resume.json

resume.json

{
  "basics": {
    "name": "Jesse Dearing",
    "label": "Staff SRE & Platform Engineer | Kubernetes · AWS · Terraform · Go · Rust",
    "image": "https://jesse.dev/images/avatar-2019-05-31.png",
    "email": "me@jesse.dev",
    "website": "https://jesse.dev",
    "summary": "I've spent over a decade at the intersection of building software and keeping it running. I care deeply about both sides of that equation.\n\nMy focus is platform engineering and site reliability: designing the infrastructure, tooling, and systems that let product engineers ship fast, securely, and with full visibility into how their code is serving customers. I've worked across the full spectrum from bare-metal in data centers to multi-region cloud deployments. Software-defined infrastructure is what makes it possible to manage, automate, and observe systems at scale, and building that foundation is where I do my best work.\n\nI'm most effective in Senior and Staff IC roles. Where shaping architecture, unblocking teams, solving problems that don't have a runbook yet requires experience and discipline but still willing to jump into codebases without hesitation. If you're building something ambitious and need someone who can design the platform and build the tooling to run it, let's talk.",
    "location": {
      "city": "Portland",
      "countryCode": "US",
      "region": "Oregon"
    },
    "profiles": [
      {
        "network": "Bluesky",
        "username": "jesse.dev",
        "url": "https://bsky.app/jesse.dev"
      },
      {
        "network": "Mastodon",
        "username": "jessedearing",
        "url": "https://hachyderm.io/@jessedearing"
      },
      {
        "network": "GitHub",
        "username": "jessedearing",
        "url": "https://github.com/jessedearing"
      },
      {
        "network": "LinkedIn",
        "username": "jessedearing",
        "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessedearing"
      }
    ]
  },
  "work": [
    {
      "location": "Remote",
      "name": "Observable",
      "url": "https://observablehq.com",
      "position": "Senior Infrastructure Engineer",
      "startDate": "2024-08-12",
      "endDate": "2025-04-01",
      "description": "Startup environment requiring broad ownership across infrastructure, security, and platform engineering.\n",
      "summary": "At Observable I built and operated cloud infrastructure on AWS running container workloads on Kubernetes. I wore many hats — platform engineering, security, and systems programming.",
      "highlights": [
        "Built a CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure using Terraform, ArgoCD, Atlantis, and Helm",
        "Practiced threat modeling and risk assessment, working with pentesters to identify and prioritize fixes",
        "Built a private VPN in Rust using WireGuard and Postgres network types to securely access customer infrastructure"
      ]
    },
    {
      "location": "Remote",
      "position": "Senior Site Reliability Engineer",
      "description": "Managed Aurora MySQL instances across our dev, staging, and production environment. I deployed monitoring to gather metric data from the instances for use in alerting, capacity planning, and cost optimization.\n\nOur team was also responsible for the Red Panda (Kafka compliant) infrastructure, logging, and Snowflake deployment.\n\nI built a Go-based CLI used for accessing our MySQL infrastructure.",
      "startDate": "2024-02-26",
      "endDate": "2024-08-12",
      "highlights": [],
      "url": "https://lacework.com",
      "name": "Lacework"
    },
    {
      "location": "Remote",
      "description": "Worked in the Tanzu (Kubernetes) division where I helped build and run the plaform for hosting the Mission Control SaaS product",
      "position": "Staff 2 Site Reliability Engineer",
      "startDate": "2018-12-01",
      "endDate": "2023-12-01",
      "summary": "At VMware I worked on the SRE team that built and maintained the infrastructure for Tanzu Mission Control (TMC). During the time I was at VMware, I helped build a platform for running TMC across 6 regions with a global backend for sharing data between regions.\nI also built tooling and software for deploying services in a reliable and consistent manner that met the compliance requirements for SOC2 and ISO/IEC 27001. The platform was even adapted to be shipped as an on premises version.",
      "highlights": [
        "Built a platform that allowed a team to deploy a new service all the way to production in about 1 day with health checking, metrics collection, log aggregation, and high availability across multiple availability zones",
        "Built a CLI for interacting with the platform to connect through VPN, get access to the Kubernetes control plane and other services like Hashicorp Vault securely using signed tokens with MFA verification",
        "Proposed architectural designs to be implemented across many different teams",
        "Identified and mitigated poorly performing database queries"
      ],
      "url": "https://vmware.com",
      "name": "VMware"
    },
    {
      "location": "Remote",
      "description": "A company focused on leveraging Kubernetes to bring about the digital transformation for companies. Heptio was founded by 2 of the founders of Kubernetes",
      "position": "Senior Site Reliability Engineer",
      "startDate": "2018-08-01",
      "endDate": "2018-12-01",
      "summary": "Brought on as the 2nd SRE to help build infrastructure for a new SaaS product codenamed HQ which later became Tanzu Mission Control.",
      "highlights": [],
      "url": "https://heptio.com",
      "name": "Heptio"
    },
    {
      "location": "Remote",
      "description": "Design first focused company. Created a tool that allows designers to create prototypes and share them so that stakeholders could comment on them",
      "position": "Senior Database Engineer",
      "startDate": "2016-06-01",
      "endDate": "2018-08-01",
      "summary": "I helped run and maintain the database infrastructure at InVision for the main product. Later started a platform for building microservice deployments and managing the data involved.",
      "highlights": [
        "Used log parsing to analyze query logs to find queries that had a bad query plan but was running many times a second. Upon suggesting a change to the owning service we were able to reduce the database CPU overhead by 20% and speed up the query to take less than 10 miliseconds instead of 100-200 milliseconds.",
        "Built a websockets front end to a streaming backend service"
      ],
      "url": "https://invisionapp.com",
      "name": "InVision"
    },
    {
      "location": "Portland, OR",
      "description": "Specialized in collection application performance metrics and created products to help development teams monitor and fix problems in their deployed applications",
      "position": "Senior Site Reliability Engineer",
      "startDate": "2012-11-01",
      "endDate": "2016-05-31",
      "summary": "I started at New Relic to enhance the build infrastructure and move our build servers into a proper data center. I built a quick and hacky Rails based front end for creating VMs for the purposes of build and testing.\nI was then pulled on to a special project where I built the the communication libraries for an attempt at a microservice deployment.\nI later joined the Site Reliability Engineering team to help run the whole SaaS. As the team needed to specialize, I then moved into the database team to manage our fleet of databases for storing customer data.",
      "highlights": [],
      "url": "https://newrelic.com",
      "name": "New Relic"
    }
  ],
  "volunteer": [
    {
      "organization": "Sitton PTA",
      "position": "Treasurer",
      "website": "https://sittonpta.org",
      "startDate": "2021-07-01",
      "endDate": "2023-06-30",
      "summary": "I served at the treasurer of my son's elementary school PTA board",
      "highlights": []
    },
    {
      "organization": "Sitton PTA",
      "position": "President",
      "website": "https://sittonpta.org",
      "startDate": "2023-07-01",
      "endDate": "2025-06-30",
      "summary": "I served as president of the board of my son's elementary school PTA",
      "highlights": []
    }
  ],
  "education": [
    {
      "institution": "University of Texas at Arlington",
      "area": "Arlington, TX",
      "studyType": "Bachelors of Arts - Interdisciplinary Studies",
      "startDate": "2002-09-01",
      "endDate": "2008-12-31",
      "gpa": "3.15",
      "courses": []
    }
  ],
  "awards": [],
  "publications": [],
  "skills": [
    {
      "name": "Programming Languages",
      "level": "Master",
      "keywords": [
        "Rust",
        "Go",
        "Bash"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Platform Technologies",
      "level": "Master",
      "keywords": [
        "Terraform",
        "Vault",
        "Kubernetes",
        "Wireguard"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Continuous Integration and Delivery",
      "level": "Master",
      "keywords": [
        "ArgoCD",
        "Container Registries"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Cloud Providers",
      "level": "Advanced",
      "keywords": [
        "Amazon Web Services",
        "Google Compute Engine"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Databases",
      "level": "Advanced",
      "keywords": [
        "PostgreSQL",
        "MySQL",
        "Aurora",
        "Kafka",
        "RedPanda",
        "Snowflake"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Distributed Systems",
      "level": "Advanced",
      "keywords": [
        "Distributed locks",
        "Consensus protocols",
        "Eventual consistency"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Communication Formats and Frameworks",
      "level": "Advanced",
      "keywords": [
        "gRPC",
        "JSON over HTTP",
        "MessagePack",
        "Thrift"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Observability",
      "level": "Advanced",
      "keywords": [
        "Metrics",
        "Alerting",
        "Log Aggregation",
        "Capacity Planning"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Security",
      "level": "Intermediate",
      "keywords": [
        "Zero Trust",
        "PKI",
        "TLS",
        "OpenID",
        "Threat Modeling",
        "Penetration Testing"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "languages": [],
  "interests": [
    {
      "name": "Coffee",
      "keywords": [
        "Espresso",
        "Cold Brew",
        "Small Batch Beans"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Soccer",
      "keywords": [
        "Timbers",
        "MLS"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "references": [],
  "projects": [],
  "meta": {
    "canonical": "https://gist.github.com/jessedearing/3f7e81cddbacb6927eeb9a861d3e277a",
    "version": "1.0",
    "lastModified": "2026-04-27",
    "theme": "kendall"
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}