Problem
A distributed mission environment needed reliable service delivery, stronger network boundaries, consistent change control, repeatable infrastructure, identity integration, measurable cost discipline, and a technical lead who could move from stakeholder decisions into implementation and troubleshooting.
Architecture & delivery
The platform uses Transit Gateway across dozens of VPCs and multiple site-to-site VPNs, with centralized multi-AZ ingress, egress, inspection, and policy enforcement. Terraform and CloudFormation codify networking, IAM, compute, containers, and deployment configuration. Containerized services, hardened images, Keycloak-based identity, GitLab pipelines, and Python automation support the operating model around that infrastructure.
Engineering constraints
- Coordinate customer, vendor, software, infrastructure, and security stakeholders without losing technical ownership.
- Preserve reliability while modernizing shared networking, identity, images, encryption, and platform services.
- Build repeatable delivery paths for environments with strict access, compliance, and change-control requirements.
- Improve security and cost posture without removing required mission capability.
- Keep published material useful to recruiters without exposing operational details.
Technologies
Outcome
The work reduced security findings by about 90%, reduced AWS spend by about 50%, cut recurring manual effort substantially, and left the environment with stronger automation, clearer technical direction, and more repeatable infrastructure and recovery paths.