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David O'Dell

Contact: 415-418-4110 | davidodell@gmail.com | LinkedIn

Summary​

Over 20 years as a DevOps and Platform Engineer, delivering scalable, high-performance infrastructure at startups and major organizations like Apple, FHLB San Francisco, and Fiserv. Architected and deployed robust platforms from scratch three times, driving CI/CD automation, cost optimization, and team collaboration. Expertise in Kubernetes, cloud ecosystems (AWS, GCP), and modern tooling (Terraform, ArgoCD, Golang). Passionate about mentoring teams and aligning technical strategy with business goals.

Skills​

  • Infrastructure architecture, capable of building scalable and reliable cloud platforms
  • Platform automation and CI/CD pipeline optimization
  • Cost optimization and resource allocation efficiency
  • Team leadership and cross-organizational collaboration

Infrastructure: Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes (EKS, GKE), Nomad, AWS, GCP
CI/CD & Automation: ArgoCD, Argo Workflows, Argo Events, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker, Concourse CI
Observability & Security: Prometheus, Grafana, Snyk, Teleport
Languages: Golang
Key Strengths: Platform Architecture, Cost Optimization, Team Leadership

Experience​

Staff DevOps Engineer, Alto Pharmacy​

October 2024 – Present

  • Led effort and reduced costs by $17K/month by optimizing resource allocation for a Ruby on Rails monolith
  • Rolled out temporal to the organization

Staff DevOps Engineer, Density.io​

February 2022 – October 2024

  • Managed hybrid GCP/AWS infrastructure (Kubernetes, Nomad) supporting 25K IoT devices
  • Led migration of applications from Nomad to Kubernetes, enhancing scalability and observability
  • Replaced legacy async workload system with Argo Events and Argo Workflows, improving visibility and reducing code complexity
  • Cut EC2 instance usage in Nomad by 45% without impacting workloads, optimizing costs
  • Streamlined CI/CD pipelines using CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Spinnaker, and ArgoCD

Enterprise Architect IV, Fiserv​

June 2021 – November 2021

  • Designed and implemented the company's first fully automated CI/CD pipeline, serving ~40K employees
  • Provided strategic guidance on mid- and long-term technical roadmap

DevOps Engineer, Helix​

June 2018 – September 2021

  • Founding team member; architected a microservices and event-driven platform on GCP with Kubernetes from the ground up
  • Established CI/CD workflows with Spinnaker, GitHub Actions, and Concourse CI
  • Contributed to open-source projects and internal development as needed
  • Developed several Go-based tools to automate engineering processes

Director DevOps, We Heart iT​

May 2013 – October 2017

  • Scaled platform from 1.2B to 4B page/screen views in 18 months, optimizing for high traffic
  • Migrated MySQL and Redis databases to Cassandra for improved performance and scalability
  • Managed a 4,500-core production environment across SoftLayer and EC2
  • Presented at a Cassandra meetup (link)

Director Operations, Say Media​

April 2007 – January 2011

  • Built a profitable ad network after pivoting from video delivery infrastructure
  • Introduced Hadoop, designing a 50-node Hadoop/Hive cluster for data processing
  • Oversaw hybrid cloud operations (EC2 and private) and led a team of 8

Manager Operations, Meez​

November 2005 – April 2007

  • Designed and deployed infrastructure from scratch, scaling to 1M users and 6M daily page views