About Me

Platform engineer and my team’s AI SME at Vanguard. My focus right now is making AI genuinely useful on an enterprise codebase: I build internal context repositories that give Claude real understanding of our infrastructure and applications, so it generates code that actually fits how we work — and I ship full-stack features in React, Angular, and NestJS alongside it. Underneath all of that is a decade of DevOps and cloud architecture, from CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code to container platforms and custom AWS Bedrock agents.

A few things I’m proud of:

• Led a Bitbucket-to-GitHub enterprise migration across multiple teams.
• Cut deployment times by 90% through pipeline optimization.
• Achieved 95% infrastructure cost reduction via cloud modernization.
• Built automations saving 40+ hours weekly (4+ FTE equivalent).
• Wrote an AI prompt/evaluation that saved $125,000 in licensing fees.

I care about mentoring engineers (many now at AWS and major tech companies) and solving hard technical problems without losing operational excellence.

Experience

Vanguard — Charlotte, NC

Application Engineer III · Sep 2025 – Present Full-stack development on the Consultant Hub Platform in React, Angular, and NestJS. Serving as my team’s AI SME: I built internal context repositories that give Claude real understanding of Vanguard’s infrastructure and codebase, so AI-assisted development produces code that fits our systems and standards.

Senior DevSecOps Engineer · Jun 2024 – Sep 2025 Architected AWS solutions (Lambda, ECS, Bedrock, Glue) while sunsetting on-prem infrastructure. Re-architected critical APIs for sub-second response (10s → <1s), built custom Bedrock AI agents, led the Bitbucket→GitHub migration, and stood up monitoring/SLOs with Grafana, PagerDuty, and CloudWatch. Presented DORA metrics to senior leadership.

Technical Project Manager · Feb 2023 – Jun 2024 Led cross-functional teams (8+ engineers) on infrastructure modernization; IaC with CloudFormation and Ansible, cutting manual config time by 75%.

Technology Specialist III / II · Apr 2018 – Feb 2023 Security automation (PowerShell + Active Directory), Bamboo CI/CD for AEM, Tealeaf clickstream analytics at terabyte scale, and Seismic platform administration. Scrum Master during a team transition.

AmerisourceBergen — Fort Mill, SC

Release Engineer II · Jun 2017 – Apr 2018 Architected Jenkins CI/CD (Groovy) for 50+ applications, integrated SonarQube quality gates, and built a build-metrics framework backed by PostgreSQL.

Lowe’s Companies, Inc. — Charlotte, NC

Mobile Build Engineer · Jan 2016 – Jun 2017 Ran an ESXi build environment for 50+ mobile developers; containerized Android build agents (Bamboo), cutting build times up to 80%; shipped native Android (Java) and iOS (Swift) apps for Lowe’s and Iris home automation.

College Talent Program Developer · Jan 2015 – Dec 2015 Rotational program across front-end, Android, and build engineering.

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Operations & Systems Technical Assistant and earlier roles · 2011 – 2014 Managed a 500+ VM VMware vSphere environment, led a P2V migration cutting datacenter footprint 60%, and automated operations with PowerShell/PowerCLI.

Certifications

• Amateur Radio — General Class, FCC (2025) · callsign W3MRB — currently studying for the Amateur Extra
• VCA-DCV, VMware
• Certified Seismic Administrator, Seismic

Education

M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, University of North Carolina at Charlotte · starting 2027 B.S., University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Beyond Work

Electronics tinkerer and edge-case ham (W3MRB) — I spend more time at the bench than the mic. Homebrew RF, 3D-printed field radio gear, SDR, and a self-hosted AI stack running on hardware I’ve unlocked myself. Writing about it at w3mrb.com .