Gerard Ceraso

DevOps engineering manager · cloud infrastructure · kubernetes

status: open to opportunities · 20+ years in infrastructure
nodes managed 12,000+
cost reduction 46–62%
peak throughput 200 req/s
marketplace gmv $20B

experience timeline

Buoy Software Engineering Manager, DevOps 2024–present
  • Designed and operate multi-cluster EKS platform across CICD, non-prod, and production, managed declaratively through Terragrunt and ArgoCD with GitOps overlay patterns to eliminate configuration drift.
  • Stabilized a 160-node production cluster by diagnosing a Karpenter memory leak through longitudinal Grafana cache analysis; authored cluster-wide upgrade plan.
  • Led compute cost program projecting 46–62% reduction via Graviton/ARM64 migration, workload right-sizing, and AWS Savings Plan modeling.
  • Built organization-wide observability platform on Prometheus and Loki; authored dashboards for CI/CD economics, GitOps sync health, and resource right-sizing.
  • Architected zero-downtime PostgreSQL migration via AWS DMS Change Data Capture, fully codified in Terraform for repeatable deployment.
  • Designed cross-account IAM architecture using IRSA with least-privilege spoke roles; routed GuardDuty findings to Wazuh SIEM.
  • Enforced infrastructure-as-code governance by building a continuous reconciliation system with Steampipe and Argo CronWorkflows that flags any AWS resource not represented in Terraform, ensuring nothing exists in production without being declared in code.
  • Deployed DataHub for data discovery and governance across Dagster, Airbyte, and BigQuery.
EKS Terraform Terragrunt ArgoCD Karpenter KEDA Prometheus Grafana Loki Graviton AWS DMS
Well Senior DevOps Engineer 2023–2024
  • Redesigned Terraform infrastructure into modular, reusable architecture across GCP and AWS, improving deployment velocity and eliminating duplication across teams.
  • Strengthened multi-cloud network design including site-to-site VPN tunnels between GCP and AWS, improving security posture and enabling secure cross-cloud workload communication.
  • Consolidated and optimized GitLab CI pipelines across cross-functional teams, reducing build complexity and improving deployment consistency.
  • Streamlined Datadog logging and metrics by reducing noise and unnecessary ingestion, lowering costs and improving incident response signal-to-noise ratio.
Terraform GCP AWS GitLab CI Datadog
Guideline DevOps Manager 2022–2023
  • Designed and integrated data pipelines for engineering and science teams using BigQuery, Datastream, Fivetran, and Looker, enabling reliable cross-system data movement at scale.
  • Standardized Helm chart development with DRY principles, improving consistency and reliability across deployments.
  • Modernized Kubernetes clusters by removing Dockershim and deprecated components to align with current standards.
  • Performed monolith database split to improve performance and reduce disaster recovery time.
  • Rationalized CI/CD tooling across GoCD, Bamboo, and CircleCI, improving pipeline reliability and standardizing deployment practices.
  • Established Terraform as the foundation for Infrastructure-as-Code across GCP, centralizing monitoring and logging alongside it.
Kubernetes Helm BigQuery Datastream Terraform GCP
Brace Senior DevOps Engineer 2021–2022
  • Containerized new and existing applications on Kubernetes, establishing standards for resource configuration, limits, and deployment patterns.
  • Managed multiple AWS accounts end-to-end with Terraform, developing reusable modules and enforcing consistency across environments.
  • Architected ETL pipelines and data management improvements, improving reliability and throughput for engineering and data teams.
  • Partnered with CISO to strengthen security posture, meeting and exceeding SOC2 requirements.
  • Upgraded EKS clusters with zero-downtime node group rotation, establishing repeatable lifecycle management practices.
Kubernetes AWS EKS Terraform SOC2 Docker
CultureIQ Lead DevOps Engineer 2020–2021
  • Owned infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, including automated deployment pipelines with approval gates and environment promotion controls.
  • Decomposed multi-language monolith into containerized multi-service architecture on Fargate and Kubernetes.
  • Developed centralized logging and monitoring strategy using Datadog, InfluxDB, and Telegraf.
  • Implemented CI/CD pipelines using Drone and Jsonnet to maintain DRY configurations and reduce duplication.
  • Collaborated with development team to design RESTful API replacing legacy architecture.
  • Ensured all infrastructure processes exceeded SOC2 and GDPR compliance standards.
Kubernetes Fargate Terraform Drone Datadog SOC2 GDPR
Ticket Evolution Lead DevOps Engineer 2018–2020
  • Migrated entire infrastructure from bare metal datacenter to containerized Kubernetes in AWS with minimal downtime, improving performance 5x.
  • Built and maintained large autoscaling Kubernetes clusters serving $20B API marketplace at 200+ req/sec.
  • Built continuous deployment system enabling developers to deploy, monitor, and rollback releases via Slack and CLI.
  • Migrated large PostgreSQL database from standalone to Aurora RDS using DMS with minimal downtime.
  • Leveraged Kong as ingress controller for granular traffic routing to Kubernetes services, removing bottlenecks without code changes.
  • Implemented full-stack observability using Grafana, Graphite, Prometheus, Datadog, and CloudWatch.
Kubernetes AWS Helm Kong DMS Prometheus Grafana Aurora
CoachCare Lead DevOps Engineer 2016–2018
  • Built scalable infrastructure supporting 100k active users across hybrid Node.js and PHP platform.
  • Provisioned and managed AWS infrastructure with reserved instance planning to reduce costs.
  • Migrated PostgreSQL to RDS and implemented RabbitMQ and Redis for queuing and token storage.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines using CircleCI with monitoring via NewRelic and Sumo Logic.
  • Established containerized infrastructure foundation using Kubernetes and Docker, enabling the team's transition to cloud-native deployments.
Kubernetes AWS RDS CircleCI Docker
Reliant Security Director of DevOps 2009–2016
  • Joined as one of the first employees, growing from sole contributor to technical leader responsible for infrastructure as platform scaled from startup to enterprise.
  • Scaled infrastructure to manage over 12,000 production nodes.
  • Technical lead for designing and deploying a Debian-based security and virtualization platform.
  • Onboarded and mentored engineers across multiple levels, growing team alongside platform.
  • Designed and implemented PCI-compliant AWS environments using private VPCs.
  • Assisted clients with PCI and SOX audits and developed remediation plans.
  • Consolidated virtualization using KVM/QEMU, OpenVZ, and VMware to reduce datacenter footprint.
AWS KVM VMware PCI Debian
Earlier career 2005–2009
Qwikker Senior Systems Administrator 2008

Designed infrastructure managing 20,000+ Mobile Content Servers. Led datacenter migration and established Follow-the-Sun support model for 24×7 coverage.

WebMD Systems Engineer 2007–2008

Lead administrator for Medscape Mail (30,000+ doctors). Migrated from Sun Solaris to distributed RHEL platform and implemented MySQL Cluster for high availability.

IGXGlobal Systems Security Engineer 2005–2007

Lead datacenter administrator. Redesigned web server infrastructure for high availability and implemented monitoring with Nagios. Managed security infrastructure including firewalls and SSL VPN.

certifications

CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional
LPIC Linux Professional Institute Certification