About Me

I'm Jonathan -- a Staff Cloud Platform Engineer who got here the long way. It started in 1999, on a hand-me-down PC running Linux, back when telnet was still socially acceptable and "the cloud" was something you looked at out the window.

I learned to break things, fix them, and automate the boring parts. By the mid-2000s I was writing PERL and PHP -- cron jobs, web scripts, and the kind of glue code that keeps systems talking to each other. That led to real sysadmin work: patch management, config drift, and the first taste of "if I have to do this twice, I'm scripting it."

From there it was a straight line to configuration management (Puppet, then Ansible), CI/CD (Jenkins, then GitHub Actions), and eventually Kubernetes and platform engineering. I've run production at scale at Rackspace, built greenfield EKS and service mesh at Doximity, shipped LinkerD and FedRAMP-grade mTLS at Mezmo, and now lead cross-functional Kubernetes and platform initiatives at Activtrak -- Pulumi, GKE, Helm, and the rest of the modern stack.

I still believe in understanding the full stack: not just the apps, but the infrastructure they run on, the pipelines that deploy them, and the policies that keep them secure. If you're looking for someone who can own the platform and ship with the team, let's talk.

Background

Present

Staff Cloud Platform Engineer

Leading Kubernetes and platform engineering at Activtrak. Pulumi IaC, GKE, GitHub Actions, and cross-functional delivery under tight operational constraints.

2020 – 2023

Site Reliability Engineer → Platform

Mezmo: LinkerD service mesh, FedRAMP mTLS, observability pipelines. Equinox on-prem K8s with Kubespray and MetalLB. Flask support portals, Ansible, and zero-downtime telemetry.

2019 – 2020

Platform Engineer

Doximity: greenfield EKS, Terraform, Helm, Istio. Nexus, Sensu, Jenkins→ECS Fargate. Mentorship and pair programming in Python and DevOps.

2011 – 2017

Linux Systems Engineer III, Rackspace

Puppet, r10k, Hiera. Ansible and GitOps for firewall and deployment. REST-driven CI, Ruby monolith CD, and ITIL-style change governance. The place where "platform" became the day job.

Mid-2000s

PERL, PHP & the scripted life

Cron jobs, web hooks, and automation before it had a fancy name. First production deployments and the habit of "automate everything repeatable."

1999

Linux & telnet

Where it started. A box, a shell, and the realization that understanding how systems work was more interesting than just using them. The rest is history.

Skills

Platform & Infra

AWS ec2 XenServer VMWare ESXSI KVM Openstack Terraform/HCL docker-compose Vagrant Puppet SaltStack Chef

CI/CD

Jenkins Bamboo Teamcity CircleCI Github Actions Gitlab

Languages & Stack

Python Ansible Kubernetes REST Frameworks HTML(5) CSS(3) Observium MongoDB MySQL Postgres AWS DynamoDB Docker Linux Nginx Apache JSON XML Bootstrap Framework SMTP DNS Wordpress Git (SCM) Postfix Nagios

Let's connect

Interested in platform engineering, Kubernetes, or just want to compare homelab notes?

Get in touch