Derek Devernoe Employment History

Derek Devernoe

Leading a global team in Cloud Infrastructure, Operations, DevOps, and Security. ☁🛠💡🔐

About

Seasoned technology leader of over 15 years, with 29 years of overall IT experience, including 12 years of AWS and cloud technologies. The last 8 years in DevOps experience with a focus on automation, continuous delivery, and CI/CD pipelines. Proven track record in achieving compliance with SOC2, HIPAA, ISO27001, GDPR, and PCI-DSS standards. AWS, GCP, and ITIL certified.

Technical Proficiencies:

Leading high performing, diverse global Engineering and Technical Operations teams
Cloud Infrastructure: Design, deployment, and management of AWS, GCP, and on-premises solutions.
DevOps: Automation, continuous delivery, CI/CD pipelines, and IT service management.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE): Reliability, stability, performance optimization, and incident response.
Kubernetes: Container orchestration and management in GKE and EKS.
Infrastructure as code: Terraform, Pulumi, Cloud Formation, scripting.
Security: End-to-end security best practices and compliance frameworks.
Database Administration: SQL/NoSQL databases.
Project Management: Planning, execution, and delivery of IT and cloud engineering projects.
Virtualization: VMware, Hyper-V, and other virtualization technologies.
Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, and other platforms.
Programming Languages: VB, C, C++, HTML5/CSS, ASP.NET, Python, JavaScript.
Content Management Systems: WordPress, SharePoint, Quickbase, Drupal, and more.

Top skills

DevOps • Amazon Web Services (AWS) • Google Cloud Platform (GCP) • Team Management • Kubernetes
Experience

Chief Technology Officer

The Cloud Professionals · Part-time

May 2019 – Present · 7 yrs 3 mos

Narrows, Virginia, United States · Remote

Operating as Chief Technical Officer and Principal Architect at The Cloud Professionals – an IT Services consulting company.

We specialize in the following disciplines, while offering a full suite of IT services:
¨ Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning
¨ Cloud Engineering, Operations and Architecture
¨ DevOps and DevSecOps
¨ Application Development (Apple Store, Google Play Store, Web Applications, Cloud Native, ERP, CRM, Custom)
¨ Security and Compliance
¨ Database Services
¨ IT Services
¨ Web Hosting

We offer consulting services on contract or per project, remote or on-site in the greater southwest Virginia region, North Carolina across the route 40 corridor, Southern West Virginia.

We specialize in cloud technology in AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Oracle Cloud. Our Engineers carry multiple certifications from AWS, Google Cloud, ITIL and more, in Artificial Intelligence, Architecture, Development and Compliance.

We manage multiple web servers, domains, DNS, SSL certificates, email, public cloud infrastructure plus on-premises networks firewalls and servers across a multitude of major providers. We mentor students and provide an opportunity to enter the technology industry through a hiring program and scholarships.

While our primary focus is primarily on small to medium size businesses without an IT department, our engineers work with Fortune 500 companies as well.

Current Contract Partners:

Thrivent Financial for Lutherans
Beacon Hill Staffing

Previous Contacts:
Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina
TekSystems
Wayne Automatic Fire Sprinklers Inc.

Check out our websites for contact information, and more detail on service and plan offerings.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and +7 skills

Senior Engineering Manager, Cloud

One Concern · Full-time

Jul 2022 – Jun 2025 · 3 yrs

Menlo Park, CA · Remote

LinkedIn helped me get this job helped me get this job

Leadership:
• Leader of high-performing DevOps, QA and Security teams, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
• Provided hands-on technical and people leadership, mentoring and developing team members, ensuring their growth and success.
• Led by example, creating a positive and productive work environment.
• Coordinated shift scheduling, ensuring 24/7 coverage and efficient handovers.
• Partnered with leadership on strategic direction and implementation of new technologies.
Technical:
• Developed and implemented a comprehensive cloud strategy aligned with company goals.
• Oversaw the design, deployment, and management of cloud infrastructure across GCP, PaaS and SaaS platforms.
• Optimized cloud spending, reduced waste, and ensured adherence to security and compliance standards.
• Implemented DevOps best practices, including automation, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• Managed application deployments using Helm charts and Kubernetes.
• Architected and optimized infrastructure using Pulumi, Ansible, and other relevant tools.
• Implemented FinOps strategies for cost-efficient cloud operations.
• Tracked infrastructure health, performance, and availability using Datadog.
• Utilized Jellyfish to monitor and report on DORA metrics.
• Troubleshot and resolved operational challenges to meet service level objectives.
• Developed and maintained supporting infrastructure, tooling and documentation.
• Led the on-call rotation, ensuring effective incident handling.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to align cloud infrastructure with company objectives.
Achievements:
• Reduced monthly cloud costs by 82%.
• Exceeded industry benchmarks for delivery and incident metrics.
• Established a robust security program for SOC2 and ISO27001 certifications.
• Delivered over $3M in annual cost savings.
• Increased team accountability and efficiency.

Kubernetes, Grit and +41 skills

Manager – Operations Engineering (DevOps)

N-able · Full-time

Mar 2021 – Jul 2022 · 1 yr 5 mos

Morrisville, North Carolina, United States · Hybrid

N-Able, a SolarWinds MSP spin-off:

As Head of AWS Global DevOps, I led a distributed team of engineers worldwide, supporting millions of endpoints across 30 MSP products.

Key Responsibilities:

• Led a global operations team with members in the USA and Europe.
• Exceeded 99.95% SLAs through effective leadership and operational excellence.
• Led the adoption of Kubernetes and managed related services.
• Developed and implemented DevOps best practices to enhance efficiency and reliability.
• Served as incident commander and on-call escalation point.
• 24/7 L2/3 support for thousands of nodes in 6 AWS regions.
• Managed on-call rotations and owned multiple critical systems.
• Supported a diverse technology stack, including legacy and modern applications.
• Heavily involved in security, operations architecture, and standards.
• Contributed to ISO27001 and GDPR compliance.
• Provided technical hands-on support for AWS, Active Directory, Terraform, and various AWS services including EKS, ECS, Lambda, RDS, Elasticache, IAM, Organizations, Route53, S3, Pub/Sub, Cloudwatch, Billing, Crowdstrike, Elasticsearch, Loggly, Pingdom, Snowflake, and more.
• Mentored team members and fostered career growth through regular 1:1s and mentorship.
• Led presentations on system usage and metrics for AWS-based applications.
• Served as codeowner and administrator for multiple git repos, actively participating in code and administrative review processes.

Kubernetes, Grit and +34 skills

SolarWinds MSP

Full-time · 2 yrs 2 mos

Hybrid

Manager – Operations Engineering (DevOps)Feb 2020 – Aug 2021 · 1 yr 7 mosMorrisville, North Carolina, United States

Leading the Global DevOps AWS Team, supporting diverse international collaborative development and operations of the MSP business.

MSP Split from Solarwinds in H2 2021 and now is rebranded N-Able – continuation of this position into separated business unit at N-Able. Kubernetes, Grit and +30 skills

Senior Operations Engineer (DevOps)Jul 2019 – Feb 2020 · 8 mosMorrisville, NC

Senior DevOps Engineer tasked with assisting the development of a customized Kubernetes platform running on EKS, as well as CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins. Migrated applications to the platform, performed training, and supported on-call.

Technologies include:
AWS (IAM, EC2, EKS, S3, RDS, Route53, CloudWatch, Systems Manager, VPC’s etc)
Kubernetes
Jenkins
Terraform
Shell Scripting
much more
Kubernetes, Load Balancing and +23 skills

Senior Developer/DevOps Engineer

Blue Cross NC · Contract

Oct 2018 – Jun 2019 · 9 mos

Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area · On-site

Working on contract as a DevOps Engineer/Cloud Architect and member of the Enterprise Architecture team.

Evolve and mature DevOps processes and cloud architecture, ensuring HIPAA Compliance and improving agility. Work with multiple teams to align roadmaps, develop standards and move closer to a scaled agile model to empower developers.

Supporting development initiatives for Java and Node.js in AWS and OpenShift. Improve IAM design, audit access level roles and policies, testing for compliance. Work with the pipeline and infrastructure teams to improve automation of the CICD pipeline, improve logging, metrics, alerting and reporting capabilities. Manage Github Enterprise repositories, approve promotions in Jenkins, Enterprise Architecture peer review for new projects. Assist development teams with Dockerfiles, CloudFormation templates, containerizing applications, and troubleshooting. Train teams on aws architecture and capabilities, logging and metrics technologies.

Maintain cloud architecture wikis on Confluence and SharePoint, develop scripts for testing integrations for HIPAA compliance, rotate IAM keys. Manage Clusters, AutoScaling policies, alarms and alerting. Improve Tagging for cost itemization and reporting.

Explore new capabilities with emerging technologies like Openshift and service mesh.

Technologies include:
Amazon Web Services – many services including S3, Route53, IAM, EC2, ECS, ECR, ELB/ALB, RDS, RedShift, Cognito, CloudFormation, CloudTrail, Lambda, CLI/API automation, scripting & much more.
OpenShift on Premises and in AWS (future GCP)
Docker, Kubernetes
Elasticsearch, FluentD, Kibana (EFK), Beats. Computer Associates APM
Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, RedHat CloudForms, Git, istio
Python, Powershell, Ruby
MongoDB, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Oracle, DB2
RightScale
Jira, ServiceNow, Rational Team Concert
RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux & Windows
Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Minikube, Vagrant
Apache, nginx, Websphere Liberty, Node.js

Load Balancing, Cloud Computing and +20 skills

Senior DevOps Engineer

udu, Inc. · Full-time

Apr 2018 – Dec 2018 · 9 mos

Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area · On-site

Family decision to move from Florida to NC – I joined a startup for the first time.
I was responsible for cloud operations in support of the development team.
Technologies include:
Linux
Elasticsearch
MongoDB
MySQL
nginx
kubernetes
Node.js
phantomjs
wordpress
salesforce
More…
all running on native Google Cloud Platform, with some AWS infrastructure.

Linux, Kubernetes and +23 skills

Director of Information Technology

Data Partners Inc · Full-time

Jun 2011 – May 2018 · 7 yrs

Fort Myers, FL · On-site

100% Hands on role – Responsible for all aspects of IT, and the management of IS technical services, in a 24/7 data processing and analytic business.

Built on a hybrid on-premises N+1 data center + AWS Infrastructure, and creative integration of differing technologies using automation. Data Partners delivers marketing results to our many major brand name clients through a large data warehouses of industry standard, custom proprietary, and continually web sourced databases quickly, and reliably.

Projects include:

Integrating scaleable AWS infrastructure expanding processing capabilities, saving thousands in on-premises hardware and reduced deployment time.

Integrate VM’s running on blades using Hyper-V, VMWare, and Amazon EC2 instances.

Integrating Linux for web servers, intranet, and sftp servers, saving thousands.

Upgrade servers and domain from Windows 2003 Enterprise to 2012 Standard R2 Active Directory.

Upgrade from Exchange 2003 Enterprise to 2010 Standard, and then to 2013 Standard and adding SSL, Outlook Web and ActiveSync.

Upgrade connectivity from T1 to 200Mbit fiber and 50M cable redundancy, while reducing cost.

Implement new security policies, and network architecture utilizing SonicWall and Barracuda appliance based firewall solutions to thwart threats and cut spam by over 95%.

Implement WordPress server VM’s for website and intranet solutions on open source saving thousands, while simplifying marketing content creation.

Continual development lifecycle of an automated self-healing multi proxy solution on AWS EC2, for database building.

Major Technologies:

Amazon Web Services
VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox
Windows servers, workstations and Active Directory
Microsoft SQL, MySQL, NoSQL servers and databases
Microsoft Exchange servers
Linux servers
SonicWall, Barracuda, Symantec security platforms
Apache and IIS running WordPress, SharePoint and ASP.net websites
Alteryx with R for ETL, Data Blending, Data Analysis
ITIL v3 best practices

Linux, Contract Management and +38 skills

Principal Systems Engineer

Wayne Automatic Fire Sprinklers Inc · Full-time

Aug 2002 – Jun 2011 · 8 yrs 11 mos

Ocoee, FL · On-site

Responsible for the architecture, implementation, and support of all IT platforms and a medium size MPLS network across multiple physical locations, connecting a large staff of field service employees in the Life Safety industry.

Projects Include:

Scaled IT systems architecture for growth from 200 employees + 5 branches to 600+ and 8 locations, and then scaled reductions back to 400 employees.

Upgrade from VPN hub and spoke to MPLS WAN network topology increasing overall company productivity and the reliability of the corporate network.

Engineer and build a Colocation and an on-premises N+1 data center with a FM200 fire system.

Replacement of disconnected standalone Nortel PBX systems to VOIP via a custom Asterisk solution to an integrated AllWorx platform, saving thousands.

Replacement of CRM and ERP systems from Microsoft Dynamics SL to a custom integrated Solutions360 app, increasing visibility, accountability and productivity.

Upgrades from NT4 to Windows Server 2003 Active Directory, and then to 2008 Active Directory.

Upgrades of Exchange Servers from 5.5 Enterprise to 2003 Standard to 2007 Standard.

Implementation of ModusGate to replace SpamAssassin/SquidGuard/IPTables config resulting in a SPAM reduction of over 85%.

Implement a field connected workforce using ActiveSync and SQLce on windows mobile devices before smartphones.

Complete replacement life cycle of all software, network, phone, PC and server hardware for the entire company, 2-3 times.

Implement redundant IT infrastructure for the WayneNet FCC Licensed fire alarm wireless mesh network.

Major Technologies:

Windows servers and workstations NT4-2008 R2 Server, Windows 7
Linux servers
Microsoft SQL Servers 7-2008
Exchange Server 5.5 – 2007
IIS ActiveSync Server, applications and mobile devices
Citrix XEN Server
Sonicwall, IPTables, Cisco PIIX
Mcafee EPO
Nortel, Asterisk, Allworx phone systems
Oracle VirtualBox
Major AutoCAD deployment
Paperless document solution
MPLS mesh networking

Load Balancing, Troubleshooting and +21 skills

AccuData America

Full-time · 4 yrs 5 mos

On-site

IT ManagerJun 2000 – Aug 2002 · 2 yrs 3 mosCape Coral, Florida, United States As IT Manager I managed a staff up to 7, including Network Admins, a DBA, and an internal and external customer help desk, in a Windows environment for this medium sized database marketing firm.

I attained a trust level so high that the owner selected me to mentor his son on IT roles, as well as pick him up to bring to work, or drop him off.

Projects Include:

Upgrade the domain from Windows NT4 to Server 2000 with Active Directory.

Migrate email from Post.Office POP/SMTP to Exchange Server 2000 for over 200 mailboxes, with minimal downtime and 0 email loss.

Transition database servers from SQL 6.5 to SQL 2000, including provisioning and setup of much faster hardware.

Implementation of T1’s using BGP and a microwave wireless backup internet connection, from ISDN lines.

Upgrade from 10 Base-T hubs to 100MBit switched network, greatly improving performance.

Punch-down and cabling for telephone and network connectivity across multiple separate buildings.

Implementation of a help desk to service internal and external customers, improving the overall IT decision making and customer service experience.

Implement Xerox DocuShare paperless solution with network HP Digital Senders, helping save money on printing and storage costs, and improving customer data organization.Skills: Grit, Load Balancing, +16 skills

Systems Engineer

Apr 1998 – Jun 2000 · 2 yrs 3 mos

Cape Coral, FL

Started as a part-time job concurrent to my position at Sony, I was offered a full-time position as the Network Administrator within 3 months. This job was the cornerstone of my IT career, gathering critical knowledge and skills that served as the baseline skills of my ascent in the IT world. During this time, I was responsible for the entirety of their IT and IS infrastructure growth from just over 100 employees in 2 buildings, to over 220 in 5 buildings.

Major Technologies:

Windows NT4-Server 2000
Exchange Server 5-2000
SQL Server 6.5-2000
Xerox DocuShare paperless solution
Cisco routers
Toshiba PBX

Skills: Load Balancing, Troubleshooting, +11 skills

Technical Support

Sony Electronics · Full-time

Feb 1997 – Aug 1998 · 1 yr 7 mos

Cape Coral Metropolitan Area · On-site

Starting as a Telephone Technical Support representative for Sony VAIO computers, I was promoted to the email support group and Tier 2 Escalations, which eventually became the 3rd level support.

Noted for actually fixing the problem rather than focusing on the call statistic pay based incentives, often given irate customers and in turn making them happy, I was often requested by name on future incidents. I also was able to assist with clearing a 6 month email support back-log, helping create a problem tree repository of canned responses used as the basis for email support responses, while managing rightly irate customer expectations on recalled back-ordered items such as DVD drives.

Troubleshooting, Windows and +1 skill

Instructor

Walt Disney World Contemporary · Full-time

Jun 1994 – Feb 1997 · 2 yrs 9 mos

Lake Buena Vista, FL · On-site

Here I learned excellent customer service, corporate culture, and team building skills that have blossomed into further successes in my IT career. I was recognized for excellence and promoted to senior level positions of increasing responsibility quickly, ahead of more senior cast members.

Major Roles Held:
Lead (Coordinator) – Manage staff of up to 25, and was on call medical first responder for the resort.
Instructor – Trained and re-certified hundreds of Lifeguards from all Disney properties for multiple positions.
Chemist – Maintain, repair, clean, log and water balance all commercial pools, spas, slide systems and interactive water attractions at the contemporary resort. Trained cast members who still work in the same capacity today.

Also worked as/in these roles/locations covering all departments under recreation: Lifeguard, Health Club, Child Care, Arcade, Boat Rentals and was even Captain on Private Guided Midnight Champagne Tours of Bay Lake.

Certificates Held:
Disney Certified Trainer
Ellis and Associates Certified Lifeguard Instructor
Red Cross Certified Lifeguard, First Aid and CPR for the Professional Rescuer Instructor
Certified Pool Operator

Leadership, Career Development and +2 skills

Licenses & certifications