Open to senior cloud & platform roles

Valejo (Jo) Johnson

Senior Cloud / DevOps Engineer — AWS

I build and operate AWS infrastructure end to end — the Terraform and CDK, the Lambda and SSM automation, and the CI/CD pipelines that keep it all running. For a decade I've automated patching, deployments, and security guardrails for teams in finance, media, gaming, and healthcare — including regulated environments under PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, and AWS GovCloud. Army veteran, happiest embedded in a delivery team: hands on the keyboard, taking the operational pain off everyone's plate.

Las Vegas, NV — open to remote U.S. Army veteran AWS GovCloud & Commercial
AWS Terraform AWS CDK Kubernetes / EKS CI/CD Python DevSecOps
Download résumé (PDF) Email me Call
20+
Years in IT and infrastructure, from Army networks to AWS fleets
10+
Years designing and running production workloads on AWS
85%
Cut in SAP patch runtime — 3–4 hours down to under 20 minutes
99.99%
Availability targets held for customer-facing EKS platforms

01 — Signature outcomes

The work, in the numbers that mattered

Four projects that best explain what I do: find the operational pain, automate it away, and leave the team with something they can run without me.

85% faster

Fleet-scale SAP patching, rebuilt

Replaced a manual 3–4 hour patch window with a Bash + AWS SSM orchestration framework: preflight checks, automated EC2 snapshots, ordered SAP service stop/start, patch execution, and post-patch validation across 100+ hosts in GovCloud and Commercial — now under 20 minutes, with rollback protection and compliance reporting.

Amazon (Leo) · 2024–present

Six figures

Annual AWS spend taken off the bill

Drove six-figure annual savings through systematic right-sizing, scheduled non-production shutdowns, and Reserved Instance coverage — without a single availability regression on customer-facing systems.

Caesars Entertainment · 2021–2024

~40% lower

Mean time to detect, across the estate

Unified fragmented monitoring into a single observability story with Grafana, Prometheus, and CloudWatch, cutting MTTD by roughly 40% and giving on-call engineers one place to look at 3 a.m.

Caesars Entertainment · 2021–2024

~60% faster

Infrastructure provisioning, standardized

Shipped reusable Terraform modules for VPC, IAM, RDS, and ECS and standardized CI/CD on GitHub Actions and Jenkins with Snyk, Checkov, and Trivy gates — teams provisioned ~60% faster and vulnerabilities stopped reaching production.

Hulu · 2019–2021

02 — Experience

Twenty-plus years, six chapters

Each role opens with the headline results. Expand any entry for the full detail, or tap a technology to see everywhere I've used it.

Filtered by
Oct 2024 — Present Current

Amazon (Leo)

Systems Development Engineer

  • Reduced SAP EC2 patching runtime by ~85% (3–4 hrs → under 20 mins) by engineering a Bash + AWS SSM orchestration framework with preflight checks, automated snapshots, patch execution, and post-patch validation across 100+ hosts.
  • Built a region-aware, fault-tolerant patching system with rollback protection, maintenance-safe SAP service stop/start sequencing, and compliance reporting — improving reliability and audit readiness in AWS GovCloud and Commercial accounts.
Show 8 more achievements
  • Designed a universal SSM polling engine to dynamically track patch, scan, and reboot status across multi-region fleets, eliminating manual follow-ups and shortening maintenance windows.
  • Automated SAP clustered DB/app server operations, enforcing ordered stop/start sequences to reduce downtime and human error.
  • Added safety and observability features including RPMDB corruption detection and remediation, CloudWatch transcript logging, and interactive vs. hands-off patching modes with reboot confirmation prompts.
  • Developed and maintained Lambda-based automation pipelines for patching, scanning, and monitoring workflows.
  • Created reusable AWS CDK stacks and constructs to provision standardized infrastructure in GovCloud.
  • Built CloudWatch dashboards and alarms for real-time operational visibility across ERP/MES environments.
  • Authored detailed runbooks, diagrams, and onboarding guides to upskill engineers on complex automation workflows.
  • Partnered cross-functionally to triage on-call incidents, support internal tickets, and embed compliance early in design cycles.
Apr 2021 — Oct 2024

Caesars Entertainment

DevOps Engineer

  • Architected and scaled EKS workloads with Terraform and GitLab CI/CD, holding 99.99% availability targets for customer-facing systems.
  • Drove six-figure annual cost savings via right-sizing, scheduled shutdowns, and Reserved Instances.
Show 5 more achievements
  • Unified observability with Grafana, Prometheus, and CloudWatch, lowering MTTD by ~40% and improving on-call response.
  • Standardized golden AMIs and OS baselines, reducing vulnerability patch lag and deployment variance across environments.
  • Automated IAM, S3, and SecurityHub event handling with Python Lambda pipelines, improving incident response speed and reducing manual toil.
  • Published secure-by-default IAM policies and CloudFormation templates to accelerate compliant service adoption across dozens of accounts.
  • Delivered internal GitOps/IaC workshops and enablement assets that upskilled teams and reduced configuration drift.
Aug 2019 — Apr 2021

Hulu

Sr. AWS Infrastructure Engineer

  • Delivered reusable Terraform modules (VPC, IAM, RDS, ECS), accelerating infrastructure provisioning by ~60%.
  • Standardized CI/CD with GitHub Actions and Jenkins, embedding Snyk, Checkov, and Trivy to shift security left and block vulnerabilities pre-production.
Show 5 more achievements
  • Automated DR snapshot rotation, reducing RTO from hours to minutes for key services.
  • Implemented budget alerts and cost forecasts with finance, driving ~10% annual cloud savings.
  • Centralized logging (Fluentd → Kinesis → Elasticsearch), improving root cause analysis speed and on-call efficiency.
  • Built hardened AMIs and GuardDuty/Inspector triage pipelines, reducing critical security findings across AWS accounts.
  • Standardized KMS and SCP guardrails and partnered with developers on OPA policies to enforce least-privilege access.
Aug 2016 — Aug 2019

Magic Leap

Systems Engineer

  • Created system hardening scripts and automated Linux patch deployment, reducing configuration drift and vulnerability exposure.
  • Collaborated with security and compliance on HIPAA and SOX readiness, aligning infrastructure to regulatory controls.
Show 6 more achievements
  • Deployed CloudWatch Logs with unified dashboards, improving operational visibility for production apps.
  • Managed Azure and AWS resource groups for R&D and production workloads with cost and access governance.
  • Implemented backup and restore procedures for VMware and physical hosts, strengthening recovery posture.
  • Developed Python and PowerShell automation for audits, onboarding workflows, and API-based integrations to remove manual steps.
  • Designed site-level AWS infrastructure with automated backups and SNS alerts, improving recovery readiness and stakeholder visibility.
  • Performed Well-Architected reviews and remediation plans to uplift reliability for production workloads.
Mar 2014 — Aug 2016

Great Healthworks

Systems Engineer

  • Deployed and maintained 150+ LAMP servers on AWS EC2 with custom AMIs, improving repeatability and time-to-deploy.
  • Designed PCI-DSS-aligned systems with encrypted S3 storage and segmented networks to protect cardholder data.
Show 4 more achievements
  • Built internal tools for inventory tracking, update rollouts, and user management to reduce manual ops.
  • Led training sessions on IT operations, security awareness, and automation best practices.
  • Scaled MySQL and PHP apps with dev teams, improving performance and reliability.
  • Owned incident response and recovery with documented playbooks for high-priority systems.
Feb 2003 — Jul 2013 10 years of service

U.S. Army

IT Support Specialist

  • Managed Active Directory, DHCP/DNS, and WSUS for 1,000+ users and systems with high availability.
  • Led multi-site IT teams, training junior staff and standardizing SOPs for patching and hardening.
Show 3 more achievements
  • Served as Tier 2/3 escalation for software, network, and hardware issues across global sites.
  • Built and maintained secure communications environments supporting overseas missions.
  • Recognized for leadership and innovation in resource-constrained deployments.

03 — Personal projects

Things I built on my own time

Shipped and running — products and tooling I designed, built, and operate myself, infrastructure included.

SaaS product

HOABase

hoabase.io

A multi-tenant SaaS platform homeowners associations use to run day-to-day operations — residents, dues, documents, and communications. Product, application, and the AWS infrastructure underneath it: designed, built, and operated solo.

Multi-tenant SaaS Solo build
Visit hoabase.io
Community

Farmers Market Vegas

farmersmarket.vegas

A directory and map of the farmers markets around the Las Vegas valley — where they are and when they run — built and hosted as a free resource for the city. Small, fast, and cheap to keep online.

Static site Maps Solo build
Visit farmersmarket.vegas
Open source

On-call SRE bot

tisacrest-oncall-bot

A Terraform module that drops an AI on-call engineer into any AWS account. It reads the stack's own Terraform state to learn what it owns, and when a wired CloudWatch alarm fires it emails a root-cause diagnosis. Diagnose-only by default with no write access — it proposes alarm wiring and coverage gaps as draft pull requests, and live remediation is strictly opt-in.

Amazon Bedrock SNS GitHub App
View on GitHub

04 — Technical depth

What I reach for

Grouped the way a hiring manager reads a stack. Select anything to jump to the roles where I used it in production.

Cloud platforms

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD & delivery

Containers & compute

Observability

Security & compliance

Languages & scripting

Systems & identity

How I work

Tip: selecting a technology filters the experience timeline above to the roles where it shows up.

05 — Credentials

Education, training, and the regulated stuff

Education

2017
Keller Graduate School of Management Master of Information Systems Management — June 2017
2016
DeVry University B.S. Computer Information Systems — June 2016

Training & certifications

CompTIA Security+ Terraform with AWS CloudFormation API Gateway Deep Dive Jenkins Chef Bash GoLang YAML Essentials Ethical Hacking Linux Administration Cisco Networking & Security Machine Learning with Python Power BI

Regulated environments

GovCloudBuilt and patched AWS GovCloud workloads alongside Commercial, with CDK-provisioned baselines and audit-ready compliance reporting.
PCI-DSSDesigned PCI-DSS-aligned systems with encrypted S3 storage and segmented networks protecting cardholder data.
HIPAAPartnered with security and compliance teams on HIPAA readiness, mapping infrastructure to regulatory controls.
SOXAligned change management and access governance to SOX requirements across production estates.
Clearance10 years U.S. Army service supporting secure communications environments on overseas missions.

Industries

Cloud & e-commerce Gaming & hospitality Streaming media AR/VR hardware Healthcare Defense

Under the hood

This site is its own case study

No framework, no build step, no third-party trackers — one hand-written HTML file on AWS, provisioned entirely in Terraform. The colors you're seeing right now are picked from the current hour in Las Vegas.

HostingS3 static site behind CloudFront + ACM TLS
DNSRoute 53 alias records, apex + wildcard
IaCTerraform, remote state in S3 with DynamoDB locking
AnalyticsLambda Function URL → DynamoDB counters
ReportingScheduled Lambda → SES daily & monthly digests
MonitoringCloudWatch alarms on 4xx/5xx error rates → SNS

06 — Beyond the terminal

The human running the pipelines

Altitude, watts, and apexes. The same instinct that makes me automate a patch window makes me want to fly the drone one canyon further.

Drones

Testing limits — capturing the world one aerial shot at a time.

Spinning

Pushing watts and playlists — legs move, mind clears.

Driving

Downshifting into bliss — every turn's a vibe in motion.

Aviation

Clouds above, code below — always chasing altitude.

👨‍💻 Music I code to 🎧 Music I groove to 🚴 Music I cycle to 💃 Music I move to

07 — Contact

Hiring for a senior cloud role?

I read every message. Tell me the team, the stack, and the problem you're trying to make go away — I'll tell you straight if I'm the right fit.

Email me Download résumé LinkedIn
cubists.gables0r@icloud.com Tap to call github.com/valejojohnson Las Vegas, NV — open to remote
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