Lauren Whitaker
DevOps Engineer · AWS, Kubernetes & Terraform
Raleigh, NC(919) 555-0128lauren.whitaker@email.comlinkedin.com/in/laurenwhitakergithub.com/lwhitaker-ops
Summary
DevOps engineer with 10 years in infrastructure, the last 5 running AWS and Kubernetes for a payroll SaaS company. Moved 38 services to EKS with GitOps deploys and owns CI, Terraform modules and on-call. Started in Windows and Linux systems administration. CKA certified.
Experience
DevOps Engineer · Brightline PayrollMay 2021 – Present
Raleigh, NC
- Moved 38 services from hand-built EC2 hosts to Amazon EKS with Helm and Argo CD; production deploys went from twice a week to 15 to 20 a day.
- Wrote Terraform modules for VPCs, RDS and IAM used by 6 product teams, replacing console changes behind 3 outages the prior year.
- Rebuilt CI in GitHub Actions with cached Docker layers and parallel test shards, cutting median pipeline time from 24 minutes to 9.
- Ran the 5-person on-call rotation; SLO-based Datadog alerts and runbooks brought mean time to restore from 70 minutes to 22.
- Saved about $11,000 a month on AWS by moving stateless workloads to Spot with Karpenter and deleting orphaned EBS volumes.
- Added Trivy image scanning and Vault-issued database credentials before the first SOC 2 Type II audit, which closed with no infrastructure findings.
Systems Administrator · Wake County Public School SystemJun 2016 – Apr 2021
Cary, NC
- Kept 220 Windows and Linux servers on a monthly patch cycle with WSUS and Ansible, serving more than 190 schools.
- Scripted staff account provisioning in PowerShell, taking a 40-minute manual task to 3 minutes during the August hiring rush.
- Migrated file shares for 12 central office departments to SharePoint Online over one summer break.
Education
B.S. Information Technology · North Carolina State UniversityMay 2016
Skills
Cloud and containers: AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, IAM, VPC), Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Karpenter
IaC and CI/CD: Terraform, Ansible, GitHub Actions, Argo CD
Observability and security: Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, PagerDuty, Trivy, HashiCorp Vault
Scripting: Bash, Python, PowerShell
Certifications
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), CNCF · HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003) · AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Associate