Meta, Altoona, Iowa
2024-2026
Production Operations Engineer
- Kept a 14-building, 390MW campus healthy — web, AI training, and storage fleets — across OS changes, provisioning, software faults, and hardware.
- Wrote fault diagnosis and remediation automation (Python, Rust, Go, C++) used across a multi-GW global fleet; target: >90% of hardware faults fixed or diagnosed with no human touch.
- Built AI diagnostic agents — RAG over curated hardware documentation, wired into ticketing — that investigated failures with no known signature and auto-resolved high-confidence diagnoses under accuracy monitoring.
- Integration team for a 128,000-GPU training cluster, online on schedule in 16 months; retrofit the site from InfiniBand to RoCE and replaced 50,000 GPUs in place.
- Root-caused failures in H100/B200 systems: multi-rack RDMA fabrics, liquid cooling, direct-attached storage, and power from the server board to the utility grid.
- Onboarded 12 engineers globally into fleet repair; ran SQL and AI tooling workshops; cross-trained technicians in coding and networking.
Meta, Altoona, Iowa
2021-2024
Release to Production Engineer
- Took pre-production server and network platforms through R&D proving to mass-production readiness; approved platforms shipped publicly as Open Compute Project (OCP) equipment.
- Onboarded a next-generation internal AI platform and three interconnected network platforms into live datacenters for testing and integration.
- Placed 40MW of global lab capacity — space, power, and networking inside production datacenters; one of two capacity owners on a five-person deployment team.
- Ran a local team of 3 contractors and coordinated 10 more globally for physical integration work.
- Built CI/CD tooling that validated server health and configuration before production release; escalation point for hardware and Linux OS issues.
Facebook, Altoona, Iowa
2016-2021
Data Center Capacity Engineer
- Created a global supply-side capacity planning role and built the five-person team that ran it; personally managed >600MW of capacity in motion per quarter — placements, refreshes, and decommissions sharing the same space and power.
- Built a rack orchestration tool suite later adopted into fleet-wide rack lifecycle management, bring-up through decommissioning.
- Worked the full rack lifecycle on-site with repair, networking, and logistics teams: delivery, cabling, provisioning, repair integration, decommissioning, and space retrofit.
- Planned large-scale deployments — space, power, cooling, networking, resiliency — and root-caused fleet-wide issues with hardware teams and vendors.
IBM, Des Moines, Iowa
2015-2016
Global DevOps Technical Lead, IBM Cloud Builder
- Served as technical lead for global DevOps tooling and automated developer testing across SoftLayer cloud products (now IBM Cloud), including Cloud Builder, IBM Cloud Orchestrator, and UrbanCode Deploy.
- Performed code review for automation platforms written in Python, Groovy, Java, and Go.
- Built continuous integration pipelines and guided continuous deployment of new products, features, and fixes across cloud architectures.
- Promoted and implemented emerging technologies and practices internally, including continuous integration, Docker, and SaltStack.
Appcore, Des Moines, Iowa
2013-2015
Product Cloud Architect
- Collaborated on the product roadmap for Project Atlas, a cloud orchestration platform.
- Served as lead architect for integrating bare-metal management into software orchestration.
- Developed cloud automation software in Groovy and Python using agile methodologies.
- Built a complete software deployment pipeline driven by Gradle and continuous integration.
- Contributed bug fixes and patches to open-source projects including SaltStack (Python), OpenStack (Python), and CloudStack (Java).
- Provided technical education on storage and networking, and supported customers across Gluster, Puppet, Nexenta, CentOS, NFS, iSCSI, and XenServer.
E-Markets, Ames, Iowa
2008-2013
IT & Systems Operations Lead
- Owned IT end to end for a ~45-person, three-state agriculture-technology company — production datacenter through every endpoint — reporting directly to the CEO on budget.
- Ran the core product, a Perl/Oracle commodities-pricing and ERP web platform, with the lead application developer; led the datacenter's migration to offsite colocation and built a Perl-based automated deployment pipeline.
- Migrated headquarters and branch offices to SIP-based VoIP (Asterisk); managed IT personnel, vendor contracts, and system automation via SaltStack and Microsoft System Center.
Cynic by Trade, LLC, La Crosse, Wisconsin
2002-2011 (concurrent)
Vice President
- Co-founded a two-owner technology consultancy, operated alongside full-time roles, serving four long-term small-business clients with full-stack systems engineering, network design, and custom programming; managed contractors on larger engagements.
- Designed and deployed secure LAN/WAN topologies (firewalls, VPNs, subnetting), built custom business software and integrations, and maintained on-premise Linux servers, storage, and network infrastructure.
Palisade Systems, Inc., Ames, Iowa
2005-2008
Customer & Developer Support Engineer
- Supported shipped FreeBSD-based network security appliances end to end at an 18-person company — customer calls, hardware repair and RMA, performance testing — while contributing fixes to packet-inspection engines written in C.
- Built application signatures with PCRE, upstreamed detection rules to Snort, developed the administrative WebUI (PHP/JavaScript), and wrote automated test harnesses validating TCP/IP and UDP traffic handling.