere-based ports builds, and custom tooling to synchronize ports trees across distributed infrastructure.
- Developed upstream-to-internal OS ingestion automation for reproducible, compliant image generation.
- Authored Ansible playbooks enforcing RHEL 8 and FreeBSD CIS benchmark controls across approximately 100 hosts spanning four environments.
- Attended BSDCan 2025 and the FreeBSD Developer Summit in Ottawa, staying current with upstream FreeBSD development and community practices.
Data Engineering Co-op · UPS
Summer 2020 – Spring 2021
- Began as a summer intern and extended into a part-time (20 hrs/week) co-op through senior year; upon graduating, declined a full-time Data Engineer offer to join Verisign as a Software Engineer.
- Built internal Power BI dashboards to surface operational metrics for business stakeholders.
- Won "Most Complete Product" at an internal hackathon for a Python/Tkinter utility that automated and simplified a marketing team's directory management workflow, designed with a GUI so non-technical users could operate it without assistance.
Contract Software Development · Seton Hall University
2019 – 2021
- Contracted by a sports science researcher to parse and analyze high-frequency motion capture data (144 Hz, hundreds of thousands of rows per session) from Vicon Nexus-equipped baseball pitchers; built a configurable Python pipeline to detect user-defined biomechanical patterns.
- Contracted by a biology researcher to build a DNA subsequence search tool in Python; implemented Aho-Corasick string matching for efficient multi-pattern search across ATGC sequences.
Personal Infrastructure
Self-host a personal website and several game servers on a Raspberry Pi for fun; deployed and maintained end-to-end via custom Ansible playbooks.
Skills
Operating Systems
RHEL / CentOSFreeBSDUbuntu
Automation & Config Mgmt
Ansible (extensive)BashPython
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform (OpenStack)
CI/CD
Jenkins (Groovy pipelines)GitLab CI
Cloud & Virtualization
OpenStackAWS (EC2)GCP
Security & Compliance
CIS Benchmarks (RHEL 8, FreeBSD)FreeIPAKerberos
Observability
Splunk
Containerization
Kubernetes (CKA in progress)Docker
Version Control
Git
Other
FreeBSD ports / poudriereMongoDBpfZFSSelf-hosted web/game server infrastructure
Education & Certifications
Seton Hall University
B.S. Computer Science
2017 – 2021
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
In Progress
Expected 2026
Contact
Reston, VA — Open to Remote