
Jess Mahan
Verified Expert in Engineering
DevOps Engineer and Developer
Huntington Beach, CA, United States
Toptal member since March 20, 2018
Jess is a DevOps and platform engineer at Phonely Inc., specializing in AWS, Kubernetes, and production infrastructure. He designs and operates EKS platforms for GPU-backed inference, including vLLM and self-hosted Deepgram workloads, and builds reliable delivery systems with Terraform, Helm, Argo CD, Kustomize, and GitHub Actions. His work spans Datadog observability, secure networking, IAM, GPU capacity planning, and incident response.
Portfolio
Experience
- C - 15 years
- Bash - 15 years
- Linux RHEL/CentOS - 15 years
- Docker - 10 years
- Python - 10 years
- Go - 8 years
- Terraform - 8 years
- Kubernetes - 7 years
Work Experience
DevOps/Platform Engineer
Phonely
- Designed and operated GPU-backed inference platforms on AWS EKS for vLLM and self-hosted Deepgram speech-to-text workloads across production and development environments.
- Built dedicated Kubernetes GPU node groups with taints, tolerations, autoscaling, capacity planning, and multi-region deployment strategies to manage scarce GPU capacity.
- Improved deployment safety by validating secrets before promotion, testing ECR image availability, reviewing Terraform plans, and preventing unintended production changes.
DevOps Engineer | Staff Software Engineer
Alpha Zero One LLC
- Contributed to platform development and automation using the Go programming language.
- Migrated legacy workload to Kubernetes, enabling autoscaling, using site reliability engineering (SRE).
- Set up and maintained CI/CD pipelines in Jenkins and GitLab.
Site Reliability Engineer
Katch LLC
- Designed and implemented the AWS infrastructure using Terraform.
- Developed the back end in Go.
- Built the infrastructure with Ansible.
- Implemented container management with Docker.
- Managed the CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins.
Information Security Engineer
Warner Bros.
- Developed an intrusion analysis with Dell Secureworks.
- Managed a centralized logging environment with Syslog-ng and Rsyslog.
- Implemented a Kibana (ELK) environment for security event analysis.
- Built a custom indexing engine in Go for a shipment to Kibana.
- Created custom DNS NetFlow style tools in C for real-time and historical analysis of DNS queries and flow with a REST API microservice for queries.
Senior DevOps Engineer
Warner Bros.
- Managed all Tomcat 6/7 and GlassFish servers.
- Implemented cloud orchestration via Puppet.
- Managed the CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins and the DNS.
- Migrated the entire on-premise environment (over 5,000 hosts) to AWS.
Project History
SecureWorks SOAP API in Go
https://github.com/alienrobotarmy/secureWorksCTunnel
https://github.com/alienrobotarmy/ctunnelBash Threads
https://github.com/alienrobotarmy/bashthreadsPhonely.ai
https://www.phonely.aiCertifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst (GCIA)
GIAC
Skills
Libraries/APIs
vLLM, POSIX
Tools
Exim4, NGINX, Iptables, Apache, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Jenkins, AWS ELB, Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Grafana, Helm, Kustomize, AWS IAM, VMware, Puppet, Apache Tomcat, Syslog-ng, Syslog, Rsyslog, Ansible, Google Stackdriver, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Amazon EKS
Languages
Python, Bash, Go, C, PHP, Bash Script
Paradigms
DevOps
Platforms
LAMP, Linux RHEL/CentOS, Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Linux, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Amazon EC2, Docker, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Google Cloud, Datadog, Google Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage
Other
System Administration, Qmail, Servers, DNS, Domain Name System (DNS), BIND, PowerDNS, BIND9, Amazon Route 53, HAProxy, CI/CD Pipelines, Dovecot, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Slurm Workload Manager, Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Deepgram, GlassFish, Prometheus
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