Resume

nick@allevato.io

Senior Infrastructure & Applications Architect

Two decades of building and operating infrastructure — from x86 hardware and fiber installs to cloud-native platforms and AI-assisted development. The breadth of that foundation is what makes AI effective: knowing what to ask for, what to verify, and where the real problems live. Deep specialization in Media & Entertainment cloud: studio, VFX, animation, and post-production pipelines at Fortune 500 scale. AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Professional.

Technical Summary

  • Senior infrastructure architect with ground-up experience: power, rack, cooling, fiber, switching, storage, virtualization, cloud — all of which informs how I work with AI today
  • Media & Entertainment cloud specialist: render farms, virtual workstations, hybrid storage, and TPN/MPA-aligned security for studio, VFX, animation, and post-production
  • Owns engagements end to end, technically and commercially: pre-sales engineering, scoping, multi-year fixed-fee delivery, and expansion inside enterprise accounts
  • Cloud governance and identity at organization scale: AWS Organizations, multi-account landing zones, SSO/SCIM federation, cost and posture management
  • AI-augmented architecture and development: two decades of systems knowledge makes the difference between prompting and engineering
  • Application infrastructure across the full delivery lifecycle: build, deploy, observe, iterate — end to end
  • Everything-as-code practitioner since before the term existed: configuration management, CI/CD, immutable artifacts
  • Full-stack capable across the entire system: trace issues from application logic through network layer to underlying platform

Education & Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Professional — Current
  • B.A. Philosophy — California State University, Northridge (2003–2007)
  • Cisco CCNA — Cisco NetAcademy (2002–2003)
  • A+ Certification (2001)

Technical

  • AI: Claude, OpenAI/ChatGPT, InvokeAI/ComfyUI, Ollama/Open WebUI
  • Cloud: AWS — full-stack architecture and operations, IAM to CloudFront; Organizations, multi-account estates, IAM Identity Center
  • Identity: Entra ID / Azure AD federation, SCIM provisioning, SAML/OIDC SSO, Active Directory
  • Media & Rendering: AWS Deadline Cloud, Deadline 10, Maya, Bifrost, Qumulo, hybrid cloud render farms
  • Security & Compliance: TPN/MPA-aligned studio security posture, least-privilege IAM, backup and monitoring standards
  • Systems: Linux (many distros), Kubernetes, VMware, Proxmox, ZFS
  • Automation: Ansible, CloudFormation, Docker-driven CI/CD
  • Web: LAMP, LEMP, MEAN stacks — PHP/Laravel, Express, MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, MongoDB
  • VDI: Leostream, DCV, HP PCoIP, TGX, cloud virtual workstations
  • Languages: Polyglot

Professional Experience

GPL Technologies — Senior AWS Solutions Architect

2018 – Present · Media & Entertainment cloud infrastructure

  • Sole engineering owner of a $1M+ fixed-fee cloud program for a Fortune 500 media & entertainment enterprise — architected, delivered, and supported across three phases and multiple years, from POC through production deployment and ongoing production support.
  • Delivered $548K in billable professional services revenue across 20+ concurrent engagements in seven months, spanning studio, VFX, animation, and post-production clients.
  • Identified, scoped, and closed ~$1M in expansion engagements inside existing enterprise accounts without a formal sales role — including a $146K cloud center-of-excellence program.
  • Piloted the firm’s initial AWS Deadline Cloud initiatives and developed a new solutions architect out of an apprentice role — who now owns a $192K+ and climbing deployment portfolio.
  • Led an AWS Organizations restructure and identity redesign (SCIM provisioning, Entra ID federation) across the company’s entire AWS estate; drove AWS Partner Central remediation and restored partner-tier standing.
  • Architected and deployed Leostream virtual workstation and VDI environments, cloud render farm infrastructure (Deadline 10, Maya, Bifrost), and hybrid storage (Qumulo) for VFX and animation pipelines.
  • Delivered against TPN/MPA-aligned security posture requirements for studio production environments.
  • Leading proponent of AI adoption — driving integration into both internal processes and external customer offerings, including custom model and pipeline integration for image categorization at a customer site.
  • Spearheaded product development (from concept to currently-in-production v2) of a full-stack, studio-centric VDI solution.
  • Spearheaded GPL Cloud Operations standards and code best practices — every customer ships with a cloud operations toolkit, full IaC representing the designed architecture, ready to operate day one.
  • Re-tooled the internal MSP practice — standardized backup, monitoring, and operations across 30+ managed customers.

Contract — AWS Solutions Architect

2014 – 2017 · Seattle, WA

  • Cloud migration, 1M+ req/day, 14M+ students · Typing.com
  • 650GB database migration, 10K+ concurrent players · Nitrotype.com
  • AWS cost reduction, $50K to $35K/month · Open English
  • Linux migration, private networking, four-nines uptime · Next University
  • Log aggregation stack, 13M+ events/24hrs · Luma Pictures
  • IaC toolkit, bootstrapped and handed to internal team · E&J Gallo Winery
  • DevOps toolkit for high-bandwidth media transcoding · Premier Digital / GPL
  • Containerized app, CI-driven delivery to production · Ocean Service Center
  • HA Elasticsearch cluster, full-stack deployment · Constructionjobs.com
  • +additional smaller engagements

5th Kind — Senior IT / DevOps

June 2013 – November 2015 · Los Angeles, CA / Seattle, WA

  • Brought in as owner’s right hand for operations. Inherited a mess — no backups, no deployment docs, dated hardware, bad power, portable AC cooling.
  • Rebuilt from the ground up: cleaned the office datacenter, deployed a half rack for customer systems, stabilized power and networking.
  • Scaled from 4 bare-metal installs to 100+ production systems across Proxmox, AWS, and on-prem.
  • Built full Ansible toolkit, retooled the deployment stack, drove SOA adoption, and fixed core database performance issues.
  • M&E SaaS product deployed across Marvel, Nissan, Toyota.

Royale — Director of IT

2012 – June 2013 · Los Angeles, CA

  • Sole IT director for a VFX studio. Owned a $2M environment end-to-end — 100-node render farm (800 cores, 1.6TB RAM), 20TB primary storage, 20TB on/off-site backup, 5TB/month turnover.
  • Built cross-platform directory services across Linux and macOS. Unified auth where there was none.
  • Managed a fiber WAN install from vendor selection through integration into multi-WAN routing.

Prior Roles

  • GPL Technologies — M&E consulting, render farms, storage · 2010–2012
  • Vericomm Corporation — POS product line ($200K revenue), VM migration · 2007–2010
  • Manx Integrated Solutions — Systems administration, Windows/AD/VPN · 2006–2011
  • PC Club — x86 hardware, freelance PHP intranet development · 2004–2007
  • Saugus Graphix — IT generalist, digital-to-physical print production · 2001–2002

Interests

Technology, strength training, rock climbing, economics, investing.