Brad Knowles

Hi everyone — Thanks to a recent re-org, I’m on the market for my next role and would appreciate your support. 💼 Seeking senior IC roles in: • AI agentic development (Cursor/Claude/Claude Code) • Observability (Prometheus, Grafana, etc…) • DevOps, Systems, or Platform Engineering 🌎 Remote or Austin, TX ⭐ Previously: AWS, VMware, AOL, Whole Foods, AppliedDigital — plus consulting for Apple Retail Software Engineering, Raytheon (GPS OCX), AT&T, ASML, and others. How you can help: → Hiring or know someone who is? Tag them or DM me → No leads? A like, comment, or share helps this reach more people Thanks for the support — would love to connect. #OpenToWork #DevOps #Observability #PlatformEngineering #AI

Applied Digital (APLD) is a U.S.-based operator of next-generation digital infrastructure, providing solutions to the fields of High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). APLD has three business segments: Blockchain colocation services, HPC datacenter colocation services and GPU cloud services (under Sai Computing). During my time at Applied Digital, in addition to my regular Systems Engineering work, I was tasked with implementing company-wide Observability systems using Prometheus+Grafana, both for the HPC Cloud side of the business (where we own the hardware and rent that out to our customers), and the newer AI Factory side of the business (where we build and operate the AI/HPC datacenters, and customers provide their own hardware). I also learned about legacy monitoring with Zabbix, including custom in-house tooling for Infrastructure-As-Code for Zabbix using Ansible. I quickly became the top contributor of Ansible code to our system-wide repository, and learned how to use Cursor+Claude to enhance my efficiency. I was a key member of the Systems Team supporting operations at the new Polaris Forge 1 datacenter site that launched late last year.

EC2-Chronos provides NTP time synchronization services across all of Amazon and AWS: * Systems Development Engineer supporting NTP time sync on all fabrics. As on-call engineer, was responsible for handling tickets cut to our team, monitoring and remediation of Policy Engine and Software Assurance Services violations, monitoring and remediating pipeline health issues, reducing red and yellow host counts, etc… * Secondary POC for enhanced accuracy for the Amazon Time Sync Service (as highlighted in the 2023 re:Invent keynote speech by Peter DeSantis at https://youtu.be/pJG6nmR7XxI?si=Pd2PAatLzxpX0EJS&t=1486), with specialties in antennas, antenna cabling, GPS/GNSS issues, Primary Time Appliances, tools for debugging antenna and cable problems, and interfacing with AppSec.

AWS Supply Chain is a cloud-based application that unifies data and provides ML-powered actionable insights, built-in contextual collaboration, and demand planning: * Support Engineer for the Quality Excellence team, supporting all QA & Development work, including organization-wide weekly analysis and reporting of Policy Engine and Software Assurance Services violations, DeeOps and Sidekick performance, and interfacing with AppSec.

The Whole Foods Market eStore handles all online ordering and sales for prepared food items across all 500+ stores, including online credit card and pay-in-store options: * Sr. DevOps Engineer — converted from contractor to Team Member for eStore, to support the move from a third-party hosted AWS account for the service, and convert to an Amazon-native system of accounts in their “Conduit NAWS” environment. This was an effort that took more than a year to complete, and cost over a million dollars for assistance from AWS ProServices. Provided general DevOps support to the team, including being in the on-call rotation for all applications, handling the Amazon internal “Anvil” security audits, handling the PCI security audits, responding to security incidents, etc…. * After the dedicated DevOps team was dismantled, the work for the Tools Enablement Team continued to support many of the same tools and customers, but now embedded into the client teams, like eStore. As more and more native Amazon and AWS tools have been implemented, many 3rd party tools have been deprecated and shut down, thus saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Whole Foods Market is a leading American supermarket chain that exclusively sells natural and organic products, now owned by Amazon: * Sr. DevOps Engineer supporting multiple teams within the Whole Foods Market “DigiTech” group, which maintains the website www.wholefoodsmarket.com, and many other associated websites, as well as a wide array of third-party services. Other teams supported include the eStore team (doing all online ordering and purchases of prepared foods, typically for events like Thanksgiving), the SPICE team (supporting the product API for Whole Foods), the WFM.com website team, and more. Services supported included JIRA, Confluence, Jenkins, PagerDuty, and many others.

VMware is a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility helping customers to create exceptional experiences by mobilizing everything, responding faster to opportunities with modern data and apps hosted across hybrid clouds, and safeguarding customer trust with a defense-in-depth approach to cybersecurity: * Consulted for a FinTech Forward 100 Leading Financial Services Provider of cloud-based payment, invoice and banking solutions to corporations, financial institutions and banks around the world 
+ Designed, developed, and implemented Chef code to automate PCI-DSS and FFIEC compliance auditing and remediation across a fleet of servers running a variety of Operating Systems * Consulted for a leading firm that builds innovative digital government solutions to enable a healthier, safer and more prosperous America
 + Part of a team using Puppet to build large-scale private cloud solutions and help automate RuggedDevOps practices for a US Federal Agency that will help bring healthcare of all Americans into the 21st century.

MomentumSI was a leading IT Services Consultancy providing application development and systems implementations that incorporate disruptive technologies, including cloud computing (acquired by VMware in November of 2014): * Consulted for a global leader serving the voice and data needs of multinational enterprises and telecommunication service providers, with a portfolio of integrated global communication solutions based on the latest Ethernet, IP, fiber and satellite transmission technologies, in particular to emerging markets
 + Learned to create Puppet modules and manifests to implement over twenty different DoD/DISA STIGs on RHEL-5 servers to turn a manual process requiring hours of engineer time for each machine into an automated process that could be completed in about three minutes across an indefinite number of machines in parallel * Consulted for a technology and innovation leader in defense, security and civil markets throughout the world, specializing in state-of-the-art electronics and mission systems integration on a project to automate the deployment of the ground control systems for a large network of next-generation mission-critical/life-critical satellite systems + Assisted in the design, development, and deployment of a large collection of Opscode Chef cookbooks and related “infrastructure as code”, including over 100 operating system and systems application infrastructure modules, as well as over twenty mission-specific custom packages that had been developed internally over the past decades 
+ Also provided training assistance to teach customer Subject Matter Experts how to use Opscode Chef to automate their existing internal processes, to take deployment processes that used to require days, weeks, and even months with a large number of people working sequentially on each machine and turn them into an automated process that could be kicked off from a central location by one person and executed in minutes across hundreds of nodes in parallel

Consulted for Retail Software Engineering group at a world-leading Fortune 20 consumer products company headquartered in the Silicon Valley area: * Delivered a Continuous Integration server using Jenkins, supporting a distributed team of over 50 developers, including:
 + Heterogeneous development environment included Xcode for both iOS and OS X, as well as Ruby on Rails for Linux 
+ Multiple static code analysis tools for Objective-C and Ruby on Rails included code complexity, duplication detection, security scans, and test coverage, among others
 + Required learning Agile development methods (proprietary mix of Scrum and Kanban), software testing methodology, Xcode IDE, Objective-C, Ruby & rake programming

Austin-based startup developing a definitive Network Management as a Service (NMaaS) platform for remote monitoring and maintenance of IP-enabled devices (acquired by Control4 in 2018): * Designed and implemented next-generation cloud infrastructure to allow scaling to 100-1000x previous maximum production load, both customer-visible portal pages and appliance-serving infrastructure for secure remote monitoring and management, including: 
+ Infrastructure Automation with Opscode Chef
 + Software Version Control with Subversion and git 
+ Continuous Integration of application software with Jenkins
 + Creating rpm format binary packages with fpm and maintaining the rpm repo
 + Variety of languages including Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, and others 
+ Integrated over fifty other external cloud-based resources and open source packages, comprising over 53k lines of “Infrastructure as Code”
 + Project resulted in the invited talk “From Zero to Cloud in 90 Days with Chef” and the tutorial “Just Enough Chef Recursive Bootstrap” at the FLOSS UK 2012 Spring Conference

Leading Public Research University located in Austin, TX, working in the Central IT Services Department in the COM building underneath the UT Tower: * Sole system administrator supporting the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED), uTexas Identity Management (TIM), and uTexas Authentication Management (TAM) systems
 + TED was the largest known public deployment of OpenLDAP, with more than ten million records averaging almost 100 data elements per person, covering every single student, faculty member, staff member, and temporary employee that was on campus since the 1960s
 + TIM was the principal method of getting information into and out of TED, in addition to integration with the campus-wide mainframes and Microsoft Windows Active Directories
 + TAM was the primary campus-wide authentication method used for virtually all web services * Member of Postmaster Team for ~50,000 students and ~20,000 faculty and staff on centralized IMAP mail server system, and using a fleet of Ironport E-mail Security Appliances processing tens of millions of messages per day * Task leader for evaluation of alternative storage solutions for the Enterprise backup system for all central IT Services systems * Task leader for initial R&D for the “Log Intelligence System” using Splunk to process all logs from all central IT Services systems, starting with over 100GiB/day of logs, and ~20-30TiB of logs over the previous six months