Jeffrey Paul Nelson

What I’m best at: Troubleshooting — I dig into production problems and stay with them until the root cause is clear. I’m adaptable: new tech is what energizes me, and I learn and integrate it into real systems (currently multi-cluster EKS, ArgoCD GitOps, Crossplane platform work, and systems fundamentals). I’m a proactive teammate on issues — I prefer architecture and observability that surface problems before a ticket has to be filed.

Senior Systems Administrator on the SRE team (Wiser). Last several years: dual-track multi-DC systems (Austin / Chicago / Toronto — VMware, storage, networking, decommissions) and cloud/SRE delivery (AWS EKS, ArgoCD, Terraform, Crossplane, incidents, cost hygiene). As DCs wound down, day-to-day shifted toward cloud platform (Austin/Chicago decommissioned; Toronto keep-the-lights-on) while systems depth stayed real. Targeting senior hybrid systems / infrastructure / SRE roles (also pure platform SRE when the fit is right). Official title: Senior Systems Administrator; team: SRE. Foundation: 20+ years Linux/Windows, VMware, and datacenter operations (RW3 → Wiser).

Core Competencies

Professional Experience

Senior Systems Administrator — SRE team

Wiser — acquired RW3 Technologies — Austin, TX (Hybrid)

2021 – Present

Official title: Senior Systems Administrator · Team: SRE · Dual-track multi-DC systems + cloud/SRE · 2026 weight shifted to cloud platform as DCs wound down

Trajectory: dual-track multi-DC (Austin / Chicago / Toronto) + SRE for years after acquisition; cloud/platform weight increased as Austin ~late 2025 and Chicago ~early 2026 decommissioned; Toronto KLO only. LinkedIn-aligned: systems admin & SRE, infrastructure, hybrid cloud, DevOps automation.

Multi-DC systems ownership through acquisition and wind-down — after acquisition, hands-on systems owner for three sites (Austin, Chicago, Toronto): VMware, storage, network edge, day-2 ops while workloads moved cloud-ward. Concurrent sysadmin + SRE for years; load shifted to cloud as DCs exited.
Led VMware / datacenter decommission work (2025–2026) — infrastructure side of estate wind-downs (Austin/Chicago path): equipment sale, shipping, physical removal, Chicago site-to-site VPN teardown via Terraform/Atlantis. Dev teams owned workload migration. Recovered six figures in capital. Toronto residual keep-the-lights-on.
Independently led EKS Hybrid Nodes PoC (Chicago, 2024) — sole engineer extending EKS to on-prem Chicago hardware (AWS Hybrid Nodes), SSM, nodeadm, Cilium, VPN to private EKS API. Validated a technical hybrid path; business decision was to migrate the remaining DC application to the cloud platform rather than operate hybrid long-term.
Building Crossplane self-service platform (current cloud focus) — with the SRE team, implementing Crossplane v2 on AWS EKS so engineers provision infrastructure via Kubernetes manifests without SRE tickets. Authored Compositions/XRDs including the first v2 Workload kind (set the pattern for team workloads; first consumer: ngri-analytics-ai).
Co-implemented three-tier Crossplane CI (wiser-crossplane-aws) — with a teammate, shipped gates so broken compositions never reach engineers: (1) path-filtered crossplane render golden-file tests (~2 min); (2) ephemeral MiniStack + k3d/uptest full reconciliation without real AWS credentials (~10–20 min); (3) sandbox EKS + real AWS as the release gate before ECR publish. Platform also runs an XRD schema-diff gate for breaking OpenAPI changes.
Led GitHubTeamRepo v1→v2 Crossplane migration (STACK-2009) — rehearsed delete/reapply on real team repos, fixed a composition team-permission flap, then cut over seven production claims to namespaced XRDs via versioned packages; verified GitHub state unchanged (repos, branch protection, team perms) with zero accidental commits.
GitOps delivery with ArgoCD — operate and troubleshoot application sync across multi-cluster EKS (sync blockages, immutable field conflicts, chart upgrades validated per-service in ArgoCD); core path for how workloads and platform changes land in environments.
Diagnosed and resolved production auth service outage (SRE-2478) — mixed 200/404/502; Service selector mixing pods from three services. Cleared ArgoCD immutable spec.selector blockage; flagged chart design flaw for pre-merge guardrail.
Owned CI/CD pipeline incident response (SRE-2448) — failed GitHub Actions npm publish traced to expired PAT from suspended account. Restored pipeline, rotated secrets, documented blast radius across three teams.
Independently investigated cost cleanup discrepancy (STACK-1856) — missing AWS savings; DLM regenerating EBS snapshots and scanner inflating estimates 15–20x. Corrected projections for management.
Removed unused Route53 Resolver endpoints (SRE-2341) — deleted unused inbound/outbound resolvers and related rules across accounts/regions via Terraform/Atlantis (and targeted state cleanup where needed); ~$2.5k/month estimated savings; extended the resolver module so inbound/outbound creation is optional.
Contributed to Spotinst Ocean → Karpenter + nOps migration — removed Spotinst nodeSelectors/annotations across online and polaris workloads; participated in the org AWS tagging effort for nOps FinOps and verified nOps reporting so resources were correctly allocated.
Executed EKS core-services upgrades — Traefik v2→v3 and kube-prometheus-stack work in the 1.31→1.35 initiative; full core-services sequence on eu-prod-euw1 with per-service ArgoCD validation.
Supported Coralogix observability and PagerDuty operations — OTEL, log-based alerting support, escalation policy contributions; evaluated FireHydrant, Incident.io, Better Stack for leadership.

Linux & Windows	Linux (primary), Windows Server, bash/shell, patching/ops fundamentals
Datacenter & virt	VMware vSphere, SAN (Nimble, EqualLogic, Compellent), multi-DC ops, cutovers & decommission
Networking	AWS VPC/TGW/VPN, datacenter switching/VLANs, Cilium, Traefik, OpenVPN, DNS, ALB/NLB
Cloud & IaC	AWS (EKS, EBS, EFS, S3, ECR, RDS, ALB/NLB, TGW, Route53, VPC, IAM), Terraform, Terragrunt, Atlantis, Crossplane v2, Docker
Kubernetes	EKS, ArgoCD, Helm, Karpenter, KEDA, Kyverno, cert-manager, external-secrets, Traefik, Cilium, node-local-dns
CI/CD & GitOps	GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, composition CI (crossplane render, MiniStack, k3d/uptest), GitHub Packages, secrets management
Observability	PagerDuty, Coralogix, OTEL, kube-prometheus-stack, nOps, FireHydrant, Incident.io, Better Stack, CheckMK, Nagios
Other	MongoDB, HashiCorp Vault

Professional Summary

Core Competencies

Professional Experience

Technical Skills