Migrations · Terraform · Hybrid networking · Cost optimization

AWS cloud engineer and technical account manager.

Over a decade in infrastructure and more than eight years hands-on with AWS. I build multi-account estates in Terraform, design identity that holds up under review, and run migrations where every step has a verification and a way back.

Open to remote roles in technical account management, IT operations, technical project management, and cloud engineering.

What I do

Hands-on AWS engineering, and the technical account work around it: cost reviews, design options put in writing, vendor coordination, and handover.

Cloud migrations

Full on-premises estates moved to AWS one application window at a time, with the identity core last. Each runbook step has its own verification and rollback, and destructive steps disable before they delete.

Infrastructure as code

Terraform first, on reusable modules and AMI patterns, delivered through GitHub Actions and HCP Terraform across a 100+ account AWS estate. CloudFormation where a vendor ships it.

Identity and access

IAM least privilege, permissions boundaries, policy simulation before deploy, and OIDC workload federation across clouds. On the directory side: forest migrations, FSMO topology, and AD Certificate Services.

Technical account management

Four years as the technical contact on client environments: quarterly Well-Architected cost reviews, TCO models behind migration decisions, vendor coordination through change windows, and handoff documents written for the people who run the system next.

Case studies

Each one covers the problem, the key decision, what broke, and the figures with their sources. They’re a sample, not the full record.

Other work

  • Terraform-first delivery on reusable module and AMI patterns through GitHub Actions and HCP Terraform, across a 100+ account estate.
  • Lambda failover for an SD-WAN appliance in AWS: health checks, route-table swaps across six subnets, and SNS alerts only on real failover or failback.
  • Quarterly Well-Architected cost reviews: right-sizing, storage-class transitions, and Savings Plans.
  • A monolithic metadata-ingestion batch process re-architected as serverless, later the foundation for business-intelligence reporting.

How the figures are sourced

Every figure on this site has a tag for the kind of evidence behind it.

  • measured

    Read from a live system during the work: command output, an API response, a console.

  • documented

    Recorded in something produced during the work: a runbook, a change record, an export.

  • calculated

    Arithmetic on other tagged figures.

  • estimated

    A model with a stated assumption. Always written with a tilde or a range.

  • not measured

    No baseline existed, so no number is given.

Savings figures

Hours and dollars saved only appear where a baseline was measured. For most of this work there wasn’t one, so those numbers are left out.

What broke

Each case study includes what went wrong and what was changed because of it.

Confidentiality

No employer, client, or colleague is named, and client details are generalized.

Background

I’m Gabe. I’ve spent more than ten years in infrastructure: seven in-house, working up from the help desk to owning the architecture and the budget, and four at a managed cloud provider as the technical contact for client environments, most of them in regulated industries.

In-house, I learned what it takes to own a system for years. At the provider, I worked across far more environments than one company has, and spent a lot of that time explaining options and risk to the people who had to make the call.

What I’m looking for

A remote role connecting the engineering to the people who depend on it: technical account management, IT or cloud operations, or technical project management. Hands-on cloud engineering fits too. AWS preferred, with an infrastructure focus: migrations, networking, hosting, backup and DR, and cost.

Tennessee, US · Central Time · Remote

  1. 2022 – 2026

    Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

    Managed cloud provider · remote

    • Delivered AWS environments Terraform-first through GitHub Actions and HCP Terraform, across a 100+ account estate.
    • Lead engineer on full-estate AWS migrations, identity core included.
    • Technical contact for client environments: quarterly Well-Architected cost reviews, TCO models, and vendor coordination through multi-year modernizations.
    • SOC 2 and audit evidence, DR testing, and Tier-3 escalation for the team’s hardest AWS problems.
  2. 2022

    Systems Engineer, contract

    Five months · remote

    • Migrated multi-site practice-management systems from on-premises servers to Azure.
  3. 2015 – 2022

    IT Technician → IT Manager / Systems Architect

    In-house · global music distributor

    • Promoted through system administrator and system engineer to owning infrastructure, security posture, the IT roadmap, and budget.
    • Hands-on with AWS from 2017: S3, Glacier, and Snowball for backup and recovery, and a cloud-based secure SFTP replacement stood up in under two weeks.
    • Migrated and upgraded 98 Hyper-V servers and took the network backbone to 40 Gbps.
    • Remote work for 90+ staff, and vendor coordination across four countries.

Contact

Email is the fastest way to reach me. My full résumé, with employers and dates, is available on request.