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Staff Cloud Platform Engineer -- Kubernetes, platform engineering, and cross-functional delivery under tight operational constraints

Jonathan D Kelley

Staff Cloud Platform Engineer -- Kubernetes, platform engineering, and cross-functional delivery under tight operational constraints

Summary

I am a 14 year internet technology veteran with a passion for devops and site reliability. I got my start in the late 1990s in highschool over IRC and designing web pages on Redhat Linux 9 (Shrike). I consider myself an expert at Linux, Kubernetes, GCP, Containers, CI-CD, devops glue and all the things in between.

Experience

Staff Cloud Platform Engineer

January 2023 – Current

Activtrak · Austin, TX

  • Coordinated project to move 150 repositories from CircleCI to Github Actions using a centralized and abstracted YAML input for developer experience.
  • Wrote Github actions job viewer we could deploy at the org level since Github Enterprise has no such feature in Golang and React.
  • Wrote Kubernetes dashboard in Golang and React to view and troubleshoot all k8s objects 60x faster than using GCP console.
  • Designed self-service infrastructure provisioning platform leveraging Pulumi IaC and policy-as-code using GCP APIs, eliminating manual ticket-based provisioning workflows for 80% of cloud resource requests.
  • Instituted organization-wide SSL rotation, moving away from Thawte key management onto Google Managed SSL (networking.gke.io/v1 / ManagedCertificate), eliminating unplanned outages and fire drills due to credential expirations.
  • Led executive-level quarterly technical briefings synthesizing complex cloud platform KPIs and Apache DevLake into actionable workforce investment decisions for CFO and board-level discussions.

CTO, Board Member, Secretary of the Board

February 2024 – Current

Kzoo Makers · Kalamazoo, MI

  • Facilitated board meetings by drafting agendas, capturing minutes, and following up on board action items using collaborative document management tools.
  • Developed the kzoomakers.org website utilizing HTML, CSS, and content management systems, aligning site architecture with organizational objectives to effectively increase member engagement and growth by 600% achieved via tracking signup metrics.
  • Developed an RFID-based authentication platform integrating Python and React to enforce secure access control for on-site premises and hazardous industrial equipment.
  • Built automated newsletter distribution system leveraging PHP and robust WordPress plugins to coordinate monthly outreach campaigns for the customer base.
  • Maintained comprehensive organizational records through enterprise document management systems, establishing audit-ready compliance for state operational requirements.
  • Instituted cybersecurity protocols and standardized digital infrastructure to safeguard member information and uphold operational integrity in accordance with evolving nonprofit requirements.

Site Reliability Engineer

June 2020 – January 2023

Mezmo · San Francisco, CA

  • Deployed LinkerD Service Mesh across 70 Kubernetes services to enforce full-path mTLS, meeting FedRAMP in-transit encryption standards and reducing audit remediation scope.
  • Participates in regular code reviews and offers suggestions for performance optimization.
  • Managed on-prem K8s cluster at Equinox using Kubespray and MetalLB for endpoints management.
  • Extended internal DevEx CLI to expose observability endpoints via self-service commands, reducing platform support requests and improving operational independence for N engineering teams.
  • Designed and implemented a Flask-based support portal with RBAC and Okta-integrated OIDC, enforcing least-privilege access to Redis and MongoDB workloads.
  • Refactored Ansible deployment logic for multi-tenant telemetry ingestion, integrating with CI/CD to support zero-downtime updates across customer-facing observability pipelines.

Platform Engineer

May 2019 – May 2020

Doximity · San Francisco, CA

  • Delivered greenfield EKS platform with Terraform/Helm-based automation, enabling scalable, reproducible microservice deployment with integrated Istio service mesh.
  • Refactored monolithic Terraform codebase into modular components with isolated state and Atlantis-managed CI policies, improving deployment reliability and reducing configuration drift.
  • Stood up Nexus ECR for handling build artifacts (ruby gems, docker registry) to reduce effects of downtime from upstream artifact providers.
  • Participated in pair programming and mentored junior engineers to be world-class contributors in Python and Devops.
  • Developed high-fidelity Sensu checks integrated with telemetry pipelines, enabling alerting on latency, saturation, and error-rate anomalies across core services.
  • Migrated Jenkins workloads from EC2 fleet to ECS Fargate, reducing CI infrastructure costs and scaling throughput dynamically under variable job loads.

Devops Engineer

April 2018 – May 2019

BoomTown · Charleston, SC

  • Rotated in 24/7 production on-call for split-platform estate (Windows/Linux); developed and maintained remediation playbooks and autorecovery mechanisms for high-availability operations.
  • Managed and extended CI/CD workflows across TeamCity and Jenkins, enabling end-to-end pipeline visibility and gated delivery assurance using PowerShell.
  • Refactored monolithic legacy WordPress stack into Docker Compose-based modular containers using Python-Paver, gulp/yarn integrations, and layered PHP testing harnesses.
  • Served as SME for AWS service primitives, driving tagging strategy compliance, IAM scoping, and least-cost deployment architecture reviews.

Linux Systems Engineer III

March 2011 – October 2017

Rackspace · San Antonio, TX

  • Migrated configuration management stack from Puppet2 to Puppet3 (PuppetDB + r10k + Hiera), enabling dynamic environment provisioning and policy-conformant module reuse.
  • Developed GitOps-based Ansible deployment workflows and firewall rule automation, introducing auditability, version control, and rollback for critical infrastructure ACLs.
  • Designed, implemented, and maintained CI tooling using Python SDKs for REST-driven deployment orchestration.
  • Created SDKs abstracting deployment APIs, enabling standardized self-service release operations for developers and platform teams.
  • Led production cutovers for high-risk identity/authentication infrastructure (multi-node authN clusters, schema-breaking migrations) with zero-impact delivery guarantees.
  • Delivered continuous delivery for mission-critical Ruby monolith across dev/stage/prod with integrated release gates and change rollback paths.

Skills

Platform & Infra

AWS ec2XenServerVMWare ESXSIKVMOpenstack

DevOps & CI/CD

JenkinsBambooTeamcityCircleCIGithub ActionsGitlab

Code & APIs

PythonAnsibleKubernetesREST FrameworksHTML(5)CSS(3)ObserviumMongoDBMySQLPostgres

Tools

Git GitHub Actions AWS DynamoDBDockerLinuxNginxApacheJSON

Education

HarvardX (edX)

Advanced Coursework in Computer Science and Software Engineering · Online

MIT OpenCourseWare

Self-Directed Study in Graduate-Level Computer Science · ocw.mit.edu

Publications