Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Certification
Timeline
Derrick Bryant

Derrick Bryant

Lead DevOps Engineering
Washington,DC

Summary

As a seasoned DevOps Engineering Leader and critical thinker with nearly 20 years of experience, I build high-performing teams and cloud-native platforms that enable fast, safe, and repeatable software delivery. I treat modern DevOps practices—GitOps, CI/CD, Agile, IaC, serverless, Kubernetes, containers, observability, and AI tools—as everyday essentials, not buzzwords. I’m often a “misunderstood developer” — with a CS degree, solid coding skills, and a quick learner mindset, I bring deep software engineering experience to roles typically seen as infrastructure-focused. This unique blend lets me build tools and systems that truly resonate with developers, improving workflows and boosting productivity. I move fast, cut through noise, and get things done. At my last role, I led the implementation of a true continuous delivery pipeline and a company-wide shift-left initiative that boosted quality, accelerated delivery, and contributed to a successful acquisition. Hands-on and collaborative, I reduce friction through automation, self-service platforms, AI-powered solutions, and elegant technical design. People often say they feel more confident when I’m in the room—even if I’m not directly involved—because I bring calm, clarity, and a team-first mindset.

Overview

18
18
years of professional experience
2
2
Certifications

Work History

Lead DevOps Engineer | Architect

CareJourney by Arcadia
Washington, DC
03.2023 - Current
  • Spearheaded the modernization of DevOps infrastructure with a focus on CI/CD scalability, platform reliability, developer velocity, and cost.
  • Architected and implemented true continuous delivery pipelines, and AI-powered internal tools to streamline engineering workflows and improve observability.
  • Lead a company-wide shift-left initiative, integrating security, compliance, and testing earlier in the development lifecycle.
  • Operated in a HIPAA-compliant environment, ensuring that infrastructure and processes met strict security and privacy standards.
  • Defined and documented technical solutions, gathered requirements, and broke down initiatives into clear, actionable Jira epics, and stories.
  • Drove sprint planning and roadmap alignment, ensuring team efforts tracked to long-term goals and business impact.
  • Owned infrastructure improvements using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK), and implemented security best practices across AWS environments.
  • Developed automated monitoring and compliance tools using AI/ML (e.g., Amazon Bedrock), improving incident response and system reliability.
  • Known as a go-to problem solver across engineering, frequently pulled into cross-team efforts for architectural input and issue resolution.
  • Maintained the Git version control system for seamless collaboration among developers and engineers during project lifecycles. Utilized GitOps principles.
  • The tech stack includes, but is not limited to: AWS (EKS, Lambda, CDK, API Gateway, CloudFront), CircleCI, Git, Kubernetes, Serverless Framework, Terraform, Python, and more.

Cloud and DevOps Engineering Leader

Datometry
San Francisco (Remote), California
01.2016 - 06.2021
  • I work across engineering, product, and customer focused scrum teams to design, develop, and implement cloud engineering efforts by educating, negotiating, and prioritizing efforts. I work with team leads to prioritize new development and technical debt across AWS, Azure, and GCP clouds to provide multiple Enterprise grade SaaS products.
  • Some of my efforts include:
  • - Architecting cloud infrastructure for enterprise grade products with unique requirements
  • - Cloud cost management that lead to significant cost reduction
  • - Testing framework optimization greatly improving developer productivity
  • - Product test framework for newly supported platforms
  • - Cross team dependencies coordination
  • - Product observability improvements leading to less time troubleshooting customer issues
  • 5 years 6 months

DevOps Team Lead

Millennial Media
Washington, DC
10.2013 - 09.2015
  • I served as the DevOps team lead by organizing the team’s efforts and negotiating requirements provided by the Director and other scrum teams within the business. My team developed tools to automate tasks related to testing and deployment of a highly available digital ad service. Our efforts ultimately led to increased productivity, higher feature completion, faster release cycles, and greater visibility by providing reliable self-service tools to development teams.
  • 2 years

DevOps Engineer

Library of Congress
05.2012 - 10.2013
  • Work with teammates to manage day-to-day operations of development environment used to create software to manage the Library's massive collection of digital content
  • Use Chef cookbooks to manage Linux infrastructure consisting of Ubuntu and Red Hat distributions.
  • Write custom Chef cookbooks and community cookbooks to manage infrastructure and releasing some custom cookbooks to the community as open source
  • Manage small set of custom designed physical hardware devices to operate as KVM servers
  • Implemented and manage new KVM Virtualization infrastructure running on both Red Hat and Ubuntu
  • Compared and tested virtualization platforms including VMWare, RHEV, RHEL + KVM, Ubuntu + KVM, and DevStack OpenStack
  • Create custom applications to make life easier for developers. Most written in Python using Django. Also create Chef cookbooks to handle deploying applications in an idempotent manner
  • Work with teammates to solve any technical issues and create team policies to ensure compliance with government regulations and best practices
  • Use git as version control system
  • 1 year 6 months

Systems Administrator

Driven, Inc
Falls Church, VA
08.2011 - 04.2012
  • Aided with junior team member development by mentoring and directing
  • Assisted with management of all company computing resources both Windows and Linux. Examples below.
  • Configured and manage high performance switches including LAGs and VLANs
  • Support office and data center housed hardware
  • Manage iSCSI SAN infrastructure by creating new volumes, connecting servers, and benchmarking
  • Created new production Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 virtualization infrastructure using KVM
  • Created and manage 70+ Windows Virtual Machines
  • Support existing VMWare ESXi infrastructure
  • Implemented new VDI (Verde) to deliver the company service to customers
  • Setup monitoring/management systems such as Nagios, Cacti, Munin, and Splunk
  • Coded and engineered custom solutions such as a web interface used to create user accounts for jailed SFTP service for client uploads
  • Implementing new asterisk based phone system using Trixbox
  • Assist with management of Windows 2003/2008 Server Active Directory Domains and Exchange
  • Created encrypted VPN link between the main office and the data center
  • Creating documentation of server setup within company wiki
  • 9 months

Systems Engineer

Cooper Notification
04.2009 - 08.2011
  • Managed and maintained life saving emergency mass notification systems
  • Provided day to day technical support for customers such as SSL certificate management, data imports, IP changes, customer network troubleshooting, etc.
  • Managed hosted infrastructure of highly available emergency notification systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2
  • Planed new office infrastructure to support customer and development needs
  • Designed and implemented new custom iSCSI storage solution for a VMWare ESX based VM development/office infrastructure
  • Evaluated Xen 3.0.3 (included with RHEL 5) and VMWare ESXi in the development infrastructure for potential use in the production infrastructure
  • Documented all infrastructure changes in the company wiki
  • Designed and implemented a Nagios monitoring solution installed on CentOS 5.4 (Red Hat 5.4 clone) to ensure high availability for emergency notification systems
  • Installed and configured office door access system
  • Member of the team tasked by the CTO to create a proof of concept of an integrated notification system using all Cooper Notification products utilizing Ubuntu 10.04, CentOS 5, and RHEL 5
  • Traveled to various customer locations for deployments, upgrades, and support
  • 2 years 5 months

Systems Administrator

Symplicity Corporation
02.2008 - 03.2009
  • Administered highly available CentOS 5 (Red Hat 5 clone) based distributed Linux cluster containing 115 servers housed in a remote data center
  • Managed SAN and cluster file system
  • Installed and managed several MySQL database servers
  • Racked/Installed over half of Symplicity's servers housed in the data center
  • Managed in office/development Xen 3.0.3 (virtualized) environment
  • Performed all necessary software updates and upgrades
  • Managed Symplicity software package upgrades via RPM
  • Developed, deployed and supported OpenVPN solution for remote users adapted for VOIP communications
  • Administered and supported Asterisk phone system
  • Used above Asterisk server to create and manage call center where approximately half of the phone agents worked remotely
  • Documented standard company practices and policies in a wiki
  • Provided technical telephone support for Symplicity clients
  • Provided technical assistance to local and remote employees via instant message, email, and telephone
  • Represented Symplicity while communicating with third party vendors
  • Provided 24/7 on call support
  • 1 year 2 months

Education

Bachelor of Science - Computer Science

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Knoxville, TN
01.2007

Skills

Serverless Computing

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Certification

Private Pilot Certificate

Timeline

Lead DevOps Engineer | Architect - CareJourney by Arcadia
03.2023 - Current
Cloud and DevOps Engineering Leader - Datometry
01.2016 - 06.2021
DevOps Team Lead - Millennial Media
10.2013 - 09.2015
DevOps Engineer - Library of Congress
05.2012 - 10.2013
Systems Administrator - Driven, Inc
08.2011 - 04.2012
Systems Engineer - Cooper Notification
04.2009 - 08.2011
Systems Administrator - Symplicity Corporation
02.2008 - 03.2009
University of Tennessee, Knoxville - Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

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