Tavaris Hooks
Pembroke Pines,FL
Summary
Cloud Engineer with multiple years of hands-on experience building and managing cloud infrastructure environments. I have worked to deploy, design, and implement cloud infrastructure for many Royal Caribbean Group products such as Ecommerce, VPS, Digital, security, and much more. Eager to leverage my expertise and drive to make an immediate impact within the Royal Caribbean Group organization. This includes modernizing core cloud infrastructure services, leading efforts to maintain and improve cloud environments, and applying best practices to ensure systems are secure, reliable, and well-architected.
Overview
3
3
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Cloud Systems Engineer
Royal Caribbean Group
Miami, FL
04.2025 - Current
- Leverage Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation) to accelerate uniform, repeatable delivery of cloud resources across the enterprise.
- Partner with product owners to ensure compute services perform reliably, stay current, and meet SLA expectations.
- Apply AI-driven automation to repeatable workflows, freeing engineering bandwidth for higher-priority, mission-critical initiatives.
- Enforce IAM least-privilege, account-level guardrails, and secret management standards across all managed environments.
- Operate monitoring and observability tooling (CloudWatch, Splunk) to triage logs, troubleshoot incidents, and surface issues before they impact production.
- Implement standardized networking patterns (VPC, Transit Gateway, Route53 DNS, security groups) that product owners and engineers consume.
- Consistently meet with engineers on the team to review architecture, implementation strategy, and share best practices that strengthen the team’s overall delivery.
- Respond to critical platform incidents 24/7, participating in the on-call (PagerDuty) rotation and driving incidents to root-cause resolution.
Cloud Engineer
Apex Systems
Miami, FL
09.2023 - 04.2025
- Implemented a centralized backup solution to mitigate potential damage from malware attacks.
- Managed IAM permissions for all users across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to maintain secure access controls.
- Collaborated with product owners and engineers to resolve critical and daily operational issues.
- Remediated security findings to enhance the organization’s overall security posture.
- Automated the backup process to ensure comprehensive coverage for all compute storage.
- Oversee critical networking components in AWS to maintain system reliability and performance.
- Integrated multiple services to improve organizational visibility and optimize product efficiency.
- Engage in weekly meetings with AWS representatives to explore cost-saving opportunities and drive innovation.
Cloud Engineer Consultant
Slalom Consulting
Miami, FL
05.2023 - 09.2023
- Collaborated with professional consultants who are experienced in cloud computing to deliver solutions using AWS, Python, artificial intelligence, and Git.
- Utilize Generative AI techniques to address the client’s specific challenges and overcome shortcomings in their existing systems.
- Worked closely with data engineers to successfully deploy an AI model on the AWS platform.
- Coordinated the deployment process, ensuring integration of the artificial intelligence model into the cloud.
- Took part in the implementation of generative ai techniques, leading to improvement in the client’s system ease of use and efficiency.
- Implemented PII detection and cleaning, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and compliance with safety regulations.
Education
Bachelor in Science - Cybersecurity
Miami Dade College
Miami, FL11-2024
Associate in Science - Enterprise Cloud Computing
Miami Dade College
Miami, FLSkills
- Multi-Cloud Administration (AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP)
- Monitoring and Logging Solutions (Splunk, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, FortiGate)
- Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation, Terraform)
- Cloud Networking (AWS VPC and Subnets, Route Tables, AWS Transit Gateway)
- Day to Day Ticketing (ServiceNow, Jira)
- Backup Reporting, Automation, and Management (AWS Backup, EON)
- AWS IAM Enterprise Management
- Critical Incident Response (PagerDuty)
- Security Best Practice Implementation
- Python
- Cloud architecture design
- DevOps methodologies
- Git version control
Certification
- AWS Solutions Architect Associate
- Hashicorp Certified: Terraform Associate 004
- AWS Certified Developer Associate
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
- CompTIA Cyber Security Analyst +
- CompTIA Project +
- TestOut Server Pro 2016: Install and Storage
Timeline
Cloud Systems Engineer
Royal Caribbean Group
04.2025 - Current
Cloud Engineer
Apex Systems
09.2023 - 04.2025
Cloud Engineer Consultant
Slalom Consulting
05.2023 - 09.2023
Bachelor in Science - Cybersecurity
Miami Dade College
Associate in Science - Enterprise Cloud Computing
Miami Dade College