Resume

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.

What I’ve shipped on my own time, from an npm plugin to an N64 recompilation, is on the software page.

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 $160K+ in expansion engagements inside existing enterprise accounts without a formal sales role — a $146K cloud center-of-excellence program plus a run of smaller follow-on projects.
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 of their own.
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.