Aaron Blanchard Email & Phone Number

Overland Park, Kansas, Us

Consulting for businesses considering a move to the cloud, providing infrastructure design, implementation, troubleshooting, custom training, and support. Designing and building on-prem and cloud infrastructures for various businesses, from startups to large companies. Implement, maintain, and train operations teams that want to implement DevOps philosophies. Development of multi-platform software for small companies and groups, government organizations, and individuals. Development of research-based applications used for data collection and analysis that is used by thousands of people. Advising companies and organizations on multi-homed or remote office collaboration methods, implementing multimedia-enhanced spaces and other properties.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, Us

As the Director of Technical Operations, my team and I are responsible for all DevSecOps capabilities and our Cloud infrastructure, alongside reliability development, data engineering implementations, and many other operations in CA's technology group. I built a team that originally consisted of two engineers who admirably made things work for many years into a group of six engineers and two DBAs who were able to operate within a newly-designed DevSecOps-based engineering team built for fast response, reliability, and handling the growth of the business in the and expansion of our products. I am a hands-on technical leader with an engineering background, and our team built secure, high-performance containerized and microservice-based cloud infrastructure with Lambda and Kubernetes, including extensive observability with New Relic and DataDog. We re-designed previously on-prem applications for the cloud and migrated others within months of my arrival, improving load times by 48% while we cut 34% of our infra costs during that first year after migration. This team also was a catalyst for modernizing our Data Engineering methods as we moved from a stable of lots of ETL products and DW tools to a Kafka-powered dataflow into Snowflake that changed data that required overnight processing into a real-time data stream for our SEO, marketing, and brand management teams.

Overland Park, Kansas, Us

Pepper is a rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) company. Using cloud tools and technologies, we created a simple yet powerful and extensible architecture and a service delivery platform for IoT with an excellent user interface. Here I built a Cloud/SRE team and a DevOps-oriented practice around a new set of CI/CD tools and methods built for our products. We designed and built a resilient, lightweight infrastructure driven by Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform/Ansible. Our platform evolved into microservices (Lambda and K8s), creating infrastructure with better security, faster and more capable CI/CD pipelines, and easy-to-read observability/monitoring. This work eliminated 37% of Infrastructure costs with innovative AWS improvements and other design changes.

Princeton, Nj, Us

I lead ETS’s DevOps/Cloud team, based in four cities around the globe. My team and I provided DevOps and IT services for this assessment and education company, most recently planning and executing migration of ETS’s hundreds of legacy applications into the cloud and the future. My team and I changed the core of ETS’ operations by implementing an integrated, IaC-based infrastructure for our applications in AWS and leveraging new AWS tools to improve the efficiency, performance, and reliability of our products. We have also created environments and build/deploy pipeline that allow developers to create their applications quickly with confidence in their code and its ability to run optimally.My team built and managed a platform that supports standardized testing and training for K-12 students. As the Director of IT/DevOps for this organization, encompassing the DevOps, TechOps, and Support Services groups, I led and worked with excellent people as they did amazing new things. We created new ways of collecting and visualizing metrics and other data about critical applications and how our customers use them, finding new methods of interpreting and conveying what we learn to our customers, employees, and other stakeholders. We primarily used open source software, running multiple interconnected applications to deliver fast, accurate assessments and insight into the data we collect for our customers.

Topeka, Ks, Us

Managed agile technical teams working on software, operations, and infrastructure projects, both cloud and on-prem. I collaborated with senior management, engineers, architects, and other IT leaders on unique technology initiatives and led engineers and developers in building these tools and experiences. I also worked closely with our clients to be responsive to their needs and deliver on our commitments. My team and I maintained a diverse set of applications customized regularly to meet the needs of an ever-growing and changing financial landscape. We were able to speed up processing and routing by 20% and reduce the overhead of three of SE2’s main applications by more than 25% during my first three months there.

Lawrence, Kansas, Us

For the last three years that I led IT for KU's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, I simultaneously held the same position for the School of Engineering. I directed IT and laboratory operations for the School of Engineering’s 4500 users and 29 laboratories spread over eight buildings on three campuses while holding the same position for the EECS Department.I had similar duties to IT Director for the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department (position below), with the additional management of larger and more diverse Networking and Computing infrastructure, greater budget responsibilities and larger staff. My skillset grew to accommodate the many disciplines of in the School, each with their own distinct technology needs.Additionally, I led operations for the School of Engineering's 29 laboratories and research centers, and was a key contributor to designing and building of the IT infrastructure in Engineering's new buildings.

Lawrence, Ks, Us

I led all IT and laboratory operations for the School of Engineering as well as the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).I recruited and managed a group of 32 technical staff providing computing, networking, laboratory, and software development support and IT services. We managed over 130 software applications, 7,900 users, and 42 labs across eight buildings on three campuses. Some of my more significant projects include:Conceptualized the design and implementation strategy for the IT/IS infrastructure I for a $17M teaching and research facility within the EECS department. I led a group of IT professionals in creating and implementing a new online help tracking system that integrated performance metrics generated by support staff activities. We created a custom helpdesk solution, which helped us improve response time by over 60%.My team developed the design and implementation of the IT infrastructure and audio/visual systems for a $85M engineering building development project.Built and established technology, processes, and the operational infrastructure across the School of Engineering.My design and implementation of systems for distance learning directly contributed to a 400% increase in student enrollment in the University’s long-distance learning program.

Designed and maintained an evolving network infrastructure for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Managed a Microsoft Windows domain of 1000+ nodes serving over 3,400 users as well as the department’s multiple Linux platforms and Mac systems.- Created and led the implementation of the integration strategy to provide the interoperability for the department’s existing computing platforms.- Managed all aspects of a large-scale IP network and end-to-end support functions for all EECS software packages, deployments and troubleshooting.- Served as member of KU’s Computer Security Incident Response Team and as Field Security Officer for the School of Engineering.- Designed, built, tested and implemented a network of Windows, OSX, Linux, and other specialized operating systems across 17 laboratories used by staff, faculty and students within the EECS department.- Monitored and ensured adherence to all federal and university regulations regarding information security (e.g., FERPA).

Master Of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Focus On Finance, Innovation & Information Systems

Bachelor’S Degree, Computer Science