Justen Mehl

Experience

Naval Air Warfare Center - Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) Feb. 2020 - Present

DevOps Engineer
- Reduced cycle time and mean time to repair (MTTR) by migrating 30 production workloads from singular dedicated VMs to Docker Swarm clusters
- Reduced operational toil by using Ansible roles to standardize configuration management of a fleet of ~100 RHEL machines
- Reduced cycle time and improved network security posture by engineering Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines to produce secure container/VM images while enforcing quality gates
- Reduced cycle time by developing Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines that release containerized workloads to production
- Reduced operational toil by co-developing Python tooling that automates the auditing of assets' Cybersecurity posture
- Reduced operational toil by writing Python tooling that allows management of web application accounts from a central identity provider (Okta) via REST API synchronization
- Collaborated with software engineering teams to resolve CI/CD pipeline issues in GitLab
- Aided in a full on-prem development environment migration to AWS GovCloud, resulting in improved developer productivity, cycle time, overall fleet readiness
- Migrated legacy log aggregation system to an ElasticSearch, Logstash, Kibana (ELK) stack, resulting in improved visibilty into our network security posture
- Deployed a Prometheus stack for aggregation and visualization of network metrics, resulting in reduced MTTR and alert fatigue
- Occasionally participated in red team engagements of Navy fleet assets
- Tech: Python, Ansible, Terraform, AWS ECS, Okta, Packer, GitLab CI, Docker Swarm, Prometheus, ELK, Anchore, Prisma, vSphere
Platform One July 2023 - Jan. 2024 (6 month residency)

Software Developer
- Led a team of 4-5 engineers in a multi-month effort to harden Big Bang packages in accordance with NSA's secure Kubernetes guidelines
- Contributed to complex Helm template codebases that comprise the Big Bang DevSecOps platform
- Supported and deployed common Software Factory tooling within Big Bang (GitLab, ArgoCD, Istio, Sonarqube, Twistlock, Nexus, Anchore, etc)
- Triaged and resolved community-identified software bugs
- Reduced cycle time by writing several shell scripts to expedite development environment provisioning
- Tech: Helm, Kubernetes, GitLab, Bash
Sabre Systems, Inc. June 2017 - June 2018

Naval Air Warfare Center - Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) June 2018 - Feb. 2020

Linux System Administrator
- Increased developer productivity by migrating legacy physical infrastructure to a highly available, scalable, and 10GbE virtual platform
- Improved network security posture by aggregating, normalizing, and visualizing audit data for analysis by our Cybersecurity team
- Reduced developer toil by migrating legacy build scripts to CI/CD pipelines
- Collaborated with software engineering teams to resolve C/C++/Ada compiler issues
- Increased developer productivity by resolving various build system issues to improve software compilation speed
- Reduced operational toil by implementing server configuration management with Ansible
- Planned, tested, and implemented major version upgrades for the primary Software Configuration Management (SCM) platform Rational ClearCase
- Tech: Bash, Ansible, Python, RHEL, Bamboo, Bitbucket, ClearCase, vSphere, Horizon View, Active Directory
Booz Allen Hamilton Dec. 2014 - June 2017

System Administrator
- Provided technical support for active duty users operating mission critical, forward deployed assets
- Improved server deployment efficiency by developing a fully-automated deployment process leveraging:
- Conducted quarterly audits against Cross Domain Solution (CDS) components:
- Performed on-site verification testing for various servers fielded on U.S. Navy ships
- Tech: PowerShell, MDT + WDS, Hyper-V, RHEL, Windows
St Mary's County Public Library Jan. 2014 - Nov. 2014

Public Technology Assistant
- Supported Windows machines, an Active Directory domain, and various library software for patrons and staff
- Reduced lead time for delivery of workstations to staff by developing various software deployment batch scripts
- Conducted IT training classes for patrons and/or the public
- Tech: Active Directory, Windows, Batch, PowerShell

Certifications

Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), ID Number LF-0tz4ldugj2
Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Certification Number 556334
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (SAA), Validation Number FX7JHJ3LB1BE1Y3C
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF), Validation Number 0W0LDSMC3EF41R51
CompTIA Linux+ #COMP001020727794

Education

Major: Software Development and Security
Bachelor of Science
University of Maryland Global Campus - Class of 2018

Overview: mehlj.github.io/CloudResumeChallenge

Frontend: github.com/mehlj/resume-frontend

Backend: github.com/mehlj/resume-backend