Infrastructure built by someone who's run it for fifteen years.
Most cloud consultants have never set foot on a shop floor or carried a pager for a system that couldn't go down. I have. Hard Deck Technologies is the work I've done my whole career, offered directly to the companies that need it.
Why Hard Deck exists.
Small and midsize companies usually get stuck between two bad options. On one side, a generic managed-services shop that treats their infrastructure like every other ticket in the queue. On the other, an enterprise consultancy that bills a fortune and disappears the moment the invoice clears.
Hard Deck exists to give growing businesses a third option: senior cloud engineering that is scoped, priced, and built to be owned. No mystery retainers, no rotating bench of juniors learning on your environment. Just a reliable floor your operation can count on, set by someone who has run these systems himself.
The short version.
I'm an infrastructure and DevOps engineer based in Houston, with more than fifteen years spanning cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code, automation, identity, and large-scale system reliability. I've built and run systems for manufacturers, enterprises, and high-growth companies, and the through-line is always the same: make the infrastructure reliable, automated, and understandable.
A lot of that experience comes from environments where failure wasn't abstract. At a Mercedes-Benz van plant and an aluminum mill, a system going down meant a production line stopping. That teaches you to build with a floor in mind, a level your infrastructure simply doesn't drop below. That idea is the whole reason this company is called Hard Deck.
More recently I've focused on Azure and Terraform at multi-subscription scale: building landing zones, writing the modules and automation that replace manual work, and standardizing how environments get provisioned and kept healthy. That's the work I bring to small and midsize companies, manufacturers and industrial operators included, that need it done right without hiring a whole platform team.
The hard deck is a real thing.
Away from the keyboard, I've spent fourteen years as a skydiver and instructor. In the sky, the hard deck is the altitude where you stop working a problem and pull, no exceptions. It's the line that keeps you alive, and as an instructor I've spent years teaching people to respect it.
That's where the company name comes from, and it's how I think about infrastructure. Set the floor your systems never drop below, build everything to hold it, and don't improvise past the point where it matters.
Photo by Alex Swindle.
Why work with Hard Deck.
No lock-in, ever
Every module, pipeline, and runbook is built so your team can run it without me. You are buying capability, not a dependency.
You work with me
No account managers, no junior bench. The person scoping the work is the person doing it, with fifteen years behind it.
Right-sized, not over-built
I pick the most cost-effective service for the job, and I say so when the cheaper path is the better one. Your bill reflects it.
I have run these systems
Years inside manufacturing plants and industrial operations, not just slide decks. I know what downtime actually costs.
Where I've done the work.
Houston, TX
Infrastructure / DevOps Engineer
- Azure, Terraform, and Ansible automation across enterprise infrastructure.
- Infrastructure-as-code standards and hybrid cloud operations.
- Reliability, provisioning, and configuration management at scale.
Houston, TX
Infrastructure / DevOps Engineer
- Built enterprise Nasuni edge infrastructure across 5+ Azure subscriptions with Terraform.
- PowerShell automation that cut manual post-deployment config by 90% (3–4 hrs to 20–30 min).
- Ansible Automation Platform for provisioning and patching across Azure and VMware.
- Standardized RHEL 8/9 builds; reached a 95%+ automation rate.
Remote
Senior Systems Engineer
- Designed highly available, auto-scaled environments across AWS, GCP, and Azure, improving uptime ~30%.
- Led large-scale data-center-to-cloud migrations of business-critical platforms.
- Automation with Jenkins, Ansible, and Bash/Python; CI/CD pipeline delivery.
- Identity and access: Okta, SAML, OAuth, Active Directory, and RBAC.
Houston, TX
Senior Systems Engineer
- Azure infrastructure-as-code with Terraform, ARM, and Bicep, cutting provisioning time ~50%.
- Hardened identity and secrets with RBAC, Key Vault, and Azure AD, reducing vulnerabilities ~35%.
- Optimized CI/CD, lowering environment onboarding time ~25%.
Houston, TX
Site Reliability Engineer
- Ran incident response and postmortems for production reliability on GCP.
- Observability with Grafana and Prometheus; built disaster-recovery pipelines.
- Modular Ansible playbooks and CI/CD with Jenkins.
Ladson, SC
Senior Systems Engineer
- Relocated 150+ servers and storage to a secondary data center with zero disruption.
- VMware vSphere HA/DRS design that improved resource efficiency ~25%.
- Disaster recovery with NetApp MetroCluster and EMC Data Domain.
Goose Creek, SC
Senior Systems Administrator
- Centralized IT operations across five manufacturing sites.
- Disaster recovery with Veeam, cutting recovery time ~20%.
- Migrated 10,000+ users to hybrid Exchange, improving email performance ~40%.
The toolbox.
Microsoft Azure (primary), Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, multi-cloud and hybrid architecture
Terraform, Ansible, ARM, Bicep, CloudFormation
Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes
PowerShell, Python, Bash
Okta, SAML, OAuth, RBAC, Active Directory, Azure Key Vault
VMware vSphere, Nasuni, NetApp, Veeam, EMC Data Domain
RHEL 8/9, SUSE, Ubuntu, Windows Server
Grafana, Prometheus, Azure Monitor, CloudWatch, SolarWinds
Certifications & education.
Certifications
Education
Let's talk about your infrastructure.
If you're a small or midsize company, manufacturing or otherwise, that needs cloud done right and kept right, the readiness assessment is the place to start.