Christopher Kruse

Work Experience

Autodesk (via Capstone Staffing) :: Remote
Development Ops III
December 2023 - Present

Contract position migrating existing applications onto Menucard, an AWS CDK-based CI/CD tool.
Contributed back to the core Menucard product, including opmtimizing the use of Docker in the build pipeline

Flexport :: Bellevue, WA
Senior DevOps Engineer
August 2022 - October 2023

Owned and lead development for our software catalog and developer tools platform built on Backstage
- Promoted a Self-service registration to the platform, with ~150 services registered
- Promoted deeper use of the catalog features, like CI/CD visualization and hosted documentation
- API-powered automatic dependency tracking for incident processes
Maintained a suite of GitHub Actions and reusable workflows to streamline steps in the CI/CD process for services
Aided in launching Argo CD for managing Kubernetes deployments using GitOps-style deployment management
Managed and maintained the internal GitHub Enterprise Server and JFrog Artifactory installations

Stedi :: Remote
Engineering
February 2020 - August 2022

Built a custom CI/CD pipeline for AWS CDK via AWS CodePipeline and CodeBuild
Developed internal tooling to log and track privilege access requests to restricted environments
Built multiple revisions of parsers for EDI data, learning from each implementation how to generalize the parser, casting an ever-wider net for customer usage patterns
Helped foster a culture of toil reduction, driving to automate repetitive, manual tasks
Participated in code reviews, helping improve the quality of the delivered products
Built a mechanism for automatically applying semantic versioning of package releases, while maintaining branch protection for the main branch of our repositories
Created build and deploy scripts across several packages, introducing performance improvements and lowering build and deploy times

Amazon Web Services :: Seattle, WA
Systems Development Engineer
December 2017 - January 2020

Led the design and development of a performance management dashboard for AWS Customer Support
- Replaced an ad-hoc process of spreadsheets and 1-1 manager discussions
- Systemizing the process led to agents being able to use their performance metrics as part of their promotion discussions
Served on incubation team for Support Enigineer-created projects
- took ideas from people in the field, productionalized them and made them available throughout the team.
Mentored junior members of the team as tech lead

Solutions Architect, World-wide Public Sector SA team
August 2016 - December 2017

Built out a discount strategy plan for promoting open data sharing
Worked with external customers to design application architectures to fit the AWS Cloud
Created sample applications providing demonstrations of specific technologies
Ran overviews and deep dive presentations of AWS Services
Lead group hands-on training sessions for AWS Services
Provided in-depth architecture review for customers; focused on security, performance, reliability and cost optimization

Systems Development Engineer, Elastic Beanstalk
December 2014 - August 2016

Designed and implemented a CI/CD system for building Elastic Beanstalk environment stacks, supporting Java/Tomcat, Python, PHP, Ruby, Docker and NodeJS
Managed software deployment and testing lifecycle operations, including parallel deployments to multiple geographic regions
Requested, set up and administered backend hosts for service extensions
Instituted regular quality reviews and internal tooling updates
Provided assistance to the Customer Support team for in-depth questions regarding the service
Routed and assisted in resolving service-level issues, creating workarounds for customers and eliminating bugs found in the service

Developer Support Engineer
February 2013 - December 2014

Provided phone, email and chat-based support to customers of AWS Services
Created training materials for and internal classes for coworkers on CloudFormation and Elastic Beanstalk services
Created Subject Matter Expert (SME) programs for CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk, OpsWorks and Simple Workflow services
Selected as an SME for CloudFormation, Elastic Beanstalk and Simple Workflow
Worked with service teams to reduce contact escalation rates, and to provide improvements to customers of the services
Developed and maintained utilities used by the Support organization, to make the day-to-day work easier
Worked with the Customer Support Development team to provide long-lasting improvements to the Support organization

SR Education Group :: Kirkland, WA
Web Developer
June 2011 - January 2013

Created features for a set of websites built for online college lead generation using Ruby on Rails
Led impromptu code reviews with coworkers; helped streamline and improve team members' code
Managed a fleet of micro-websites on EC2/Nginx as proxy/caching servers
Provided reporting data via third-party APIs to help influence the project's direction

Programming Languages:
- Typescript
- Rust
- Ruby
- Java
Cloud Native:
- Infrastructure as Code (AWS CDK, AWS CloudFormation, Terraform)
- AWS Serverless (Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3), CodeBuild and CodeDeploy
- Kubernetes, Helm and Kustomize, Argo CD
Tools:
- git, docker, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL

Bachelor of Science (Cum Laude), Computer Science
Clarke University, Dubuque, IA
May 2009