I spent just under a decade in the United States Air Force before separating and taking a chance to work with AWS and get a foot in the tech industry. While working at AWS, I was exposed to everything from cutting-edge in-house software, working on physical servers, remotely debugging networks, and all of the cloud architecture I had only read about. I quickly built up my knowledge of working within Linux-based environments and archietecting cloud environments.
Now, I feel at home while working via CLI and have continuously built up further expertise in cloud best-practices. I stepped away from AWS to take my journey further down the route of a DevOps/Cloud engineer. I spent the next year working within AWS GovCloud and related systems as a consultant working on software undergoing acceptance testing...which we passed. The position showed me that I had an itch for something that AWS and the consulting job couldn't seem to scratch.
I now understood that I had firmly set both of my feet in tech and that I wanted to build solutions. I found myself on too many occassions, putting out fires or helping with implementing a feature for the sake of creating a new feature. AWS may have some teams that allow you to create solutions, but it wasn't moving fast enough for me. The consulting gig was constant firefighting to get through acceptance testing. I needed to build solutions and that led me to jumping out into the world of startups.
I'm now working as a Site Reliability Engineer and have finally found a way to scratch that itch I've had the last several years. I'm now building solutions like streamlining the development process for our engineers, automating testing and deployments, building technical designs alongside the engineers to ensure best-practices are followed, etc. It's stressful at times, but so much more rewarding when I am the one building these things and seeing them work. Seeing a service work, after many whiteboard sessions, is almost like watching a baby take its first steps. So I look forward to continuing this journey and see where else it takes me. Maybe I'll be mentoring another engineer in the future who's looking to scratch that same itch.
Every day is another day to learn something new.
- Linux
- Python
- Bash
- RHEL
- Terraform
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)
- Jenkins
- Chef
- Docker
- CI/CD
- DISA STIG Compliance
- AWS
- AWS Solutions Architect โ Associate (recertified AWS SAA-C03, exp. 13 Dec 2025)
- Atlassian suite (Jira, ServiceDesk, Confluence)
- Datadog
- AWS Cloudwatch
- Observability/Monitoring
- GitLab
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
- Kubernetes
- CKA Certification
- CKS Certification
- GitHub (reason for this page)