jeff@bilder:~$ cat ~/experience.log

Experience

20+ yrs
in IT infrastructure & security
Team of 7
DevOps engineers led
26
AWS accounts · US / EU / GovCloud
$10M
infrastructure budget managed

From hand-configuring redundant Cisco networks in 1999 to managing a team automating multi-region AWS, GovCloud, and Azure DevOps estates today, the throughline has stayed the same: take infrastructure that’s sprawling, fragile, and manual, and turn it into something automated, observable, and secure. Equally at home diagnosing a 2 AM production outage and presenting architectural trade-offs to executives. Below is the path that got me here.

$ git log --career --oneline

Experience

▸ DevOps Manager / IT Operations Team Lead
Origami Risk, LLC · Chicago, IL
Jul 2017 – Present
  • Manage a team of 7 DevOps engineers operating a multi-region SaaS platform across AWS commercial, AWS GovCloud, and Azure DevOps — owning hiring, mentorship, performance, and roadmap.
  • Led a VPC-peering → Transit Gateway migration, designing a hub-and-spoke architecture with scoped route tables for network segmentation.
  • Manage 26 AWS accounts across US commercial, EU, and GovCloud — provisioned with consistent VPC, IAM, and observability baselines via Terraform.
  • Ran IAM least-privilege audits across all environments, identifying and remediating access outliers.
  • Migrated QA build agents from TeamCity to Azure DevOps on EC2 Auto Scaling Groups (up to 40) with pre-baked AMIs, hitting a one-hour SLA for Playwright sharded test execution.
  • Standardized reusable Azure DevOps YAML pipeline templates enforcing consistent build, test, security-scan, and release stages across the engineering org.
  • Built event-driven pipelines producing DISA STIG CAT II-compliant machine images with Ansible.
  • Integrated CloudZero cost telemetry across the multi-account AWS estate using least-privilege scoped keys.
  • Run the team on Scrum in Azure DevOps Boards and partner with Product & Engineering leadership to align the quarterly DevOps roadmap to business priorities.
  • Converted infrastructure to Terraform IaC under GitHub peer review with linting enforcement — every change version-controlled and monitored.
Director, Infrastructure Engineering & Operations
5th Column LLC · Chicago, IL
Jun 2015 – Jul 2017
  • Owned availability of multiple data centers hosting managed security solutions; planned and managed a $10M annual budget.
  • Architected active-active data centers for MSSP-hosted apps (Cisco ASR/Nexus, Pure flash storage, Juju-deployed OpenStack).
  • Led the Skunk Works function and acted as liaison to Product/Development for SaaS security releases.
  • Delivered Zabbix distributed monitoring and per-tenant ELK 5.x clusters that scale horizontally with client consumption.
  • Drove role-based Ansible/SaltStack automation for consistent, secure tenant configuration.
ASP Infrastructure Manager
Marsh ClearSight · Chicago, IL
Apr 2010 – Jun 2015
  • Owned availability of business-critical, client-facing SaaS at 24×7×365 with contractual outage penalties — across 4 data centers and 600+ servers.
  • Managed a team of 6 engineers across Windows, Unix, networking, security, and EMC storage.
  • Led data center migration of storage, servers, and networking to CenturyLink Managed Hosting IaaS.
  • Implemented CA LISA Release Automation for continuous deployment and supported biannual SOC 1 audits.
Senior Systems Engineer
Marsh ClearSight · Chicago, IL
Dec 2007 – Apr 2010
  • Technical lead for data center technologies; administered VMware ESX 3.5 → 4.1 across 20 hosts and 500+ VMs.
  • Designed a custom Nagios monitoring solution with scripted event handlers, saving the company $100K+ versus commercial alternatives.
  • Built PXE menu-driven automated installs for Windows, Linux, and ESX systems.

# earlier roles

G2 SwitchWorksSenior Systems Engineer2007
CisionSenior Systems Engineer2004 – 2007
Harmony Health PlanSenior Systems Engineer2004
Netrix LLCSenior Systems Engineer (Consulting)2002 – 2004
deCODE Genetics, Inc.Network / Security Engineer1999 – 2002
$ ls ~/certifications

Certifications & Education

CCNP — BCSI & BCMSN2004–2007
Cisco Systems
CCNA Security2016
Cisco Systems
CCNA Route / Switch2016
Cisco Systems
Advanced Wireless LAN Field Specialist2007
Cisco Systems
B.S. Computer Information Systems1999
St. Norbert College — De Pere, WI
$ ./connect.sh --with jeff

Let's talk about your infrastructure.

25 years of building resilient, automated, secure platforms — happy to put that to work for your team.