Nathan Cerny
Verified Expert in Engineering
System Architect and DevOps Developer
Nathan is a customer-facing technical executive with expertise in DevOps. He has driven digital transformations at multiple Fortune 500 companies, used his leadership skills to dramatically improve team retention, and created rules for cloud-based reapers that resulted in a savings of over $10,000/month. Nathan bridges the gap between client's existing processes and the methodologies that will help them succeed. Nathan thrives on interactions between systems and holistic architecture.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
GitHub, GitLab, CI/CD Pipelines, Chef, Node.js, React, Bash, Windows PowerShell, Kubernetes, Docker, Shell
The most amazing...
...thing I've done is take a skill I knew nothing about, learn it, and use it to save over $10,000/month in cloud costs for the company.
Work Experience
Consultant
Self-employed
- Designed and built web applications for a new venture startup.
- Developed a novel configuration management software designed to move the coding impetus away from the consumer.
- Learned React and various technologies to better support web development.
- Learned SwiftUI to support iOS application development.
Senior Manager, Technical Services and Customer Architecture
CHEF
- Led a team of customer success architects, responsible for retention and expansion of over $40 million in annual revenue.
- Developed customer success architect role and requirements and mentored customer success architects on practices to achieve over 90% retention rate, and over 110% expansion rate across all segments.
- Ensured customers achieved real business outcomes. By mapping their business value to their technical roadmap, we were able to deliver a product where customers did not need to spend time on non-valuable tasks, not in service of an outcome.
- Developed rules for cloud-based reapers to clean up unused cloud instances and manage cost. This resulted in a savings of over $10,000/month.
- Served as an escalation point for any customer issue, and resolved escalations quickly, resulting in millions of dollars in saved revenue.
- Coached customers on use of Inspec to drive CIS and DISA STIG security benchmarks across their infrastructure.
Success Team Manager
CHEF
- Scoped, staffed, and managed professional services engagements for customers, helping them drive DevSecOps goals utilizing Chef and Inspec.
- Collaborate with the customer to correctly identify the scope of work and guide them on the most beneficial places to prioritize work to meet their outcomes.
- Utilized frameworks to help customers assess and identify areas of growth and developed a plan to address them.
Customer Success Engineer
CHEF
- Developed frameworks to assess customer's DevOps adoption and drive conversations around digital and DevOps transformation.
- Guided large enterprise customers in adoption of automation, testing, and pipelines to improve stability of their infrastructure.
- Guided large enterprise customers in DevOps principles and methodologies. Helped customers to incrementally morph their culture into a DevOps culture of communication.
Software Architect | System Architect | System Engineer
Cerner
- Supported application teams with automations, monitoring, and reporting, reducing deployment time from 72 hours to four hours, and increasing the success rate to almost 100%.
- Wrote Chef cookbooks and other automation to ensure repeatability and stability, delivering automated applications that could be tested.
- Evangelized DevOps and Agile practices and methodologies within the enterprise, helping application teams and operations teams.
- Provided guidance for hardening and maintaining robust deployment across HIPAA compliant environments.
Experience
Ceph Cookbook
https://github.com/ncerny/cephrChef Ingredient Cookbook
Crown Clothing - Portfolio eCommerce Site
https://github.com/ncerny/crwn-clothingSkills
Languages
Bash, Bash Script, Ruby, Java, C++, JavaScript, PHP, Go, GraphQL, Swift, Python
Frameworks
Windows PowerShell, Serverless Framework, Express.js, Redux, Next.js, SwiftUI
Tools
GitHub, GitLab, Chef, Terraform, Shell, Jenkins, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Git, HashiCorp, GitHub Pages, VMware, Zabbix, Splunk, Vault, Grafana, Elastic, ELK (Elastic Stack), Amazon EKS, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)
Paradigms
DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), DevSecOps, Azure DevOps, Management, Agile, Serverless Architecture, Continuous Deployment, Kanban, Automation, Scrum, HIPAA Compliance
Platforms
Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Windows, Windows Server, AWS Lambda, IBM WebSphere, Firebase, Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), OpenStack, Linux RHEL/CentOS, HP-UX, AIX, WebSphere MQ, Oracle
Storage
Inspec, MySQL, Ceph, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Oracle RDBMS
Other
CI/CD Pipelines, Habitat, Architecture, Agile DevOps, Consul, System Administration, Linux Administration, Scripting Languages, Computer Science, Tech Sales, Customer Success, Cloud Architecture, Cloud, AWS Cloud Architecture, Lean, IT Infrastructure, Windows System Administration, Electrical Engineering, Physics, P&L Management, Sagas, Serverless, Microsoft Azure, Prometheus, Project Scoping, Continuous Learning, RHEL, OpenVMS, WebSphere Application Server, ITSM, IT Service Management (ITSM), Gatsby
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, React, GitHub API, Stripe, React Redux, Jenkins Pipeline
Industry Expertise
Security, IT Security
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
Kansas State University - Manhattan, Kansas, USA