Senior DevOps Engineer · Building systems that help people get to better outcomes
I've spent two careers doing the same thing: designing, building, and improving systems that
help people get to better outcomes. First in law and access-to-justice work — a decade
designing programs and tools that helped tens of thousands of people navigate courts,
benefits, disaster recovery, and consumer debt. Then in engineering — eight years at
Rakuten Advertising progressing from junior engineer to Senior DevOps, leading a squad of
4–7 on a dozen production services, migrating production services from VMs to GKE, overhauling CI/CD across
the team, designing blue-green deployment to eliminate deploy downtime, and building an
AI-powered monitoring agent from scratch.
How I workI take ownership of the services I'm
responsible for and have an allergy to “that's not my problem.” I jump on the
messy work nobody's claimed, ramp up fast on unfamiliar systems, and bring people along
— setting technical direction and organizing cross-functional teams around clear
goals.
Technical Skills
Deep:
Kubernetes (GKE), Go, GCP, CI/CD, Docker, Postgres, Linux
Working knowledge:
Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, PHP, Helm, Kong, HashiCorp Vault, Keycloak, Prometheus,
Grafana, Pub/Sub, Redis, React, Node, SQL, YAML, Terraform, Ansible, SonarQube, Wiz,
Chainguard
Practices:
Blue-green deployments, AI-assisted development, Agile
Experience
Rakuten Advertising
— New York, NY & Remote
-
Noticed engineers were avoiding monitoring because PromQL was a barrier; designed
(including the UI), built, and shipped an AI chat agent from scratch that turns
plain-English questions into Prometheus/Grafana queries — now used regularly by ~10
engineers across the team
-
Took on a backup/restore gap nobody had addressed for our GKE clusters: researched the
options, made the architectural call, configured the capability in GCP, and authored
the TechOps runbooks the rest of the team now uses
-
Designed a blue-green deployment strategy using Kubernetes HTTPRoute weights —
eliminated deploy-window downtime and replaced a fragile procedure with one engineers
can run with confidence
-
Standardized Kubernetes deployments by migrating production services from bespoke Helm
charts to a unified, reusable chart, reducing configuration drift and onboarding time
for new services
-
Built CI/CD pipelines delivering isolated, ephemeral Kubernetes environments per
feature branch, enabling parallel QA testing with zero conflicts
-
Technical lead for a squad of 4–7 engineers owning a dozen customer-facing and backend
services across Go, React, TypeScript, and PHP — set direction, unblocked the hard
problems, and integrated those services across auth layers, OIDC, and secrets
management
-
Reduced ticket resolution time by 50% in the first year as lead through process
improvements and clearer technical direction
-
Migrated ~10 production services from VMs to GKE — owned each migration end-to-end,
eliminating waste where >90% of CPU and >80% of memory had been sitting unused
-
Took CI/CD from inconsistent to standardized across the team — built and overhauled
~15 pipelines with automated test, lint, vet, quality (SonarQube), and security (Wiz)
gates — yielding 30% faster deploys and 16% fewer bugs
-
Technical lead for the Campaigns MVP: structured the team's backlog with 50+ Jira
stories, then built the greenfield application platform — Postgres, GCP Cloud Storage
+ CDN, production HA — configuring Kong/OIDC routes and Keycloak clients on shared
infrastructure
-
Mentored two summer interns on a real mobile project — teaching them React Native and
Go from a standing start, then shipping the code they wrote to the App Store and
Google Play
-
Championed AI adoption across the engineering organization, mentoring colleagues on
AI-assisted development tools and workflows
-
Decomposed a PHP monolith into 5+ distributed services, improving maintainability and
deployment independence
- Optimized Docker builds; reduced one production image from 1.15 GB to 30 MB
-
Collaborated with cross-functional teams to define technical requirements and
architecture for new platform capabilities
-
Designed and implemented Pub/Sub messaging architecture for high-throughput APIs in Go
and PHP
-
Introduced CI/CD pipelines to a team that had not previously used them; built
automated build, test, and deployment workflows from scratch
-
Developed and maintained production APIs and backend jobs with monitoring, alerting,
and testing
-
Executed a complete CSS overhaul of a primary customer-facing dashboard, improving
usability and visual consistency
Center for Justice Innovation
— New York, NY
-
Consulted jurisdictions nationwide (St. Louis County, Charleston, SC, and others) on
justice reform strategies as part of the MacArthur Foundation's Safety and Justice
Challenge
-
Directed programs for the nation's first community court with a $2.3 million annual
budget
-
Supervised a 15-person multidisciplinary team of social workers, clinicians,
researchers, and intake staff
-
Designed and oversaw alternative-to-incarceration programs for thousands of cases
annually
-
Managed operations that saved taxpayers over $1,000,000 annually while reducing jail
intake at Rikers Island
-
Served as primary liaison between judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and legal
aid organizations, building consensus around innovative approaches
Pro Bono Net (now Scale Justice)
— New York, NY
-
Managed technology projects serving more than 80,000 users at a nonprofit expanding
access to justice
-
Led development of the FEMA Appeals generator, a document assembly tool created for
Superstorm Sandy response and used by disaster victims nationwide
-
Cultivated partnerships with AmLaw 100 firms, major nonprofits, and government
agencies
-
Coordinated city- and statewide volunteer attorney programs and pro bono legal
services
New York Appleseed
— New York, NY
-
Designed and supervised a legal representation program that served over 20,000
defendants in consumer debt cases
-
Pioneered a limited-scope engagement model, training hundreds of volunteer lawyers and
law students across multiple court locations
-
Collaborated with senior leadership of the New York State Access to Justice program to
expand and institutionalize the model
The Family Center
— New York, NY
-
Provided legal representation to families facing terminal illness in housing,
benefits, custody, and guardianship proceedings
-
Conducted "know your rights" clinics and delivered compassionate counsel during
critical family transitions
Education
Flatiron School — Full-Stack Web Developer Program
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University — J.D., cum laude
University of Tulsa — B.A., summa cum laude, Spanish; Minors: French,
Political Science