Joe Perez #
[email protected] • LinkedIn • Github • Portfolio
Senior Site Reliability Engineer – Cloud‑Native & IaC Specialist
Results‑driven engineer with 10+ years designing, automating, and scaling cloud platforms. Expert in containerised workloads, Terraform‑based Infrastructure as Code, and cost‑optimisation strategies that have saved > $500k annually. Passionate about building resilient, developer‑centric pipelines that accelerate delivery from weeks to minutes.
Experience #
ChowNow – Senior DevOps Engineer #
Los Angeles, CA September 2019 – December 2025
- Migrated legacy monolith to AWS ECS Fargate, standardising builds across 12 services and minimizing outages via automated roll‑backs.
- Optimized front‑end Docker builds with multi‑stage pipelines, reducing build time 75% (from 12 min to 3 min).
- Refactored mobile app builder CI pipeline to shave 80% off build duration via Ansible tuning, enabling faster feedback loops for developers and daily releases.
- Designed and rolled out a Terraform workspace structure that supports concurrent workstreams and reduces blast radius for unrelated services
- Developed reusable Terraform modules for VPC, IAM, and RDS provisioning, cutting infrastructure‑as‑code onboarding time by 93% (15 days to 1 day).
- Led MySQL 5.7 to 8.0 migration using RDS blue‑green deployments, averting a projected $560 k/yr cost increase and achieving zero‑downtime cut‑overs.
- Integrated an acquired‑company’s workloads into IaC, consolidating observability under Datadog and improving mean‑time‑to‑detect incidents by 40%.
- Implemented Cloudflare WAF/CDN, decreasing DDoS exposure and off‑loading ~15% of web traffic from AWS resources.
- Automated security hardening with AWS Secrets Manager and SSM Patch Manager, achieving compliance with internal security standards.
- Collaborated with the data team to redesign pipelines, moving from daily refreshes to near‑real‑time reporting while embedding PII‑aware security controls.
- Introduced and championed tooling to streamline engineering processes:
- Locust – load testing and compute‑scaling validation.
- GitHub Actions – automated build & test pipelines.
- Pre‑Commit – shortened feedback loops for infrastructure code.
- Packer – pre‑built AWS AMIs for EC2 workloads.
- Cloudflare - WAF/CDN for security and caching.
- AWS ECS Fargate + Lambda - serverless and container orchestration.
- AWS Database Migration Service – reporting and upgrade automation.
- AWS Patch Manager – automated EC2 patching.
- AWS SSM (SSO + MFA) – replaced SSH with secure authentication.
- AWS Secrets Manager – secure secret storage and rotation.
- AWS RDS Blue‑Green Deployments – near‑zero‑downtime database upgrades.
NationBuilder – Systems Engineer #
Los Angeles, CA August 2016-August 2019
Technical Skills #
| Category | Tools & Services | Proficiency |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Platforms | AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS, SSM, Secrets Manager, DMS, Patch Manager) | ★★★★★ |
| Containers | Docker, AWS ECS Fargate | ★★★★☆ |
| IaC & Automation | Terraform, Ansible, Packer | ★★★★★ |
| CI/CD | GitHub Actions, Jenkins | ★★★★★ |
| Monitoring | Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana | ★★★★☆ |
| Security | Cloudflare WAF/CDN, IAM, PCI‑DSS practices | ★★★★☆ |
| Scripting | Bash, Python | ★★★★☆ |
| Load Testing | Locust | ★★★★☆ |
Education #
Bachelor of Science in Informatics
Indiana University, Bloomington
Projects & Contributions #
- taccoform.com – Main Contributor
Created and maintained the taccoform.com site as a community hub for sharing Terraform learnings, patterns, and reusable modules.- Authored over 25 detailed blog posts covering advanced Terraform concepts, module design, and best‑practice workflows.
References available upon request.