Clark Winters

Freelance DevOps Engineer, Toptal

2023 - Present, Remote

• Architected and implemented robust CI/CD pipelines across 10+ repositories using GitHub Actions, creating reusable custom actions that reduced deployment errors and decreased release time from 2 days to less than an hour.
• Led Infrastructure as Code implementation with Terraform, creating consistent AWS environments across dev/staging/production, cutting environment bugs by 50% and enabling confident deployments.
• Designed and optimized release orchestration processes with automated scripts coordinating service dependencies, ensuring zero-downtime deployments and maintaining 99.9% system availability.
• Engineered scalable data pipelines processing ~100GB daily, integrating with Snowflake and other data targets to enable real-time analytics for product teams.
• Implemented comprehensive monitoring using CloudWatch and Sentry with Slack integrations for proactive incident response.
• Served as an embedded technical resource, providing deep troubleshooting expertise across the full application stack.

Lead Cloud Engineer, 2nd Watch

2019 - 2022, Remote

• Introduced Infrastructure as Code configuration and other automated solutions to optimize clients’ systems and streamline internal processes.
• Developed an intuitive full-stack application, enabling a streamlined process for the patching team to categorize and patch customers’ Amazon EC2 instances.
• Performed system administration tasks such as installing software, applying patches, and maintaining file systems on Linux and Windows virtual machines.
• Delivered exceptional customer experiences through on-time delivery, consistent communication, and technical expertise.
• Collaborated regularly with other engineering teams to ensure system reliability and durability.
• Mentored and collaborated with team members, which allowed for increased delivery quality and skill development for all involved.

Systems Integration Specialist, Boeing

2018 - 2019, Bellevue, WA

• Configured and maintained Linux servers to ensure proper operation and security.
• Authored automation scripts to streamline operating system builds and delivery.
• Crafted custom, security hardened ISOs containing commonly required software packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, and SUSE.
• Implemented and administered a self-hosted GitLab instance, empowering the team with enhanced source control and continuous deployment capabilities.
• Created intranet websites that allowed internal customers to learn about the team’s offerings, release cycles, and maintenance schedules.

Database Administrator, 2nd Watch

2015 - 2017, Seattle, WA and remote

• Managed daily operations for hundreds of database instances residing on both Amazon EC2 virtual machines and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), including introducing strategic automation to minimize human error and time requirements.
• Implemented automated, volume-based backup and restore for databases using Amazon EC2 snapshots, decreasing backup and restore times by 90% on average.
• Initiated the database migration process standardization for increased efficiency and reduced error rates.
• Pioneered the creation and integration of the database support service, revolutionizing the role of database support within the managed cloud services business.
• Established high-quality production enterprise support for Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL databases.
• Proposed strategic infrastructure recommendations to customers that often allowed clients to decrease cloud spend on database services by up to 30%.