Justen Mehl
DevOps Engineer at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR)
Lexington Park, MD 20653
240.538.3671
Experience
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Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR)
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 CentOS 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
- Collaborated with software engineering teams to resolve CI/CD pipeline issues in Bamboo or GitLab
- Aided in a full on-prem development environment migration to AWS GovCloud, resulting in improved developer productivity, cycle time, overall fleet readiness
Project served as a U.S. Navy "North Star" program - a representative proof-of-concept for all Navy system engineering teams
- 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, Packer, GitLab CI, Docker Swarm, Prometheus, ELK, AWS ECS, Anchore, Prisma, Jenkins, vSphere
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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
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Sabre Systems, Inc.
June 2017 - June 2018
Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR)
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
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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:
- Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) for image configuration
- Windows Deployment Services (WDS) for system deployment via Preboot Execution Environment (PXE)
- Various PowerShell scripts for post-install configuration
- Conducted quarterly audits against Cross Domain Solution (CDS) components:
- Validated SELinux Mandatory Access Control (MAC) policies and enforcement level
- Validated syslog/audit functionality by performing privilege escalation attempts
- Validated input filtering by injecting malicious/malformed transport stream (MPEG-2 TS) packets
- Performed on-site verification testing for various servers fielded on U.S. Navy ships
- Tech: PowerShell, MDT + WDS, Hyper-V, RHEL, Windows
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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
Skills
- 7 years: Ansible, Python, Bash, RHEL/CentOS
- 3 years: Terraform, Docker Swarm, GitLab CI, Packer, PowerShell, Windows Server
- 2 years: AWS, Kubernetes, Jenkins, Prometheus
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