Joshua Blankenship
Colorado Springs,CO
Summary
A senior IT professional and US Air Force Veteran with 12 years of progressive experience across enterprise infrastructure, networking, cloud platforms, systems administration, and IT operations. With a proven ability to lead technical initiatives, modernize legacy environments, automate operational workflows, and support mission-critical systems with high availability and security requirements. Adept at translating business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Staff, Systems and Infrastructure Engineer
Walmart Global Tech
01.2022 - Current
- Manages Disaster Recovery capabilities for Walmart’s Critical Business Services, primarily eCommerce, ensuring business continuity in alignment with Walmart’s Policy on identified Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives (RTO and RPO).
- Cross-Functional Team Leadership during the testing phase, solely responsible for the actions of 400+ of associates during production level testing across multiple technology domains.
- Plans, Facilitates, and Executes upon various Disaster Recovery Scenarios with application teams under User Cases. Mission objective is to measure the out-of-region redundancy of Walmart’s Critical Applications.
- Develop and Modify testing scripts for 300+ applications deployed in multitudes of configurations, utilizing .yaml scripting to manipulate, automate, and simulate failures and outages. (Scaling Kubernetes Pods, Blocking IP tables, Chaos testing, etc. )
Boundary Protection Design Engineer III
Jacobs Technology
01.2020 - 01.2022
- Performed as an engineer on the network boundary for the Missile Defense Agency, configuring multiple firewalls and security devices to align to DoD policy for numerous enterprise networks.
- Architect for unclassified, classified, and demilitarized zone boundary devices, designing the traffic flow logic, security rules, and subnetting for geographically separated units.
- Detected and rectified major critical infrastructure problem with the Palo Alto Firewalls, able to reduce network latency by 30% and save the company on additional licensing purchases.
- Deployed boundary solution for the SD-WAN Project to the Missile Defense Agency using the Palo Alto virtual system (vsys) capability to remotely configure and deploy numerous tailored firewalls with unique policies to teams with different mission capabilities.
Craftsman, Cyber Systems Operations
United States Air Force, USAF
06.2014 - 11.2019
- Managed both small and large enterprise projects by consistently meeting milestones, key performance indicators, and deliverable objectives. Coordinated with external and internal customers to support the missions of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) and Business and Enterprise Systems (BES).
- Senior Administrator for a large US Enterprise Network, supporting the system responsible for 800,000 DoD users and multiple weapons systems.
- Configured, optimized, and secured the local physical IT infrastructure, consistently achieving 99% availability and performance across Microsoft Server environments (2003, 2008R2, 2012, and 2016).
Education
MBA - Information Technology Management
Western Governors University
Salt Lake City, UT06-2023
Bachelor of Science - Information Technology
Western Governors University
Salt Lake City, UT08-2021
Associate of Science - Information Technology
Community College of The Air Force
Montgomery, AL01-2017
Skills
- Multi-Level Communicator
- Cross-Functional Team Leadership
- Network Architecture and Security
- System Operations and Security
- Adaptability
- Disaster Recovery Engineering
- IT Policy Governance
- Risk Management
- Cybersecurity
- Security Frameworks and Tools: Wireshark, Fire eye, Palo Alto Firewalls and IDS/IPS
- Languages: Python, HTML, Bash, Yaml, SQL, Powershell
- Cloud Technologies: TCP/IP, Azure, Kubernetes
Certification
- CISSP - In Progress [Est. March 2026]
- CompTIA Security+
- CompTIA Network+
- CompTIA Project+
- CompTIA Cloud Essentials
- ITIL Foundation v3 Level
- CompTIA A+
Accomplishments
- Earned "Walmart Excellence" Award for adapting and providing new solutions regarding disaster recovery testing.
- Earned the "Commandant's Award" for Demonstrating Superior Leadership Qualities.
- Earned "Airman of the Year" Award for performance exceeding my current rank and expectations.
Timeline
Staff, Systems and Infrastructure Engineer
Walmart Global Tech
01.2022 - Current
Boundary Protection Design Engineer III
Jacobs Technology
01.2020 - 01.2022
Craftsman, Cyber Systems Operations
United States Air Force, USAF
06.2014 - 11.2019
MBA - Information Technology Management
Western Governors University
Bachelor of Science - Information Technology
Western Governors University
Associate of Science - Information Technology
Community College of The Air Force