josh@fechner:~$

josh@fechner:~$ whoami_

Josh Fechner

Sr. DevOps & Cloud Engineer

Hands-on DevOps engineer with 12+ years supporting enterprise systems and applications. Formerly 5x AWS certified, including Solutions Architect Professional and DevOps Engineer Professional. I design, build, and operate cloud platforms and the paved roads teams ship on.

location Minneapolis, MN focus AWS / Terraform / Kubernetes / CI-CD status open to opportunities
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about.md

// 01

I have spent the last decade building and operating cloud infrastructure on AWS, and the decade before that as an electrical engineer and systems administrator. That path shows up in how I work: I like understanding a system end to end, from the hardware and the network up through the pipelines and the paved-road patterns product teams actually use.

Most of my recent work is platform and DevOps engineering: multi-account, multi-region AWS foundations (account provisioning, identity, and networking), internal developer platforms on EKS, infrastructure as code with Terraform, CI/CD, observability, and carrying the pager for what I build. I care about reliability, sensible guardrails, and keeping things simple enough to reason about.

AWS Terraform Kubernetes Go Docker CI/CD Observability Platform Engineering
$git log

--experience

// 02

Principal DevOps Engineer @ Cargill

Feb 2023 - Present
  • Designed and built a multi-account, multi-region AWS architecture, including account provisioning and bootstrapping, identity, and networking with AWS Cloud WAN.
  • Engineered and operated Cargill's internal cloud platform (CPI) on AWS EKS, giving product teams a paved-road path to ship containerized services; core platform written in Go with Docker.
  • Carried the platform on-call rotation, resolving production incidents and driving follow-up reliability improvements.

Sr. DevOps Engineer / Director of DevOps @ FOXO Technologies

Feb 2021 - Feb 2023
  • Greenfield development of a new life insurance application, including CI/CD pipelines and all infrastructure as code using Terraform.
  • Developed CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application code using GitHub Actions, Checkov, Yor, and Snyk.
  • Built out a multi-account cloud architecture, including accounts used as development sandboxes.
  • Implemented Datadog for observability into logs and metrics.
  • Built up a team of high-performing DevOps engineers to support our development efforts.
  • Worked with the security team to address compliance requirements (SOC 2).

Sr. DevOps Engineer @ Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Jun 2019 - Feb 2021
  • Led the initial PoC and greenfield development of a new application.
  • Developed initial CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure and application code.
  • Integrated code scanning tools into application CI/CD pipelines (Fortify, NexusIQ, SonarQube).
  • Worked with architecture and application development teams to design solutions to fit business requirements.
  • Migrated source control and CI/CD from Bitbucket/Bamboo to GitLab.
  • Developed CDK patterns for application teams to consume for serverless infrastructure.
  • Wrote Terraform to provision an entire ingress architecture for an application behind a private API Gateway.

Sr. DevOps Engineer @ brightpeak financial

Jan 2017 - Jun 2019
  • Lifted and shifted 3 WordPress sites from Liquid Web to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFront, S3, and RDS.
  • Participated in a legacy infrastructure lift-and-shift from CDW-managed VMware VMs to AWS.
  • Built a new digital engagement platform on AWS API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB (Serverless Framework) within Agile scrum teams.
  • Implemented and automated build pipelines with Jenkins on AWS EC2.
  • Implemented static single-page web app hosting with AWS CloudFront, WAF, and S3.
  • Set up SumoLogic log aggregation and monitoring for AWS resources.
  • Migrated to a container-based CI/CD pipeline using Bitbucket Pipelines.
  • Created and maintained infrastructure as code with Terraform.
  • Stood up HashiCorp Vault and Consul clusters for environment key/value and secret storage.
  • Created custom AWS Config rules with Lambda and Python to enforce compliance on AWS resources.

Sr. DevOps Engineer @ Digi International

May 2016 - Dec 2016
  • Implemented Datadog SaaS monitoring on development, test, and production systems.
  • Added several new XenServer nodes to an existing cluster.
  • Performed auditing on Bitbucket accounts.
  • Participated in upgrading a Cassandra ring.
  • Participated in a 24/7 on-call rotation.

Cloud Architect @ Valtira

Nov 2015 - May 2016
  • Studied for and passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate and Professional exams.
  • Migrated Java/Tomcat microservices from large EC2 instances to Elastic Beanstalk.
  • Reduced the cost of a web cluster by more than 80% using SpotInst.
  • Worked with clients to define best practices for working in and moving to AWS.

Sr. Systems Engineer @ Acesse

Jun 2014 - Oct 2015
  • Managed all aspects of a global production AWS environment serving 300M page views/month: EC2, RDS, ELBs, Auto Scaling groups, SES, VPCs, S3, and Route 53.
  • Built a near-real-time dashboard (Dashing, Ruby) of key server metrics from the New Relic API.
  • Wrote Ruby scripts to detect and remediate Shellshock (CVE-2014-6271 and related) across roughly 300 servers.
  • Performance-tested and tuned Adobe Connect servers to support 1,000 concurrent and 100,000 total users.
  • Built a system with EC2, DynamoDB, SQS, and Ruby to record EC2 Auto Scaling scale-down events.
  • Built out production and performance-stage environments for a Java/Tomcat re-platform, and collaborated with developers on build and deploy processes.
  • Provided monitoring, disaster recovery, and systems support toward 24/7 availability.

Earlier - Electrical Engineering & Systems Administration

Sr. Design Engineer @ Eaton's Cooper Power Systems EAS

Mar 2013 - Jun 2014
  • Worked with multidisciplinary teams to bring new Smart Grid products to market.
  • Updated existing PCB designs to meet standards, replace end-of-life components, cut costs, and fix hardware bugs.
  • Performed board- and component-level troubleshooting on customer-returned products.
  • Documented theory of operation, hardware test procedures, and results; performed standards testing for certification.

System Administrator III @ Quality Bicycle Products

Apr 2011 - Mar 2013
  • Evaluated options for a new customized eCommerce platform with the Java eCommerce team, and for replacing a legacy ERP system with business leadership.
  • Installed on-prem Cisco UCS B-Series chassis, servers, and Fabric Interconnect with a NetApp storage backend for dev and test.
  • Implemented a new centralized Cisco wireless network and replaced several pfSense firewalls with Cisco firewalls.
  • Maintained the on-prem Atlassian suite (Jira, Bamboo, Fisheye, Crucible, Crowd, Confluence) and a centralized Git repository.
  • Wrote and maintained Ant build scripts, and implemented Apache-based load balancing and monitoring for legacy systems.

Hardware QA Engineer @ Cooper Power Systems

Oct 2008 - Apr 2011
  • Designed and performed end-to-end system testing of software, firmware, and hardware.
  • Implemented virtualization using decommissioned hardware, VMware ESXi, and FreeNAS.
  • Developed lab environments for testing many hardware devices across firmware versions.

Hosted Systems Engineer @ Cooper Power Systems

Apr 2007 - Oct 2008
  • Administered 25-30 Windows 2000/2003/2008 servers at managed co-location facilities in Minnetonka, MN and Toronto, ON.
  • Managed proprietary Windows services, Tomcat servers, and Oracle 9i/10g/11g databases.
  • Troubleshot customer systems across FLEX paging over dial-up, serial-over-TCP/IP, and direct serial links.

Technical Support Engineer @ Cooper Power Systems

Aug 2005 - Mar 2007
  • Project management including planning, commissioning, and training for new customers.
  • Troubleshot customer issues over the phone and in the field.
  • Provided remote support of customer Windows servers for troubleshooting and training.
$ls

skills/

// 03

cloud / aws

  • EC2
  • EKS
  • Lambda
  • S3
  • RDS
  • DynamoDB
  • VPC
  • Route 53
  • IAM
  • API Gateway
  • CloudFront
  • ELB
  • SQS
  • SNS
  • SES
  • Elastic Beanstalk
  • Config

iac / provisioning

  • Terraform
  • AWS CDK
  • CloudFormation
  • Serverless Framework

containers / orchestration

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Amazon EKS

ci / cd

  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • Jenkins
  • Bitbucket Pipelines
  • Checkov
  • Snyk
  • Yor

languages

  • Go
  • Python
  • Bash
  • Ruby
  • C

observability

  • Datadog
  • New Relic
  • SumoLogic

systems / web / data

  • Linux
  • VMware ESXi
  • Windows
  • Nginx
  • Apache
  • Tomcat
  • WebSphere
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL

education

  • BS Electrical Engineering, Iowa State University (2000-2005)
$tree

architecture/

// 04

Diagrams for infrastructure I have designed or run. This site itself is one of them: a private S3 bucket served through CloudFront with Origin Access Control, DNS and TLS via Route 53 and ACM, provisioned with OpenTofu and deployed by a GitHub Actions pipeline that authenticates to AWS with OIDC (no static keys).

$./contact.sh

// 05
emailjosh@joshfechner.com
githubphekno
linkedinjoshua-fechner
locationMinneapolis, MN