Hey! My name is

David Fries

I like to engineer solutions to complex problems

A career spanning a decade of systems administration, software development, and cloud engineering

About Me

My name is David Fries and I go by DJ. I’m currently living in the beautiful state of Colorado! I am extremely passionate about all things technology, which includes: cloud engineering (GCP, AWS, DigitalOcean, and Azure, software development (Python, TypeScript, and Go), and Kuberenetes (bare-metal and cloud provider maanged).

I am currently looking for my next full-time opportunity. If you think I’d be a good fit for your team, please reach out to me via email or LinkedIn! I am only interested in remote positions at this time; mainly in the DevOps/Backend/Platform Engineering space.

When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my wife going on adventures around Colorado, playing video games, and thinking about the next project I want to work on.

Here are a few technologies I've been working with recently:
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • Postgresql
  • React
  • Node
  • Express (ExpressZodAPI Library)

Experience

Senior Systems Engineer - The Home Depot (Contract)
Nov 2023 - Jan 2024
Re-factored Terraform modules (consolidation, grouped repos). Helped support a distributed system handling ~10 billion requests a month (99.99995% SLA) Worked with K8s, Envoy, Grafana (OSS and Cloud), Prometheus, and GCP. Developed custom Python scripts and Github Actions for validating, promoting, and deploying Grafana dashboards based on dev, non-prod, or prod lifecycles. Worked with fellow engineers to troubleshoot a mix of Systemd, Flatcar Linux, FRR, and GoWatchdog.
DevOps Engineer - Stateless
Jul 2022 - Oct 2023
Heavily worked with Pulumi, Typescript, and all major cloud providers (Azure, GCP, and AWS). With Pulumi Infrastructure as Code, I worked on a custom deployment platform for our services, writing dynamic resource providers for bespoke APIs, and creating many custom resource components for various pieces of our infrastructure. Helped maintain a custom fork of the Megaport Terraform Module Helped create novel software defined networking products centered around cloud networking automation and datacenter networking/connectivity. Worked on implementing our RESTAPI for our SaaS offering, all written in Typescript, Express (Zodios), and EdgeDB. The API client for the frontend team to use was then built and deployed with Gitlab CI/CD. Created various complex Gitlab CI/CD pipelines for deploying software, building docker images, or creating our main product stack. Implemented an observability stack of Grafana, Thanos, and Loki for processing our application logs/distributed system performance Maintained software deployments for our SaaS offering which ran on a cloud provider’s respective Kubernetes engine. Helped troubleshoot and maintain high-performance bare metal Kubernetes clusters which ran our custom software defined networking solution; this included white-box Mellanox (Nvidia) switches, containerized FRR, and a lot of BGP config templating.
Site Reliability Engineer - Blue Sentry Cloud
Nov 2021 - Jul 2022
Worked with remote team providing incident response, service request resolution, and cloud-transformation projects for clients. Provided 15-minute SLA response when on-call. Used Terraform heavily when creating/modifying client infrastructure. Assisted with ad-hoc client projects, ranging from automation tasks and documentation to architecture recommendations and security best-practices. Used Agile methodology when working with clients. Maintained client’s Kubernetes infrastructure running on bare-metal and EKS. Hands-on with the following AWS services: EC2, RDS, EKS, S3, Lambda, ASGs, LBs, QuickSight, IAM, CloudFront, Route53, VPC Peering, and Step Functions.
Cloud Network Administrator - US Greenfiber
May 2015 - Nov 2021

Software Development: Used Python to create a custom integration between our accounting software and a critical SaaS. CI/CD pipeline built with Gitlab to deploy our microservices to Kubernetes. Created an external API to synchronize data from a SaaS to our accounting software via SQL and custom modules. Implemented custom report dashboards with Python(Flask), Vue.js, and SQL. Automated various IT tasks such as employee on-boarding/off-boarding, paperless accounting batches audits with either PowerShell or Python depending on the required task.

Systems Administration: Windows Server 2008 R2, 2016, 2019 MSSQL 2008-2016 Docker, Kubernetes, Ubuntu Server Managed/organized a 20+ year old Active Directory environment. Citrix Cloud platform, Citrix XenApp 7.x

Education

Dec 2020
B.S. Computer Science
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Cybersecurity concentration
May 2017
Associate of Science
Central Piedmont Community College
Software, Systems, Networking
Associate of Arts
Central Piedmont Community College

Projects

BillTrak
TypeScript React Node
BillTrak
A side project to help me keep track of my bills and subscriptions.

Achievements

Eagle Scout, Boy Scouts of America
Awarded Eagle Scout in 2012. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Palms awarded in 2013-2015.

Get in Touch

Drop me a line if you’d like to chat!