Supporting senior-level DevSecOps and cloud efforts for the United States Army's Uncrewed Vehicle Control (UVC) program within the Program Executive Office, Aviation and the Project Office, Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (PM UAS).

Collaborate with a multitude of technical and program management teams, industry partners, government representatives, and other stakeholders to drive change and the adoption of agile methodologies in support of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program, the Missile Defense Agency's Enterprise Software Factory, and its alignment to the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative with the intent of improving defensive superiority of the United States. Assess, recommend, plan, develop, test, and deploy compliant Impact Level 5 and 6 (IL5, IL6) solutions. Engage and integrate with new and existing MDA programs for successful migration to automated, standardized, and centrally managed enterprise hybrid multi-cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, on-premises). Support software analyst teams responsible for Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) of numerous weapon system programs. Relevant projects involve Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline development, GitOps to maintain a single source of truth, infrastructure automation via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management via Configuration as Code (CaC), Information Assurance (IA) via compliance to NIST's Risk Management Framework (RMF), Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) certified Kubernetes platforms, Software Composition Analysis (SCA) along with Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to determine transient dependencies and their associated Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) for supply chain protection, Static Application Security Testing (SAST) to detect Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) and other poor coding practices, Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) for defects and vulnerability detection of running applications, artifact and package repository managers, consolidated software development lifecycle platforms, and automated and consistent generation of graphical and headless software development workstations hosted via virtualization or containerization.

An integral part of a fast-paced, innovative research and development (R&D) program for the U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) involving the creation of advanced Modeling & Simulations (M&S) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for wired and wireless communications across all 5 warfare domains (i.e., land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace). Our program works cross-functionally with innovative team members skilled in High-Performance Computing (HPC), M&S, AI, Data Analytics, and Cybersecurity. Experiment with innovative theories, ideas, and concepts to expand the realm of the possible. Self-organize and participate in an agile development lifecycle. Ask questions, seek answers, and build consensus within a cross-functional team. Provide design inputs and collaborate to decompose, estimate, and refine backlog requirements. Communicate and collaborate through verbal and visual methods (e.g., diagraming, whiteboarding). Educate, collaborate, influence, and guide the support of development of innovative AI and data analytics solutions for battle management, C2, and asset tasking. Work closely with AI, algorithm, analysis, and data experts focused on deep analytics and machine learning techniques (e.g., artificial neural networks, clustering, decision tree learning) who leverage structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data sources to develop solutions in sync with a larger system and software architecture. Day-to-day responsibilities focus on DevSecOps planning and implementation, Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline development, GitOps process and Agile Scrum methodology adoptions, infrastructure automation via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management via Configuration as Code (CaC), containerization, container orchestration, and Information Assurance (IA) via compliance to NIST 800-171 and CMMC.

Actively engaged in supporting a fast-paced, innovative engineering research and development initiative for the Missile Defense Agency's (MDA) Automated Cyber Secure Information System (MACSIS) via BMDS Advanced Technology Mission Assessment Architecture (BATMAA) which delivers a cyber-secure information technology infrastructure that allows users to access sensitive data via a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and Developmental – Cyber Integration Penetration Hardening Execution Range (D-CiPHER) which delivers a simulated rapid-prototyping environment allowing for high-fidelity cybersecurity training, critical asset security evaluations, and realistic threat modeling through event scenario creation that unveils hidden security vulnerabilities that would otherwise remain dormant. Contribute however necessary for success within a team at the crossroads of High Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtualization, Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, and Modeling & Simulations (M&S). Discuss new and innovative theories, ideas, and concepts. Participate in an agile development life cycle. Work within a diverse integrated product team. Provide design inputs and assist with decomposing to system requirements. Assist in developing and implementing changes to the system. Diagram and present recommendations. Day-to-day responsibilities focus on infrastructure automation via Infrastructure as Code (IaC), configuration management via Configuration as Code (CaC), and Information Assurance (IA) via compliance to NIST 800-171 and CMMC.

Plan, organize, and execute all IT functions involving Davidson's Automated Cyber Secure Information System (ACSIS). Direct internal IT operations to meet organizational needs, as well as the support and maintenance of existing applications and development of new technical solutions to maintain competitive advantage and continuously enable change, growth, and flexibility. Devise and establish documented IT policies and procedures to support the implementation of strategies set by upper management while aligning to best practices. Implement IT initiatives that enable the company to compete more vigorously and profitably in a constantly changing and demanding marketplace. Manage security of network, systems, and enterprise information. Ready the organization for IT security audits. Participate on all hardware and software evaluations and maintain vendor contracts. Develop strong relationships with vendors to negotiate optimal pricing and terms. Liaise between users, operations, and IT personnel to drive cross-functional collaboration. Represent the IT department at corporate review meetings. Collaborate with IT staff to develop solutions to more efficiently manage business activities and overcome challenges. Lead, motivate, develop, coordinate, advise, and evaluate a team of professionals consisting of systems, network, and help desk administrators. Oversee analysis and evaluation of staffing requirements to fulfill business requirements. Conduct interviews, make recommendations for new hires and consultants, and assist in recruiting appropriate talent. Manage the financial aspects of the department, such as budget control and expenditure reporting. Serve as an active and contributing consultant on the Missile Defense Agency's Next Generation Hardware Trade Study for the Objective Simulation Framework (OSF) with Teledyne Brown Engineering while leveraging established ACSIS methodologies to provide unique knowledge and experience based on past performances.

Design, build, maintain, and improve state-of-the-art, security-focused, government-compliant (i.e., NIST 800-53, NIST 800-171, and DFARS 252.204-7012), private cloud, virtual server and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) which are vendor, platform, software, and hardware agnostic for internal and external customers (i.e., government agencies and government contractors). Lead special IT projects from conception to completion. Evaluate and test vendor products and services to determine best solutions for continual development and transformation of internal and external IT infrastructures. Perform penetration testing on internal systems and remedy potential risks for increased security. Setup, manage, and maintain corporate infrastructure testing and cyber security labs. Automate IT tasks to simplify system and user management. Develop improved processes to benefit end users and IT staff. Manage a co-op student from a local private high school. Deployed a unified security management platform for correlated event notifications, agent and agentless host-based IDS, network IPS, NetFlow monitoring, targeted traffic capture and analysis, automated vulnerability scanning, risk resolution and mitigation tracking, centralized logging of all systems and services, passive and active asset discovery and tracking, system and service availability monitoring, and compliance reporting, requiring custom rule development and coordination with software development team for integration with perimeter firewall. Transitioned corporate web conferencing services for vastly improved video capabilities, deep integration with existing VTC equipment, an extended feature set, a consistent enterprise experience, and a significant reduction in business expenses. Implemented and migrated to a new inventory management system for improved functionality, ease of use, and cost savings. Assist in writing contract proposals as necessary.

Support NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center on the MITS contract. Identify the organizational improvements needed, design and test systems to implement those changes, and train and motivate others to use the systems. Research software and hardware capabilities and limitations. Prepare analyses of costs and benefits for management to decide if systems and infrastructure upgrades are worthwhile. Ensure that technical requirements are properly integrated with existing processes and skill sets. Develop and revise system design and development procedures. Enhance system compatibility to simplify the sharing of information. Research emerging technologies to determine their potential of increasing efficiency and effectiveness. Serve as the technical expert and execute master-level tasks for all things IT-related. Manage implementation, migration, and administration of Linux operating systems and applications, including services utilizing IP storage technologies (e.g., SAN, NAS) and other networking capabilities. Utilize server virtualization technologies provided by a converged cloud environment (e.g., VCE Vblock, vCommander for private cloud IaaS portal, NetApp filer for remote storage) consisting of compute, storage, network, and backup components to ease management and consolidate hardware. Centralize configuration management of systems for reproducibility, change history, and rapid deployment. Verify integrity of data storage and reliability of disaster recovery plans. Ensure secure and continuous availability of services. Oversee continual audit logging, malware protection, and security patching. Assess the system security plan to ensure compliance with NIST 800-53A Rev. 4, CIS, and MSFC OCIO standards. Interface with service providers. Perform off-site installation and maintenance of meteor camera systems throughout the United States. Transitioned from Dynetics Technical Services, Inc. on November 1st, 2016 due to contract rebid.

Administered data services, hardware servers, computer networks, and telephone systems for the entire company utilizing ITIL workflow processes adopted by the department. Contributed to projects involving substantive enterprise-level applications and changes to IT infrastructure. Actively participated in project planning and development of long-range objectives and milestones. Standardized infrastructure on Citrix XenServer virtualization platform hosting Ubuntu Server LTS Linux virtual machines with storage on Dell EqualLogic SANs at headquarters and colocation facility. Successfully upgraded and reconfigured multi-site company phone systems running Switchvox. Performed configuration audits of enterprise disaster recovery solution, CommVault's Simpana, resolving many issues and improving alert notifications and reporting. Adopted a collaborative and secure online password management service for role-based intradepartmental sharing of credentials for ease of dissemination. Major contributor to the growth and organization of department’s internal documentation. Served as on-call contact for service down situations. Volunteered for many after hour and Saturday projects. Entrusted with proactively monitoring and analyzing ongoing network performance and providing end user support to employees during a three day out-of-state company-hosted conference. Cross-trained personnel as necessary.

Managed operations of IT infrastructure for the Engineering department. Administered data services, hardware servers (e.g Dell, HP, Sun Solaris UltraSPARC), and computer networks. Standardized Engineering infrastructure on VMware vSphere 5 virtualization platform with Ubuntu Server LTS Linux virtual machines utilizing LVM storage at headquarters and colocation facility. Deployed vCenter Server for centralized management of ESXi hosts. Implemented Puppet for configuration management of Engineering infrastructure with all changes version-controlled, automatically syntax-checked, and non-fast forward protected via Git with Gitolite. Leveraged dynamic Puppet environments for testing and isolation from production. Managed all unique configuration for migrated systems using Puppet. Integrated Puppet and Puppet Dashboard with Passenger for maximum performance scaling in large environments. Greatly reduced the time to complete Linux installs by automating installations with Preseed and Kickstart. Developed an automated Engineering infrastructure monitoring and notification solution using Nagios to ensure high availability. Deployed a secure version control server using Git and Subversion which authenticates via LDAP and restricts access to specific departments for vendor compliance. Created an IPv4 / IPv6 AJP proxy at colocation facility to consolidate inbound traffic to a single source for security and to centralize logging. Successfully rebuilt a critical statistics system used by Product Management and Marketing for examining the web traffic of production download sites from remnants gathered through forensic data analysis. Implemented NIS for central user management in a lab environment. Major contributor to the growth and organization of department’s infrastructure-related documentation. Served as on-call contact for service down situations. Volunteered for many after hour and Saturday projects.

Developed and maintained technical documentation for all hardware and software products by utilizing Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe Acrobat Professional, XMLmind XML Editor, DocBook, and Microsoft Office. Built systems in lab environments to determine how our products functioned. Interviewed product owners, comprised exclusively of hardware and software engineers, to receive clarification. Developed 10 published manuals for software products and 18 published manuals for hardware product lines, including various unpublished manuals for products never released. Significantly improved the layout and content of the Digium Partner Interoperability Certification reports and created over 60 published interoperability reports. Performed a thorough analysis of the RoHS documentation requirements of many of our products for compliance. Became an expert with Digium's VoIP gateways and failover / redundancy appliances.

Developed and executed tests for pre-release products when necessary. Maintained an open source test and requirements management system for the Product Quality department. Managed projects using Scrum methodology within a team.

Remotely setup, maintained, and troubleshot customer telephone systems based off of Asterisk, The Open Source PBX. Served as the right-hand man to the Technical Support Manager. Continued creating new employee training materials, training new hires, instructing internal-only training classes on new product lines and third-party tools, and structuring and managing the on-call technical support program. Significantly lightened the load for management by determining work schedules, authorizing employee timesheets, and processing leave requests. Increased morale by providing direct praise and publicly posting compliments received by employees. Significantly improved customer satisfaction and response times by analyzing and reacting to metrics, prioritizing cases based on customers’ business impact, and assigning cases according to technicians’ skills.

Supervised 9 employees which were part of 1st Tier in the Technical Support department. Promoted from 2nd Tier Support Technician to Supervisor of 1st Tier Technical Support within 6 months. Key player in department’s early success by developing efficient departmental procedures, creating new employee training materials, training new hires, instructing internal-only training classes on new product lines and third-party tools, and structuring and managing the on-call technical support program. Significantly lightened the load for management by determining work schedules, authorizing employee timesheets, processing leave requests, evaluating employees’ performance, providing counsel for growth and corrective actions, conducting bi-annual performance reviews, and submitting recommendations for pay increases. Increased morale by providing direct praise and publicly posting compliments received by employees. Played a critical role in the hiring process by reviewing resumes, conducting phone screens and in-person interviews, and providing input to management. Largely responsible for the hiring of many long-term employees who proved to be valuable assets. Significantly improved customer satisfaction and response times by establishing guidelines for incident and problem trend analysis through the use of metrics, prioritizing cases based on customers’ business impact, and assigning cases according to technicians’ skills. Actively engaged in personal and professional development through self-help books, classes, and mentoring.

Remotely setup, maintained, and troubleshot customer telephone systems based off of Asterisk, The Open Source PBX. Performed advanced troubleshooting of ISDN Primary Rate Interface (PRI) and Basic Rate Interface (BRI) lines. Interconnected multi-site locations utilizing SIP and IAX2 trunking for least cost routing (LCR) between our customers' offices. Setup provisioning servers to auto-provision various brands of VoIP phones (e.g., Cisco, Polycom, Snom). Developed advanced Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems with text-to-speech (TTS) and voice recognition capabilities to meet the needs of our customers. Became an expert with Digium's analog and digital time-division multiplexing (TDM) interface cards, media compression cards, and Asterisk IP PBX. Promoted from 1st Tier Support Technician to 2nd Tier Support Technician within 1 year. Successfully passed the Digium Certified Asterisk Professional certification (dCAP) with a 98% on first attempt. Developed and deployed many high dollar turnkey solutions for our customers. One of the top two technicians who took on the largest number of special and complex projects. Only technician to meet the manager’s challenge of closing at least 5 support cases per day, everyday, for a month. Entrusted with leading department meetings while the manager was out, being the Support Administrator for SalesForce / SupportForce, and determining and gathering department performance metrics to provide to management.

Remotely setup, maintained, and troubleshot customer telephone systems based off of Asterisk, The Open Source PBX. Regularly communicated with local and long distance providers on a customer's behalf to successfully establish their service using digital T1 / E1 / J1 lines, analog POTS lines, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Instructed our customers in how to configure their channel banks with Asterisk to support their existing analog telephone handsets. Regularly led in the categories of most closed tasks, outgoing emails sent to customers, and lowest average response time. Vastly improved internal documentation for our products. Leveraged virtualization technologies to increase productivity while learning new software products and reproducing software bugs. Created software patches for bug fixes. Tested software patches submitted by internal software development and community members. Received numerous glowing compliments from customers.

Served as the sole IT administrator with a focus on Linux server administration utilizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), White Box Enterprise Linux, Debian, and SUSE. Administered data services, hardware servers, computer network, and telephone system for the entire company. Actively managed Windows Server Active Directory and GoldMine CRM, as well as the telephone system running on a seamless integration between a Toshiba Strata DK280 legacy PBX for inbound and outbound voice calls, Asterisk for extended call features such as conferencing and voicemails, and HylaFAX for sending and receiving of faxes via email and web interfaces. Drastically increased network security by tightening firewall rules via Cisco ACLs and Linux iptables, blocking spam using SpamAssassin, ensuring antivirus compliance on all clients, and monitoring for and proactively blocking intrusion attempts using Snort (IDS/IPS). Mitigated the duration and potential need of disaster recovery by successfully implementing BackupPC for onsite data backups and Arkeia for offsite tape backups, and regularly monitoring hardware and software RAIDs. Developed an automated infrastructure monitoring and notification solution using Nagios to ensure high availability. Verified licensing compliance by adopting automated discovery and tracking of software and hardware assets. Significantly cut spending on hardware resources by building a large number of desktop systems from spare parts. Provided Windows desktop support, including client side TCP/IP network troubleshooting, when necessary. Occasionally worked more than 24 hours straight to complete critical projects during non-business hours.

Developed automated data conversion solutions for restructuring data from third-party databases to formats native to the company's software products. Performed thorough data analysis, parsed data elements utilizing regular expressions, and leveraged custom Linux and Windows applications to successfully complete projects in a timely manner. Successfully migrated many customers from their outdated physical and digital library card catalogs.