Hello! I'm Don.
Cloud Infrastructure and Software Engineer
Welcome to my personal portfolio page! I have spent the past decade building and maintaining enterprise cloud infrastructure. I started my career at a managed service provider, where I adapted quickly through multiple promotions and company acquisitions in a fast-paced environment. I then moved to healthcare tech, where I worked on cutting-edge AI/ML infrastructure and helped optimize cloud costs and processes leading up to an acquisition. These days, I'm helping an AI startup scale their platform from the ground up, and spend my free time experimenting with different software projects. If you're looking for IT infrastructure consulting, feel free to reach out.
Career Timeline
12 years building cloud infrastructure through 3 acquisitions. Now I'm building the applications that run on it.
EOC Technician
Launched my IT career with a Managed Service Provider working in their Enterprise Operations Center, where I helped to provide operational support for a wide variety of clients and technologies in a fast-paced environment. I was retained through a company acquisition based on my technical expertise, customer service, and leadership capabilities.
Key Responsibilities
- ▹Monitor a variety of IT systems alerts and respond to incidents across all shifts
- ▹Troubleshoot and resolve client technical issues across multiple platforms
- ▹Manage ticketing system and maintain detailed incident documentation
- ▹Coordinate with engineering teams for complex issue resolution
- ▹Create and maintain process documentation and runbooks
- ▹Train new team members on monitoring tools and procedures
- ▹Handle escalated technical issues and VIP customer situations
Key Achievements
- ✓Promoted to Shift Lead, demonstrating leadership across rotating shifts
- ✓Helped lead company-wide transition to Nimsoft monitoring system for all managed operating systems
- ✓Recovered critical client backup data that others had been unable to locate, preventing data loss and potential litigation
Impact Metrics
Technologies
Cloud Services Engineer
After proving myself in the EOC, I was offered a choice between several career paths in different technical areas of expertise. I decided to join the Cloud Services team, where the focus was on datacenter virtualization, storage, and networking. Once on that team, I rapidly advanced from Tier 1 to Tier 3 escalation engineer while thriving through another company acquisition.
Key Responsibilities
- ▹Handle escalations for complex cloud infrastructure issues across a large client base
- ▹Participate in design and implementation of a variety of private and public cloud solutions
- ▹Lead Incident response for high-severity outages, and author Root Cause Analysis reports
- ▹Implement proactive monitoring improvements to prevent future issues
Key Achievements
- ✓Promoted from Tier 1 to Tier 3 Engineer in under 2 years
- ✓Implemented a wide variety of cost-savings measures for clients, improving retention
- ✓Earned certifications in VMware and Nutanix technologies to enhance technical expertise
Impact Metrics
Technologies
Advanced Enterprise Services Engineer
At this point in time I was selected as the founding engineer for a newly created AES business unit, which was established to provide white-glove support to the company's largest and most compliance-sensitive environments. This role marked my transition from reactive engineering and support into proactive infrastructure design, architecture, and automation at scale.
Key Responsibilities
- ▹Design, deploy and maintain private cloud solutions for enterprise clients
- ▹Create automation workflows for DR testing and lifecycle management
- ▹Perform capacity planning, infrastructure sizing, and lifecycle management
- ▹Collaborate with sales engineering on pre-sales technical solutions
- ▹Mentor junior engineers on advanced cloud infrastructure concepts
Key Achievements
- ✓First engineer hired into newly formed Advanced Services unit supporting most strategic enterprise accounts
- ✓Created automation workflows for capacity planning, lifecycle automation, and enterprise-scale disaster recovery simulations
- ✓Earned VMware and Zerto advanced certifications in datacenter virtualization and disaster recovery
Impact Metrics
Technologies
Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Took a role at a new company to be on the cutting edge of Machine Learning/AI infrastructure technology. VigiLanz was well established in the healthcare software space with a focus on resource-intensive ML workloads. I owned the design, deployment, and operations of their private cloud spanning multiple datacenters. Following acquisition by Inovalon, I obtained AWS certification and helped with the design, deployment, and migration of private cloud workloads to AWS.
Key Responsibilities
- ▹Defined and operationalized team SOPs, KPIs, and cost management frameworks for infrastructure operations
- ▹Prepared and presented recurring capacity, lifecycle, and cost management reports to leadership
- ▹Partnered with InfoSec to design and enforce cloud security policies ensuring HIPAA and SOC 2 Type II compliance
- ▹Collaborated with Development teams on infrastructure requirements for ML model deployment
- ▹Managed hardware and software lifecycle including patching, upgrades, and capacity planning
- ▹Provided escalation support and root cause analysis for production infrastructure issues
Key Achievements
- ✓Designed and deployed comprehensive Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan with annual validation
- ✓Led multiple hardware expansion and upgrade projects from procurement through production deployment
- ✓Obtained AWS Solutions Architect certification and helped design and deploy AWS infrastructure using Terraform for multi-datacenter private cloud migration
Impact Metrics
Technologies
Investor & Technical Advisor
Decided to leverage my 10 years of industry experience (and some of my savings) to join a start-up that built an AI powered internship search platform used by Universities. I joined as a technical advisor to help guide infrastructure and scaling decisions.
Key Responsibilities
- ▹Provide strategic guidance on cloud infrastructure architecture and scaling strategies
- ▹Advise on DevOps best practices and CI/CD pipeline optimization
- ▹Evaluate and recommend technology stack choices for platform reliability
- ▹Contribute to product roadmap planning and technical decision-making
- ▹Leverage enterprise infrastructure expertise to guide startup growth
Key Achievements
- ✓Led migration from legacy hosting to Google Workspace, improving collaboration and reducing operational overhead
- ✓Implemented comprehensive monitoring of critical platform components to improve reliability and incident response
- ✓Attended NACE conference to network with industry professionals and research market opportunities in career services technology
Impact Metrics
Technologies
Projects
After transitioning to a part-time role in mid-2025, I seized the opportunity to add the final piece to my toolkit—hands-on software development. With over a decade of infrastructure expertise, I wanted to close the loop and become a true end-to-end practitioner.
My goal is simple: master the complete software journey from concept through architecture, implementation, and deployment to fully scaled production systems. By combining deep infrastructure knowledge with development skills, I'm building the rare ability to own solutions from first line of code to the last byte of infrastructure.
Modern AI-assisted development tools have supercharged this journey. The projects below showcase my exploration of full-stack development, cloud-native architectures, and infrastructure automation—each one strengthening my ability to deliver complete, production-ready solutions solo.
This Website!
A modern, responsive portfolio showcasing my professional journey and technical skills
Dental Equipment Asset Tracker
Enterprise-grade multi-tenant SaaS platform for dental equipment asset management with work order system
ToDoGres (Priority Task Manager)
Monolithic Flask application with dynamic priority calculation engine and component-based architecture
AI-Powered Meal Planning
Full-stack TypeScript monorepo with AI recipe generation, receipt OCR scanning, and intelligent pantry management
NCAA Football Dynasty Tracker
Interactive Streamlit dashboard for tracking multi-season college football dynasty campaigns with tier-based progression
SleeveTracker
Full-stack portfolio management application with multi-account tracking, real-time market data, and microservices architecture
GitHub Activity
View my full profile on GitHub
Skills & Technologies
Technologies and tools I work with.
Cloud Platforms & Virtualization
Infrastructure & Systems
DevOps & Automation
Monitoring & Operations
Software Development
Get In Touch
Interested in working together or have a question? Feel free to reach out.