Senior Platform Engineer at Pierce
From the physical rack to AI operations.
I follow the problem through every layer, then leave behind a system other people can run.
Documents existed. A reliable answer to “what breaks if I touch this port?” did not.
I traced the estate and modelled it in NetBox. VLAN by VLAN. Cable by cable. Port by port.
The picture had lived in people's heads, old diagrams and drifting switch configurations. I made it something the next engineer could query, with configuration backups behind the switch fleet.
Now we can reason about it
before we touch it.
Faults can be traced. Changes can be reviewed. Improvements can be proposed.
Independent audits looked bad. Internal reporting looked healthy. I compared the raw origin responses by user agent.
Conceptual response comparison. No production page or response body is reproduced.
Read what the server actually returned. Compare the bodies, not just the status codes or keyword dashboards.
The underperformance had an infrastructure cause. A commercially important defect had survived between teams' remits.
Then I applied the same pattern to packages and patching: Red Hat Satellite and Pulp as the source of truth for what exists on which machine.
Content managed deliberately. Patching that can be audited. A stepwise platform upgrade, with the fleet readied for its next operating systems.
The test is what remains after the change: known state, repeatable operations and fewer things that depend on memory.
Monitoring dataset rescued by database tuning.
PierceCertificate-expiry outages since automating the lifecycle.
Pierce · Since automationSole infrastructure on-call through Black Week, seven days straight.
Pierce · 2024 & 2025Migrated from Akamai to Cloudflare, including edge routing and Terraform reconciliation.
Pierce · 2026Depth at one layer helps. Following a problem across the boundaries is where I do my best work.
Internal LLM service deployed company-wide.
INDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTUREMulti-agent operations, persistent memory and scheduled health rounds.
AWS organization built from the root account up. Entra ID SCIM, dual-active IPSec design, Azure and Cloudflare Workers.
Docker and Harbor. Harvester 1.7 / RKE2 proof of concept on nested vSphere. API-gateway evaluation and ADR: Kong against KrakenD.
INDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTURETalos Kubernetes, Cilium and Kube-OVN.
Zabbix 7.0 LTS with automated proxy deployment. ELK major upgrade, Grafana, Kafka consumer lag via Burrow and node_exporter.
INDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTUREVictoriaMetrics.
Akamai to Cloudflare migration, Workers routing and Terraform state reconciled with production. SPF, DKIM and DMARC across all domains, with SPF flattening.
1,363 pages untangled in a category migration; over 1,300 retired campaign redirects cleared across two markets.
NetBox modelling, switch configuration backups, firewall changes by API, VLANs and IPSec/VPN.
INDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTUREVyOS routing.
NetApp NFS/CIFS. Blade-controller latency traced to NFS nconnect tuning.
INDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTURELINSTOR / DRBD and ZFS.
VMware / ESXi on Cisco UCS, Linux, Red Hat Satellite and Pulp.
INDEPENDENT INFRASTRUCTUREProxmox.
The secrets and certificate platform follows that rule: deployments pull secrets at deploy time; certificates renew and deploy themselves. Rotation becomes a repeatable process, rather than a favour asked of the person who built it.
Different constraints. The same engineering standards.
Talos Kubernetes on Proxmox. Cilium and Kube-OVN networking, LINSTOR/DRBD and ZFS storage, VyOS routing.
The constraint is one person and no rota. The operations workflow is designed to turn collected state into a decision about what needs human attention.
A Telegram-first inventory and listing assistant. Photograph an item, get recognition and a ready-to-post listing, publish to marketplaces.
Real users, Stripe billing and eBay integration. Python, Telegram Bot API, PostHog and Grafana.
A Ukrainian biology and ecology portal. Migrated from Drupal to Django and Wagtail through a rehearsed cutover, with no acceptable downtime window.
Visit BatrachosA kit and upkeep companion for cyclists and runners. Photo-based gear cataloguing, weather-aware clothing and component wear from ride data.
A working alpha. An ongoing product, not a finished release.