Career Summary

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% or more. Advanced leader in AI-driven agentic workflows, building organization-wide coding platforms that triple developer throughput while maintaining security and compliance.

Professional Experience

Present

Director of Cloud Infrastructure

First Citizens Bank | Tempe, AZ

Jul 2021 - Present

  • Guided platform integrations and migrations during the transition from Silicon Valley Bank.
  • Built a secure AWS Landing Zone for 100+ accounts, cutting AWS spend 30% YoY through FinOps automation.
  • Engineered an enterprise-grade, bank-hardened Kubernetes platform on EKS.
  • Enforced FFIEC/PCI-DSS/SOC 2 compliance using policy-as-code gates.
  • Sat on the bank’s AI governance board, crafting secure onboarding patterns for GenAI/ML tools.
  • Integrated DevSecOps tool chain (Sentinel, Snyk) into CI/CD.
  • Introduced an “override-as-code” workflow that embeds risk-acceptance and governance logic directly in Git.
  • Decomposed a monolithic repo into team-owned repositories, dropping feature lead time from weeks to days.
  • Consolidated “VPC-per-service” sprawl into a shared-services VPC hub, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Director of Cloud Infrastructure

REPAY | Tempe, AZ

Oct 2017 - Jul 2021

  • Built a green-field AWS platform from scratch, achieving PCI compliance with zero criticals.
  • Grew the team from a single engineer to a 10-person SRE team and a 5-person operations team.
  • Delivered a multi-account Landing Zone with automated FinOps, saving 30% YoY.
  • Launched Backstage IDP and Documentation-as-Code, reducing documentation drift by 75%.
  • Engineered and deployed enterprise observability and monitoring solutions (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana).
  • Architected reusable patterns, reducing cloud migration time from months to a single day.
  • Provided 24/7 on-call support and incident response with PagerDuty.

DevOps Engineer

Early Warning Services (Zelle) | Scottsdale, AZ

Jan 2017 - Oct 2017

  • Launched and scaled a large-scale SaaS payments service to 25M users with zero downtime.
  • Built immutable CI/CD pipelines for containerized microservices, enabling daily releases.
  • Automated blue-green rollouts and A/B tests, reducing RTO to <5 min.

Principal Cloud Architect

Thinkvine | Remote / Chandler, AZ

Apr 2016 - Jan 2017

  • Migrated Windows & Linux workloads to AWS, cutting hosting costs by 45%.
  • Converted legacy infrastructure to Terraform IaC, achieving 75% faster deployments.

Lead DevOps Engineer

OWNZONES Media Network | Scottsdale, AZ

Apr 2016 - Jul 2016

  • Designed green-field AWS infra; saved USD 300k/yr via S3 lifecycle + Glacier.

Applications Developer

State of Arizona - Dept. of Administration | Phoenix, AZ

Jan 2015 - Apr 2016

  • Introduced Git and automated unit testing to mainframe COBOL systems.

Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching Assistant

Northern Illinois University

2012 - 2015

Mainframe Technical Analyst Intern

Bank of America

2013 & 2014

Help Desk Manager

Universal Technical Institute

2010

Help Desk Manager

J-Curve Technologies

2009 - 2010

Systems Support Analyst

Bank of America

2006 - 2009

Desktop Repair

Geek Squad

2001 - 2006

Key Technical Achievements

AI-Driven Engineering & Coding

Architected organization-wide platforms combining AI-assisted development with controlled agentic execution, tripling engineering throughput by generating production-ready IaC and policy code with robust hallucination detection.

Automated Cloud Cost Optimization

Architected an event-driven automation platform for intelligent, on-demand non-production environments, cutting spend by over 70% through scheduled teardowns and usage-based spin-ups.

Secure AWS Landing Zone

Designed a robust, multi-account architecture for 100+ AWS accounts with centralized networking, logging, and policy-as-code, enabling highly scalable and secure onboarding for 30+ development teams.

Kubernetes Deployment Automation

Implemented scalable EKS blueprints with GitOps, admission control, and advanced autoscaling. Developed architectural patterns that simplified adoption and optimized spot instance usage for cost savings.