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. AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Professional.

Technical Summary

  • Senior infrastructure architect with a ground-up perspective: power, rack, cooling, fiber, switching, storage, virtualization, cloud — all of which informs how I work with AI today.
  • 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.
  • Everything-as-code practitioner since before the term existed. Configuration management, CI/CD, immutable artifacts.
  • Full-stack capable. Able to trace issues from application logic through the network layer to the 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
  • 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: DCV, Leostream, HP PCoIP, TGX
  • Languages: Polyglot

Professional Experience

GPL Technologies — Cloud and DevOps Engineer

2018 – Present

  • Leading proponent of AI adoption — driving integration into both internal processes and external customer offerings.
  • Delivered custom model and pipeline integration for image categorization at a customer site.
  • Primary cloud architect at a multi-customer M&E and enterprise technology group. Own the full engagement lifecycle — pre-sale engineering, architecture design, implementation, and handoff.
  • Spearheaded and implemented 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.
  • Delivered AWS solutions to Skydance Films and dozens of other customers across entertainment, defense, and enterprise.
  • VDI extraordinaire — product creator for GPL Breeze (powered by Leostream). Fully automated, cross-region deployments across multiple studio customers.
  • Piloted and POC’d AWS Deadline Cloud in partnership with AWS.
  • 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.