Josh Mast

Software Plumber, Cloud Wrangler, Computer Janitor

email: josh@mast.zone web: https://josh.mast.zone/

"T-shaped" polymath hacker who enjoys designing, building, and breaking software and systems, tackling problems, and never stops learning. 20+ years of experience covering a wide array of technologies. Self-motivated and autonomous, but also collaborates well with others. Interested in 100% remote Staff or Principal roles in Platform Engineering, SRE, DevOps, or Cloud Infrastructure.

Skills

Software Engineering. Experience building software with Python, Go, Javascript/Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Java, and shell scripting. Legacy code archaeology, debugging, and improvement. Software engineering best practices in Agile environments including unit and integration testing, peer review, software architecture, continuous delivery, and continuous integration.

Cloud Infrastructure. Experience with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud platforms. Systems operations on Linux & UNIX-like platforms. Container orchestration platforms including Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Amazon ECS, Google Cloud Run, and Heroku. Infrastructure-as-code and configuration management with Terraform, Crossplane, Ansible, Chef, Packer, and Docker. Continuous integration & delivery pipelines with Git, GitHub, ArgoCD, FluxCD, Tekton, Concourse CI, Google Cloud Build, Travis CI, Circle CI, and Jenkins. Application and infrastructure monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, and Google Cloud Monitoring.

Work History

Principal Engineer - Fulcra Dynamics

09/2022 - Current

Early engineering hire at Fulcra Dynamics. Fulcra Dynamics specializes in collecting and normalizing life data from a wide array of sources to provide in depth visualizations, insights, and data portability with AI technologies. Leading a lean, highly collaborative engineering team to rapidly iterate on product features and deliver them into production.

• Took initial product prototype and architected and delivered scalable consumer solution on GCP, building Python & Go-based services on Google Cloud Run, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, and PubSub.
• Migrated legacy PostgreSQL infrastructure to a resilient, high availability cluster on GKE Autopilot and cloudnative-pg and delivered live production switchover with zero downtime.
• Introduced Infrastructure-as-Code and GitOps best practices to existing GCP infrastructure with Terraform & Terraform Cloud.
• Bootstrapped initial development of frontend web application with SvelteKit, Tailwind CSS, and D3.
• Improved platform reliability and efficiency through service monitoring and application tracing with Google Cloud Monitoring and k6 API performance test suites.
• Enabled rapid development iteration and release with automated CI/CD pipelines on Google Cloud Build and GitHub.
• Started engineering knowledge base to record architectural decisions, designs, infrastructure operations playbooks, and incident post-mortems.

Principal Cloud Platform Engineer - Puppet

06/2021 - 09/2022

Technical lead on a team building a platform to enable developers to accelerate development and delivery of SaaS products. Worked closely with engineering teams to identify pain points, define development workflows, and provide technical guidance on GCP cloud infrastructure and services.

• Led team in building Kubernetes-based application platform with GKE, Knative, ArgoCD, Kyverno, and Crossplane.
• Introduced Terraform Cloud to the engineering organization and grew adoption across the org by starting a community of practice around Terraform and infrastructure as code.
• Migrated Puppet’s public download repositories to Google Cloud, helping to improve manageability and resiliency via infrastructure-as-code practices, as well as writing initial runbooks for the release engineering team to help with day two operations.
• Led evaluation of zero trust networking solutions to replace legacy OpenVPN solution.

Lead DevOps Engineer - Ceres Imaging

03/2021 - 06/2021

DevOps lead engineer working directly with engineering & data teams to improve performance, reliability, and observability of the Ceres data analysis platform across AWS and GCP.

• Improved performance and scalability of image processing batch pipelines on Amazon ECS.
• Introduced infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform.
• Operation of GKE-based Jupyter Notebook clusters for teams of data analysts requiring GPU accelerated image analysis workflows.

Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Simple Finance

03/2019 - 03/2021

Wrangled AWS, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry on the platform engineering team at Simple, a fintech company providing online banking & budgeting. Responsible for the production operation of Simple’s application platform on AWS and building tools & automation to enable the rapid and safe delivery of applications and services.

• Planning and implementation of the Cloud Foundry platform, enabling the migration of application services that power Simple’s platform off legacy EC2 & Kubernetes infrastructure; lowering the total cost of operation and providing engineers with the flexibility to develop, test, and release services more rapidly.
• Built a high-performance logging service with Go to provide a centralized method of shipping application logs from Cloud Foundry into the Datadog log service.
• Providing mentoring and technical guidance to the rest of the engineering organization through pairing, writing documentation, and giving talks on Cloud Foundry, 12 Factor Application patterns, Terraform, and AWS.
• Implemented cloud governance tooling on AWS to control and audit cloud spending, achieving over $20k of savings per month.
• Drafting and implementing disaster recovery procedures and tooling for engineers. Automating platform infrastructure deployment and reducing potential downtime from days to hours in the case of a catastrophic emergency.
• Migration of homegrown PostgreSQL database infrastructure on Amazon EC2 to Amazon RDS.

DevOps Engineer - Capital One

06/2018 - 03/2019

Member of a DevOps team in the Card Rewards organization tasked with supporting AWS cloud infrastructure of the Rewards platform, building self service infrastructure management tooling to support API engineering teams.

• Architected and implemented a batch processing pipeline solution for a partnership with Sony leveraging AWS Batch, S3, and Python.
• Feature development and production support for Java based Spark pipelines on the Rewards batch data processing platform.
• Development of a Python based AWS S3 bucket policy & notification self service management tool for use by the larger organization, including implementation of unit testing, continuous integration, and deployment pipelines.
• Implemented infrastructure-as-code best practices for cloud infrastructure management with Terraform, GitHub, and Jenkins
• Data analysis using PySpark, Pandas, and Jupyter Notebook for customer transaction data remediation efforts during migration to the organization’s RewardsOne platform.
• Mentored team members in Python, software engineering, and continuous integration best practice.
• Improved infrastructure monitoring using AWS CloudWatch and the Datadog platform to increase Rewards platform resilience and help inform cost optimization decision making.

Software Engineer - SoftChalk LLC

08/2017 - 06/2018

Member of an engineering team building Python based web applications for creating and publishing of interactive lesson material for the educational sector. Implemented continuous integration build & publish processes for Java based desktop applications.

Senior Software Engineer - JVZoo

01/2016 - 09/2017

Member of a compact team of developers building an e-commerce platform in the internet marketing sector. Delivered features to PHP web application. Fully automated web application builds and deployment & rollback process with Ansible.

Principal Software Engineer - NBCUniversal

02/2012 - 09/2015

Technical lead in an Agile team building a complete identity management SDK solution for TV & media clients within NBCUniversal. Frontend development with Javascript, jQuery, and Angular and backend service development in Python, Flask, and RabbitMQ. Took initiative in driving automation of services deployment and performance testing.

Web Developer - Syfy Channel

03/2010 - 01/2012

Part a team of designers and editors at Syfy.com. Implemented replacement of legacy Flash sites with rich web interfaces utilizing HTML5 & Javascript. Closely collaborated with other teams within NBCUniversal to build backend CMS and API architectures using Apache, PHP, Drupal, Python, and MySQL in a Linux environment. Once wrote some Javascript to make a ghost appear on a webpage.