Forward Deployed Engineer · Seattle, WA
I get dropped into somebody else’s undocumented system, work out how it actually behaves, build the thing that fixes it, and leave the team able to run it without me. Twenty years of that — now with production LLM pipelines in the loop.
A set of Azure deployments with no IaC, no docs, and nobody left who built them. I reverse-engineered them into a custom PowerShell/Azure CLI toolset and shipped it with a development plan, a test plan, and a training plan — because the deliverable isn’t the tooling, it’s the team being able to run it after I move on.
My AI SRE service kept an issue ledger the model maintained itself. The same read-modify-write defect came back four times in two weeks. It wasn’t a prompt problem. I moved detection and state into deterministic code and left the model one job: narrate a diff the code already computed. P1 alerting has no model in the path at all.
Migrating public ingress to a Cloudflare Tunnel closed every inbound port. It also surfaced an API token sitting on a host scoped to mint arbitrary tokens — full account compromise, in a file. Found it, removed it, verified nothing downstream broke, wrote down the failure mode.
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