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James Nurmi, Cloud Architect and Developer in Split, Croatia
James Nurmi

Cloud Architect and Developer in Split, Croatia

Member since July 22, 2021
With two decades of experience, James brings a deep understanding of matching business requirements with practical solutions. From small shops just starting to get traffic to large shops looking to increase reliability, availability, and control costs, he brings expertise and creativity to help your business grow and thrive in the cloud. With diverse skills and a tenacity for problem-solving, James helps bridge the gap between what a business needs and how it can get there.
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Portfolio

Experience

  • Linux 20 years
  • Cost Cutting 16 years
  • Scalability 16 years
  • AWS Cloud Architecture 15 years
  • AWS IAM 14 years
  • Cloud 14 years
  • Go 8 years

Location

Split, Croatia

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Go, Python

The most amazing...

...thing I've accomplished is helping the client cut the cloud spending from a million dollars per year to a tenth of that in weeks by knowing the right tools.

Employment

  • DevOps Consultant

    2022 - PRESENT
    Undisclosed (Private Client)
    • Targeted resource cost and utilization policies reduce spending by more than 50% while increasing the availability of application services by orders of magnitude.
    • Designed, managed, and implemented a coordinated zero-downtime effort to migrate services from a single AWS region to multiple regions to optimize service availability and compliance efforts.
    • Migrated ECS workloads to an EKS backplane, supporting multiple developer and customer-facing workloads.
    • Implemented security policies to ensure customer data and PII were well-protected and auditable.
    • Managed integration with multiple third-party services, including Contentful, Vercel, and similar services.
    • Oversaw and created CI/CD workflows for micro-service-based architecture.
    Technologies: Vercel, Kubernetes, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS RDS, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub, Securities, Alternative Investments, Datadog, Terraform, AWS Cloud Architecture, Cloud, Amazon ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service), AWS ALB, Apache Kafka, Site Reliability, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Orchestration, AWS Cloud Development, Docker, AWS Kinesis, System Architecture, Git, DevOps Engineer, Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, Shell, Bash Script, AWS Lambda, HTTP, JavaScript, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • Senior DevOps

    2021 - PRESENT
    Undisclosed (Toptal Client)
    • Managed multiple team members and led reorganizing into a DevOps as a service mentality, enabling engineering teams to quickly and independently iterate without being blocked by operations and logistics.
    • Managed and migrated several workloads across several Kubernetes clusters to ensure availability and redundancy of services.
    • Charged with several operational concerns, including management, security, infrastructure, SSO integrations, and others, to ensure automation and well-defined policies across the engineering teams.
    Technologies: Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, Apache Kafka, AWS ALB, Autoscaling Groups, Elastic APM, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Single Sign-on (SSO), PagerDuty, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Site Reliability, Scalability, Containers, Containerization, DevOps, Terraform, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS RDS, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Orchestration, AWS Cloud Development, Docker, CI/CD Pipelines, Git, DevOps Engineer, GitHub, Ubuntu, PostgreSQL, Shell, Bash Script, AWS Lambda, HTTP, JavaScript, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • Kafka and Kubernetes Expert

    2022 - 2022
    Undisclosed (Toptal Client)
    • Established automated monitoring between Terraform components and Datadog to ensure consistent application of company standards.
    • Configured and managed multiple Kafka (MSK) clusters for highly available mission-critical services.
    • Guided junior team members in learning AWS infrastructure and services.
    • Provided support and troubleshooting for VPCs, peering connections, and other complex networking installations.
    • Supported multiple Kubernetes clusters for production and developer use.
    Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon EKS, Apache Kafka, AWS ALB, Site Reliability, Datadog, AWS RDS, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Orchestration, AWS Cloud Development, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD Pipelines, AWS Kinesis, System Architecture, Git, GitHub, Ubuntu, Back-end, PostgreSQL, Redis, Shell, Bash Script, AWS Lambda, Prometheus, HTTP, JavaScript, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • DevOps Consultant

    2021 - 2022
    Undisclosed
    • Migrated several services and Terraformed recipes to more modernized and standardized implementations.
    • Managed scalability, security concerns, incident response for external threats, and internal risk management.
    • Charged with spearheading much of the policy generation and implementation for ISO27001 certification of the organization.
    Technologies: VPN, ISO 27001, AWS IAM, GitLab, Terraform, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Docker, DevOps, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service), AWS ALB, Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS RDS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Orchestration, AWS Cloud Development, Ubuntu, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Shell, Bash Script, Prometheus, HTTP, JavaScript, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • Cloud Architect | Operations Lead

    2015 - 2018
    Sano Intelligence
    • Created, managed, and supported the entire cloud infrastructure for the enterprise to ensure high availability and low-cost automation solutions.
    • Supported internal engineering and IT groups to ensure coordinated efforts across the organization and reduce duplication.
    • Implemented infrastructure scalability throughout an enterprise's formative years—ensuring the load testing, scalability, and productivity of teams working on the product.
    Technologies: Linux, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Architecture, Monitoring, Scalability, Google Cloud, DevOps, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS RDS, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Orchestration, AWS Cloud Development, GitHub, Ubuntu, Back-end, PostgreSQL, Shell, Bash Script, Grafana, Prometheus, HTTP, MQTT, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer

    2012 - 2015
    The Climate Corporation
    • Worked to help control costs and mitigate expenses through the use of AWS technologies, including spot instances, monitoring, and active management of infrastructure.
    • Acted as the primary engineer on security and infrastructure concerns within the cloud infrastructure.
    • Consulted across teams within the organization for use and integration with AWS and other cloud technologies, including engineering, IT, and business analytics teams.
    • Implemented and managed the authentication infrastructure for production services ensuring reliable SSO across the application suite.
    • Applied the high-availability and high-reliability infrastructure to support build deployment automation and reproducibility.
    Technologies: Go, Python, Ruby, Java, Amazon EC2, AWS EMR, Cost Cutting, Web Security, Amazon Web Services (AWS), DevOps Engineer, DevOps, Cloud Security, Cloud Computing, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), AWS Cloud Development, Back-end, PostgreSQL, Redis, Shell, Bash Script, Grafana, HTTP, MQTT, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • Systems Engineer

    2008 - 2010
    Ooyala
    • Designed, negotiated purchasing, built, and provisioned the first physical data center for the company's hybrid-cloud system.
    • Designed and deployed corporate and production networks, automation, IT integration, and provisioning tools.
    • Acted as the first-and-final security contact for internal and external threat mitigation, management, and resolution.
    Technologies: Amazon EC2, BGP, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), AWS EMR, VPN, IPsec, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Back-end, PostgreSQL, Shell, Bash Script, HTTP, JavaScript, Identity & Access Management (IAM)

  • Linux Administrator | Corporate Site Reliability Engineer

    2004 - 2008
    Google
    • Managed and maintained numerous corporate services to support the engineering organization and the corporate mission.
    • Oversaw several integration points of the various technology platforms in Google's unique environment.
    • Handled on-call and maintenance of tight SLAs to ensure worldwide and 24/7 availability of corporate infrastructure.
    • Acted frequently as a nexus of information between the corporate and production networking teams and security, production, and corporate resources.
    Technologies: Python, C, Linux, LDAP, RADIUS, Ruby, DNS, Load Balancers, Cloud, Perforce, CVS, Git, Mercurial, IP Networks, VPN, Firewalls, Kerberos, Shell, Bash Script, HTTP, JavaScript

Experience

  • Hrmit.io

    A Go-and-JavaScript web service designed to aid companies with automating their onboarding and offboarding processes across a wide variety of web services.

    By ensuring repeatable and reliable onboarding, new employees can get started faster, access the services needed for their roles, and reduce the time they spend during their first weeks asking for access to core components.

    Similarly with offboarding, companies are given reliable and auditable assurance that employees no longer have access to company property after they leave, helping to control license costs, security risks and unplanned IT work.

Skills

  • Languages

    Go, Bash Script, C, Python, JavaScript, C++, Java, Ruby

  • Frameworks

    AWS HA, AWS EMR

  • Libraries/APIs

    Google Apps, RADIUS

  • Tools

    VPN, Amazon ECS (Amazon Elastic Container Service), AWS IAM, AWS ELB, Amazon EBS, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), GitLab, GitHub, Amazon CloudWatch, Shell, Git, Amazon EKS, Terraform, Grafana, MQTT, Perforce, CVS, Mercurial, Jira, Atlassian, Trello, Helm

  • Paradigms

    DevOps, Lambda Architecture, Continuous Delivery (CD), Continuous Integration (CI)

  • Platforms

    Unix, Linux, AWS ALB, AWS Lambda, Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Docker, AWS Kinesis, Ubuntu, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Azure, Apache Kafka, PagerDuty

  • Storage

    Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Redis, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Datadog

  • Other

    DNS, Load Balancers, Cloud, IP Networks, Firewalls, Kerberos, IPsec, Cost Cutting, AWS Cloud Architecture, Monitoring, Scalability, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Cloud Security, AWS DevOps, DevOps Engineer, Containers, Containerization, Site Reliability, Cloud Computing, AWS RDS, CI/CD Pipelines, AWS Certified Solution Architect, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Orchestration, AWS Cloud Development, System Architecture, Back-end, HTTP, Identity & Access Management (IAM), LDAP, Wireless, BGP, Web Security, Securities, Lambda Functions, Prometheus, Autoscaling Groups, Elastic APM, Single Sign-on (SSO), ISO 27001, Vercel, Alternative Investments

Education

  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
    2000 - 2004
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University - Blacksburg, VA, United States

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional
    DECEMBER 2022 - DECEMBER 2025
    AWS
  • AWS Certified Security - Specialty
    APRIL 2022 - APRIL 2025
    Amazon Web Services
  • AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional
    MARCH 2022 - PRESENT
    Amazon Web Services

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