Systems & Platform Engineer — QA automation · Linux infrastructure · AI-assisted development
Public web platforms served from self-managed infrastructure, end to end — this very page is delivered by the stack it describes.
Each of these is live in production. Happy to demo any of them on a call.
Designed and operate a members-only club website (Discourse / Ruby on Rails) with custom-built plugins and themes: a guided onboarding wizard with an interactive map, self-reporting rally attendance with custom badge artwork, per-member vehicle maintenance garages provisioned automatically against a third-party app's API, auto-generated yearly photo galleries, a live field-radio audio stream, and an accessibility mode designed with older members.
Launching to full membership fall 2026 · runs unattended day to day
Media-heavy site served from a consumer uplink. Built a VPS edge layer: nginx slice caching on SSD tiers plus an inotify-driven, bandwidth-capped mirror that pushes recent videos to the edge automatically, with a nightly reconcile keeping storage inside budget.
First view of a 20 MB video: 58 s → 5 s (~90% faster)
A production VM froze repeatedly under memory pressure. Root-caused an out-of-memory livelock, then engineered the permanent fix: right-sized allocation, cgroup memory caps per service, kernel panic-and-reboot policy, swap headroom — and wrote the runbook so it never needs me at 2 a.m.
Zero recurrences since · self-healing watchdogs added platform-wide
Run production email for three domains on my own mail server: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and reverse-DNS all verified, submission ports hardened after real brute-force traffic, and a nightly automated probe that round-trips a message and pages me if deliverability degrades.
Passes Gmail/Outlook spam gauntlets · monitored nightly, automatically
Local LLM lab (Ollama, Open WebUI, llama.cpp nodes) plus scheduled autonomous agents that do real work: a market tracker maintaining a price-history database of 800+ listings, web-scraping pipelines with anti-bot handling, and PDF archives sliced into readable web articles. AI-assisted development across Python, Ruby, and JavaScript every day.
Agents run on cron, unattended, with state, dedupe, and alerting
At Mobomo (federal contractor), I was solely responsible for the QA effort on NOAA Fisheries — a high-traffic federal Drupal platform — for seven years on a six-person remote agile team. Automated suites in Behat and Playwright, Dockerized test environments, and the QA documentation that helped the company reach CMMI Level 3.
Every release tested, reported, and shipped to federal stakeholders
Open to full-time, contract, or part-time engagements — platform and infrastructure engineering, QA automation architecture, AI/agent integration, and Discourse community platforms. I also build and host fast, fully managed websites for southwest-Missouri small businesses: domain, DNS, email that delivers, hosting, and edits handled by one local person who answers the phone.