Jesse Rhoads's CV

Summary

Site Reliability and Platform Engineering Leader specializing in Proof-of-Concept validation, Observability, and Automation.

Proven ability to coordinate efforts across distributed teams.

Tenacious troubleshooter with a distinct attention to detail.

Committed to continuous learning, mentoring, and knowledge-sharing, as they are key elements of success.

Extensive experience in developer enablement at organizations ranging from startup to enterprise.

Operations & SRE: Chaos Engineering, Capacity Planning, Server Provisioning, SLO Management, Incident Response

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Atlantis, Ansible, Salt, Chef

CI/CD: CircleCI, Buildkite, Argo CD, Jenkins

Observability: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Elasticsearch, Nobl9

Cloud Technologies: Linux (Ubuntu and various distributions), AWS, Kubernetes

Programming and Scripting Languages: Python, Bash, PHP, Go, Ruby

Selected for a cross-functional team to build a dedicated FedRAMP Moderate environment.
Administered global developer infrastructure including GitHub, IaC (Terraform + Atlantis), and internal developer portals such as Backstage.
Authored CircleCI Orbs and Buildkite plugins to reduce engineering toil by abstracting common CI patterns into reusable workflows.
Migrated 2000+ code repositories to use artifact storage on Cloudsmith, standardizing on one solution for all teams.
Led migration of CI pipeline credentials from HashiCorp Vault to AWS Secrets Manager (ASM). This facilitated the decommissioning of Vault and reduced operational overhead.

Established foundational SRE practices as the business unit’s first SRE hire. Partnered with DevOps to integrate operational resiliency and automation into the SDLC.
Designed an onboarding training class on SRE core concepts for all new engineering hires to establish a common knowledge baseline.
Built a high-availability (HA) solution for Sharded MySQL using Orchestrator, HAProxy, Consul Template, Python, and Percona toolkits.
Maintained and extended system configuration management, utilizing SaltStack and Ansible.
Developed Telegraf scripts for custom metric collection and designed centralized Grafana dashboards.

Planned, architected, tested, and automated systems for a high-traffic SaaS platform using Ansible and Terraform across a hybrid GCP and bare-metal fleet.
Designed and orchestrated custom load testing engines using Locust and executed targeted chaos engineering exercises.
Developed critical tooling and internal utilities using Python and Golang.
Evaluated and deployed a Wazuh IDS to significantly augment security policy enforcement capabilities.

Managed end-to-end software deployment, automated regression testing, production releases, and global platform updates.
Orchestrated physical bare-metal and cloud systems (AWS) supporting internal Python and Go applications.
Automated containerized build and deployment pipelines using Docker Compose, Jenkins, and Aptly.
Built a Ceph storage cluster on commodity hardware to host backends for libvirt/KVM hypervisors.
Fostered growth of junior engineers by providing collaborative technical guidance and structured pair programming.

Architected large-scale prototypes and high-fidelity validation environments inside cloud technology incubation labs.
Conducted massive load and functional QA testing, contributing heavily to configuration management pipelines via SaltStack and Python.
Supported expansion of a 2+ Exabyte EMC ATMOS Storage Network, distributed globally across tens of thousands of physical nodes.
Wrote custom automation scripts to query APIs and broadcast critical test telemetry into Slack, increasing bug resolution velocity.
Developed a Python API interface in collaboration with IXIA to automate network impairment hardware orchestration.

Provisioned, installed, configured, and maintained all system layers across hosted dedicated hardware and AWS instances.
Developed an automated deployment pipeline consisting of Chef and Capistrano to ensure configuration parity across environments.
Built, scaled, and safely migrated several distributed production instances of Redis, MongoDB, and Greenplum databases.
Centralized monitoring in ZenOSS, writing custom metric trackers to alert on system anomalies.

Performed deep hands-on infrastructure maintenance, performance optimization, and vendor escalation management for an enterprise Unix fleet.
Authored system documentation and automated repetitive sysadmin runbooks using shell scripts to boost operational throughput.

Member of the founding engineering team that designed, built, validated, and operated the Highwinds CDN from its inception.
Managed system and network environments for development and QA teams, handling subnetting, VLAN allocation, and Brocade device configuration.
Designed, racked, and maintained bare-metal server farms. Templated configuration using Cobbler and Puppet.
Acted as a core technical bridge between Dev and Ops, verifying release stability and validating bugs using siege and HTTP verification tools.
Scaled capacity and prevented capital expenditure by virtualizing legacy hardware resources, building server labs running over 200 virtual machines using XenServer.

Nov 2024

Sept 2025

Nov 2024

Oct 2024

Apr 2016

B.S.

May 2002