# Alex Wise (@engineer.sitereliability.best)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/engineer.sitereliability.best
Headline: Platform Engineer, Experience AI Builder, Systems Safety Nerd, and Free Software Aficionado

## About

Hey! I’m Alex and I work on computer systems. I'm an experienced SRE focused on resilience and security. I've worked for small startups, scaled platforms, robotics labs, AI incubators, and consultancy. My current obsession is figuring out how to best make use of the incredible software patterns and tooling that the past few years have unlocked.Mostly posting in the Atmosphere as @awssnarkitect.bsky.socialCurrently building an AI Camp for sofree.us

## Experience

- **Staff DevOps Engineer at Bushel** (2024 – 2026)
  \- Introduced unit-costing and chargeback for all business units across GCP, AWS, DataDog, and other SaaS spend, empowering leadership to make decisions around cost-initiatives. Also led several general cloud right-sizing campaigns to reduce cloud spend by 30%.
  \- Architected and built a data pipeline to drive agentic LLM search and analysis capabilities on GCP BigQuery, Dataproc, and Datastream, as well as CockroachDB and Databricks. Sub-100ms latency for production data changes to be queryable for insights in sandbox.
  \- Engineered Delivery and reliability monitoring solutions for payment processing system built on Temporal, CockroachDB, GKE, and other SaaS providers. Create chaos engineering/continuous verification approaches to improving resilience.
  \- Maintained, supported and developed GKE, AWS, and Azure environments using Terragrunt and Terraform, ensuring a source of truth for infrastructure
  \- Participated on AI Leadership Council: performing research, demos, and presentations to help engineering and broader leadership understand and drive adoption of AI-powered development tools.
- **Senior Solutions Architect at Verica** (2021 – 2023)
  \- Led the design and delivery of Chaos Engineering resilience testing solutions for a 5G packet core, significantly enhancing the reliability and stability of DISH Wireless’ 5G environment. Press Release 1 Press Release 2
  \- Developed four chaos engineering features for customer production environments, to detect common resilience issues in Kubernetes and Kafka
  \- Built integrations for multiple CI/CD and DevSecOps platforms, including GitLab, GitHub Actions, Weaveworks Flux, and Terraform.
  \- Worked with multiple identity and operations teams to integrate with commercial-off-the-shelf and bespoke SSO and Monitoring solutions, including Datadog, Pagerduty, Amazon Cloudwatch, Okta, Auth0, GSuite, GitLab, and Slack
  \- Developed a solution for automated testing of "Cloud-Readiness" of 5G Network Functions, which was presented in a talk at KubeCon EU titled "Corralling the CNFs"
  \- Built a Retrieval-Assisted Generation chat assistant using Pinecone and Langchain to answer natural-language queries about resilence and security capabilities in the 3GPP specification.
- **Sr DevOps Engineer / Product Owner - Platform at Verizon Location Technologies** (2020 – 2021)
  \- Built a sparse-tree point-cloud data model for storing digital twin location and localization data, fed by Amazon Kinesis and RTI Connext DDS.
  \- Engineered robust CI/CD solutions for various projects, both on-premises and in the cloud, bolstering software development efficiency and reducing time-to-market.
  \- Completed migration of existing CI/CD infrastructure from GitHub/Jenkins to GitLab.
  \- Contributed to the maintenance and support of the MapQuest backend infrastructure, ensuring high reliability and seamless performance of critical systems.
  \- Presented on a range of technical topics including Kubernetes Development Tooling, Cloud Development Environments, and Integrating OpenTelemetry as part of a biweekly Architecture Lunch-and-Learn meeting, promoting knowledge sharing and fostering a culture of continuous learning within the organization.
  \- Designed and built ML model-training and deployment pipelines using kubeflow and AWS native services (Lambda Step Functions, Ground Truth, SageMaker Pipelines) to deploy to both cloud and Multiaccess Edge Compute environments.
- **Sr DevOps Engineer & Team Lead at Flowhub** (2019 – 2020)
  \- Provided continuous delivery and self-healing for 175 microservices environment, built on GKE, Google Pub/Sub, and Firebase
  \- Converted collection of Bash scripts for infrastructure management to Terraform, Atlantis, and GitLab
  \- Built first formal Information Security program, including comprehensive asset inventory, Rapid Risk Assessment program, and Infrastructure as Code controls
  \- Reduced infrastructure costs by 50% ($150k/mo) in 3 months by migration, data cleanup, and cost control.
- **DevOps Engineer at Flexential Professional Services** (2018 – 2019)
- **Technical Support Representative (CentOS LAMP Stack) at InMotion Hosting** (2017 – 2018)
  \- Leverage commands on CentOS 7 LAMP/LEMP hosts to troubleshoot and provision web sites.
  \- Create and Collaborate on diagnostic tools and scripts
  \- Provide responsive, thorough, and efficient technical support in a customer-facing role.
- **Security Captain at The Pelican Bay Foundation** (2014 – 2017)
  ·Sole Shift Manager for up to 30 employees seasonally ·Orchestrated access control and medical safety for 50,000 residents and guests ·Scheduled all shifts, lowering year-over-year overtime costs by 20% ·Interacted directly with residents to resolve safety and security issues ·Implemented, audited, and maintained RepoApp Lost and Found Software ·Coordinated CPR and EMR certifications of department ·Helped Draft OSHA Exposure Control Plan
- **Seasonal Restaurant Manager at The Pelican Bay Foundation** (2011 – 2014)
  ·Coordinated front-of-house operations for 2 beachfront restaurants and 2 bars with patrons and vendors in $3MM revenue operation ·Managed 30+ FOH staff each shift ·Fluency in JONAS Club Software ·Comprehension in Cheftec Inventory Management software ·Coordinated FEMA Emergency Management protocols.
- **Founder, Chief of Sales at Later Days Decisions, LLC** (2006 – 2007)
  Managed and orchestrated Anti-Tobacco motivational speaking group in conjunction with Students Working Against Tobacco (SWAT) and local Health Departments in Florida and California  Filed for 501(c)(3) status for four-person partnership. Program received 92% message retention among middle school-aged children.
  
  Expanded business across the states of Florida and California, finding new sponsors and adapting to changing business environments.

## Education

- **Florida Gulf Coast University** — Associate of Arts - AA (2006 – 2014)

## Skills

- AWS Glue
- PyTorch
- Generative AI
- 5G Core
- Apache Pulsar
- Temporal
- Azure DevOps Services
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Machine Learning
- Social Media
- Microsoft Excel
- Customer Service
- Public Speaking
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Leadership
- Microsoft Word
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Amazon EC2
- Amazon S3
- Amazon RDS
- Amazon CloudFront
- Amazon Dynamodb
- SQL
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Linux
- Red Hat Linux
- VMware
- VMware vSphere
- Sales
- Customer Satisfaction
- EMR Training
- Cloud Computing
- CompTIA
- Management
- Active Directory
- Identity & Access Management (IAM)
- Kubernetes
- Ansible
- cPanel
- Git
- GitLabCI
- Microsoft Office
- AWS Bedrock
- AWS SageMaker

## Certifications

- Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation Prep Course — Linux Academy (https://linuxacademy.com/profile/u/cert/id/118538)
- CompTIA Cloud+ — CompTIA (http://verify.CompTIA.org)
- Deploy to AWS with Ansible and Terraform — Linux Academy (https://linuxacademy.com/profile/u/cert/id/128396)
- AWS Certified Generative AI Developer - Professional — Amazon Web Services (AWS) (https://aws.amazon.com/verification)
- CKAD: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer — The Linux Foundation (https://www.youracclaim.com/badges/2ca26f80-afc7-4151-b230-a9f8049b413c/linked_in_profile)
- Solutions Architect - Associate — Amazon Web Services (https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/alexwise.guru/img/awsSolutionsArchitect_AE.pdf)
- AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty — Amazon Web Services (AWS) (https://www.credly.com/badges/f8a7a2a7-cb36-41b7-8567-038360062d4d/linked_in_profile)