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Tailwind Resume
Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan

Senior Kubernetes Engineer

Profile

Senior Kubernetes Engineer with 7+ years designing, deploying, and optimizing large-scale container orchestration platforms. Expert in cloud-native infrastructure, GitOps, and platform engineering with a proven track record of reducing deployment times by 80% and improving system reliability to 99.99% uptime.

Work Experience

TechFlow Systems Inc.

06/2021 - Present

Senior Kubernetes Engineer

San Francisco, CA

Lead Kubernetes platform engineering for multi-cloud infrastructure serving 500+ microservices across three business units. Architect cluster federation strategy, implement GitOps workflows, and establish platform SRE practices.

  • Design and maintain 15+ production Kubernetes clusters across AWS EKS and GCP GKE with combined 10,000+ node footprint
  • Implement cluster autoscaling, pod disruption budgets, and topology-aware scheduling to optimize resource utilization
  • Establish platform security standards including Pod Security Standards, network policies, and secrets management with Vault
  • Mentor team of 5 platform engineers and develop internal tooling for developer self-service

Multi-Cluster Service Mesh with Istio

  • Designed and deployed a unified service mesh across 8 Kubernetes clusters spanning two cloud regions. Implemented mTLS, traffic splitting, and observability for 200+ services.
  • Istio control plane deployed on dedicated admin clusters; data plane as sidecar proxies; Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Kiali for observability; cert-manager for automated certificate rotation
  • Lead architect responsible for mesh design, pilot deployment, production rollout, and runbook documentation. Conducted performance benchmarking and capacity planning.
  • Technical Stack: Istio Kubernetes Terraform Helm Prometheus Jaeger cert-manager OPA
  • Challenges: Zero-Downtime Migration: Migrated 200+ services from legacy ingress to service mesh with zero production incidents using canary deployment strategy
  • Challenges: Latency Reduction: Reduced inter-service latency by 35% through optimized Envoy configurations and connection pooling
  • Challenges: Security Compliance: Achieved SOC 2 compliance for service-to-service encryption with automated certificate rotation and audit logging
  • Challenges: Cost Optimization: Reduced cloud networking costs by $240K annually through intelligent traffic routing and locality-aware load balancing

AI-Native Platform Operations with Claude Code

  • Integrated Claude Code into platform engineering workflows for infrastructure code generation, incident analysis, and runbook automation. Built human-supervised pipelines for Kubernetes manifest validation and deployment planning.
  • Claude Code CLI with repository-context exploration; custom MCP server for Kubernetes API integration with scoped read-only and write permissions; CI pipeline with schema validation, policy checks, and automated rollback
  • Designed integration architecture, established guardrails and review workflows, trained team on effective task decomposition and prompt strategies for infrastructure tasks.
  • Technical Stack: Claude Code MCP Integration Kubernetes API GitHub Actions OPA Terraform Python
  • Challenges: Manifest Generation: Reduced Helm chart and raw YAML authoring time by 60% through Claude Code-assisted generation with automatic schema validation
  • Challenges: Incident Response: Accelerated mean-time-to-resolution by 40% using AI-assisted log analysis and root-cause hypothesis generation with human verification
  • Challenges: Documentation Sync: Maintained living runbooks and architecture decision records through AI-assisted updates triggered by infrastructure changes

CloudScale Solutions

03/2018 - 05/2021

Kubernetes Platform Engineer

Seattle, WA

Built and operated Kubernetes platform on AWS for SaaS provider serving 50+ enterprise customers. Focused on cluster lifecycle management, CI/CD optimization, and developer platform experience.

  • Deployed and managed 5 EKS clusters using Terraform and custom modules for VPC, IAM, and networking
  • Implemented GitOps with ArgoCD for automated application deployments and drift detection
  • Developed internal CLI tool for namespace provisioning, resource quotas, and network policy generation
  • Collaborated with security team to implement CIS Kubernetes Benchmark compliance scanning

EKS Cluster Migration and Standardization

  • Migrated legacy Docker Swarm infrastructure to Amazon EKS with standardized cluster blueprints and automated provisioning pipelines.
  • Terraform modules for EKS, VPC, and IAM; Packer for custom AMIs; ArgoCD for GitOps; Atlantis for Terraform pull request automation; CloudWatch and Prometheus for monitoring
  • Executed migration planning, built reusable Terraform modules, performed cutover with rollback procedures, and trained operations team on new tooling.
  • Technical Stack: AWS EKS Terraform Packer ArgoCD Atlantis Prometheus CloudWatch Python
  • Challenges: Migration Completion: Successfully migrated 300+ workloads with 99.95% uptime during transition period
  • Challenges: Provisioning Speed: Reduced new cluster provisioning time from 2 weeks to 45 minutes through automation and module standardization
  • Challenges: Cost Reduction: Decreased infrastructure costs by 30% through rightsizing, spot instance adoption, and efficient autoscaling policies

Open Source & Publications

Certifications

  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
  • AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
  • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

Open Source & Community

  • Contributor to Kubernetes SIG-Scalability with focus on benchmark tooling
  • Maintainer of open-source Terraform EKS module with 2,000+ GitHub stars
  • Speaker at KubeCon, AWS re:Invent, and local cloud-native meetups on platform engineering topics

Skills

Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

  • Deep expertise in Kubernetes architecture including API server, etcd, scheduler, controller manager, and kubelet internals
  • Advanced pod scheduling with node affinity, anti-affinity, taints, tolerations, and custom scheduler extensions
  • Multi-cluster federation with KubeFed and custom control planes for disaster recovery and geographic distribution
  • Container runtime optimization with containerd, CRI-O, and gVisor for security isolation
  • Custom resource definitions (CRDs) and operators using Go and kubebuilder for platform abstractions

Cloud Infrastructure & IaC

  • Production EKS, GKE, and AKS deployments with VPC networking, IAM integration, and private cluster topologies
  • Terraform advanced patterns including modules, workspaces, remote state, and policy-as-code with Sentinel/OPA
  • Cloud-native networking with CNI plugins (Calico, Cilium), service meshes, and ingress controllers
  • Storage orchestration with CSI drivers, volume snapshots, and cross-region replication strategies
  • Cost optimization through reserved instances, savings plans, spot integration, and FinOps practices

GitOps & CI/CD

  • ArgoCD advanced deployments with application sets, sync waves, and progressive delivery patterns
  • Flux v2 with source reconciliation, Kustomize overlays, and multi-environment promotion pipelines
  • GitHub Actions and GitLab CI optimization with reusable workflows, matrix builds, and caching strategies
  • Image building with Docker BuildKit, Kaniko, and distroless base images for minimal attack surface
  • Artifact signing and verification with Sigstore, Cosign, and SLSA provenance attestation

Observability & Reliability

  • Metrics pipeline with Prometheus, Thanos, VictoriaMetrics, and Grafana for multi-cluster aggregation
  • Distributed tracing with Jaeger, Tempo, and OpenTelemetry for request flow analysis
  • Log management with Loki, Fluent Bit, and vector for efficient Kubernetes log aggregation
  • SLO/SLI definition, error budget policies, and alert management with PagerDuty and OpsGenie
  • Chaos engineering with Litmus, Gremlin, and custom failure injection for resilience validation

Security & Compliance

  • Pod Security Standards, OPA/Gatekeeper, and Kyverno for admission control and policy enforcement
  • Secrets management with HashiCorp Vault, external-secrets operator, and cloud KMS integration
  • Container image scanning with Trivy, Snyk, and Falco for runtime threat detection
  • Network segmentation with Cilium network policies, service mesh mTLS, and zero-trust architectures
  • Compliance automation for SOC 2, PCI-DSS, and FedRAMP with continuous control monitoring

AI-Assisted Software Delivery

  • Claude Code integration for Kubernetes manifest generation, Helm chart authoring, and infrastructure debugging with repository-context exploration
  • GitHub Copilot for Terraform module development, Bash scripting, and Python automation with inline suggestions and test generation
  • Human-supervised workflows: task decomposition, implementation planning, PR review with AI-generated diffs requiring local validation and CI checks
  • MCP integrations with scoped Kubernetes API permissions for read-only cluster inspection and write-protected change proposals
  • Schema-constrained structured outputs for automated policy validation and deployment parameter generation
  • Rollback-ready deployment pipelines with AI-assisted change summaries, security/permission review gates, and automated canary analysis

Education

University of Washington

09/2016 - 06/2018

M.S. in Computer Science

Seattle, WA

Specialization in Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing. Relevant coursework: Advanced Operating Systems, Distributed Algorithms, Cloud Infrastructure, Network Security, and Scalable Machine Systems.

Achievements:

  • Graduate Research Assistant in the Systems Lab focusing on container scheduling optimization
  • Published paper on 'Energy-Aware Pod Scheduling in Kubernetes Clusters' at ACM SIGMETRICS
  • Teaching Assistant for undergraduate Cloud Computing course
  • GPA: 3.82/4.0