Senior Software Operations Engineer
Open To Work
Ellis Grant
Telensa (Signify)
Roswell,GA
10
Years of experience
3
Certification
Senior Site Reliability and Cloud Operations Engineer with deep hands-on leadership across Kubernetes, ROSA/OpenShift, AWS, Azure, and GCP. Built Terraform, GitOps, observability, and disaster recovery platforms that cut deployment time, lowered incident response times, and improved reliability for large engineering teams and shared infrastructure environments.
Work History
Senior Software Operations Engineer
1 Year- Principal architect and technical owner for all AWS infrastructure and GCP-based ROSA/Kubernetes platforms supporting 1,000+ penetration testers across the Americas.
- Eliminated toil by building the organization's Terraform platform from scratch (50+ reusable modules for EKS, GKE, and ROSA), cutting infrastructure deployment time from 1 week to under 30 minutes (98.75% reduction).
- Standardized 30+ EKS and GKE clusters with Helm and Rancher multicluster management, reducing cluster provisioning from ~2 weeks to under 10 minutes (99.8% reduction).
- Automated delivery with Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines using GitOps workflows, cutting manual deployment effort by over 90% and enabling continuous delivery across platform teams.
- Ensured configuration consistency across 2 GCP organizations (20+ projects each) by importing unmanaged resources into Terraform, achieving near-zero configuration drift.
- Reduced support load from ~30 tickets/week to 1–2/month (98%+) by designing SCP guardrails and IAM governance controls across all AWS accounts.
- Automated onboarding via AWS Control Tower Account Factory, provisioning 40+ AWS accounts and cutting setup time from days to under 30 minutes (95%+ reduction).
- Built Athena, Glue, and SQL cost analytics platform, reducing AWS spend from $20K/month to under $13K/month ($84K+ annual savings, 35%).
Data Center Engineer
2 Years- Implemented Honeycomb as the primary observability platform, instrumenting 30+ services with distributed tracing and SLO-based alerting and reducing mean time to root cause from 45 minutes to under 10 (78% improvement).
- Built a Lambda-based SRE alerting pipeline integrated with Slack across 150+ services, reducing mean time to detection from 25 to 8 minutes and incident acknowledgment time by 60%.
- Maintained 99.9% uptime SLAs, achieving $180K+ annual savings (45%) through AWS Cost Explorer, Reserved Instances, intelligent autoscaling.
- Architected cross-cloud infrastructure across 8 AWS accounts and 4 Azure subscriptions, reducing average deployment time from 45 to under 20 minutes and raising release success rate to 97%.
- Reduced secrets-related incidents by 90% by automating secrets management and key rotation across 50+ services with Azure Key Vault and AWS KMS.
- Managed 100+ Terraform modules across AWS and Azure, enforcing module versioning that reduced configuration drift to near-zero across all environments.
- Automated compliance evidence collection with AWS Config, SecurityHub, Python/Lambda workflows, reducing SOC 2 audit prep from 6+ weeks to under 2 weeks per cycle across 3 consecutive clean audits.
- Established AWS Control Tower guardrails with SCPs across all accounts, reducing policy violations by 85% in first quarter.
- Consolidated data center footprint from 15+ sites to three main hubs, reducing data center spend from 85% to 20% while maintaining the network for pre-sales.
Lead Senior Operations Engineer
2 Years- Designed disaster recovery for 8 critical business applications using automated AMI creation and cross-region replication, achieving a 2-hour RTO and 15-minute RPO.
- Managed team of 10 engineers across multiple sites in United States and UK, ensuring operational efficiency and collaboration.
- Built 10+ Jenkins CI/CD pipelines integrating SonarQube and Veracode scanning, reducing deployment cycle time by 50% and catching 30+ vulnerabilities per quarter before production.
- Deployed 15+ containerized services on Azure Kubernetes Service using Helm and ARM templates, reducing deployment time from 60 to 20 minutes (42%).
- Developed multi-account AWS environment on Control Tower and Account Factory for 50+ accounts, streamlining provisioning from 2 weeks to under 2 hours.
- Architected AWS Transit Gateway and Direct Connect (10 Gbps) networking across 12 VPCs, optimizing data transfer costs by 30% for legal software systems serving 500+ clients.
Education
B.S. - Pre-Law Studies
Skills
Platforms & Orchestration: Kubernetes
EKS
GKE
AKS
ROSA/OpenShift
Rancher
Helm
AWS services
Terraform automation
Kubernetes administration
Cloud infrastructure
Disaster recovery planning
Disaster recovery
Code automation
Security protocols
Certification
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- Microsoft 0365 Endpoint Administrator Associate
Timeline
Senior Software Operations Engineer
Telensa (Signify)
01.2024 - 01.2025Read More
Data Center Engineer
AHEAD LLC
01.2022 - 01.2024Read More
Lead Senior Operations Engineer
AHEAD LLC
01.2020 - 01.2022Read More
Jacksonville State University
B.S. from Pre-Law Studies
Read More