About

About

Jesse McCann

Staff Platform / Infrastructure Engineer

📍 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  ·  jesse@mccannical.com  ·  818-403-8142  ·  LinkedIn  ·  GitHub

I’ve spent 15+ years owning production infrastructure, from aerospace systems at Virgin Galactic to multi-cloud Kubernetes platforms in FedRAMP High environments. Most of my work is the plumbing other engineers build on: deployment automation, developer environments, cloud cost governance, and lately, the workflows that let engineers and AI agents work together on real codebases. On the side I ship complete products solo (Next.js / Supabase / Stripe), and I build with Claude daily.

Experience

Site Reliability Engineer — DTEX Systems

Jun 2024–Present · Greater Philadelphia

Platform engineering for multi-tenant SaaS across commercial and FedRAMP High/Moderate environments.

  • Built and own the multi-cloud Kubernetes “deployment factory”: Terraform/OpenTofu IaC that turns standing up a customer environment from days of manual work into one command and about an hour.
  • Cut monthly cloud spend 30% in the first cleanup pass and 45% overall, mostly through Cloud Custodian policy automation.
  • Built an internal multi-agent AI platform: Vertex AI and Copilot for inference, with a durable issue graph holding state so agents can handle long-running work. The team now uses the blueprint for large-scale legacy refactoring, and one prototype goes from a PRD to a working web UI validated with Playwright.
  • Built an agentic tool that pulls a full picture of a customer out of Jira and Confluence in about 30 seconds.
  • Standardized the team’s developer environment: mise for tool versions, Python tools distributed via uvx, one-command GCP/AWS auth.
  • SME for OpenSearch and GCP architecture. Own continuous monitoring, vulnerability management, and patching, with 24Ă—7 on-call.
  • Mentor engineers on AI-assisted development.

Sr. Cloud Systems Engineer / Technical Lead — Confluent

Nov 2020–Apr 2024 · Mountain View, CA

Infrastructure through pre-IPO, IPO, and post-IPO growth at the company behind enterprise Apache Kafka.

  • Wrote and operated Go and Python infrastructure services on GCP Cloud Run, with CI/CD from GitHub through Cloud Build. Deployed GKE with Terraform plus custom Go cluster-management tooling.
  • Led a multi-quarter Zero Trust network rollout (Palo Alto) for a global workforce. Wrote the allow-list automation so the cutover didn’t interrupt anyone’s work.
  • When a GitHub EMU migration was on the table, built proof-of-concept tools to measure how much would break, took the findings to InfoSec, TPM, and Engineering leadership, and helped steer the decision to GitHub Enterprise instead.
  • Mentored 10 engineers and ran continuous-learning efforts across the infrastructure teams.

Staff System Engineer — BlackLine

Feb 2018–Nov 2020 · Woodland Hills, CA

  • Directed the migration of legacy infrastructure to GCP with Terraform.
  • Ran the Atlassian stack in a high-availability setup; integrated SAP Resolve with Salesforce.
  • Put the cloud infrastructure under version control in GitLab.
  • Trained the team on Git, PowerShell, Python, and Terraform. Automated HRIS updates, server deployment, and patch management.

Senior System Engineer — Applied Minds

Dec 2014–Feb 2018 · Burbank, CA

  • Led the company’s NIST 800-171 compliance effort and implemented the security controls behind it.
  • Built real-time monitoring on the ELK stack in Azure; set up backup and disaster recovery.
  • Migrated internal applications to AWS on time and on budget; maintained 99.99% uptime. Led an Exchange → Office 365 migration.

Senior Systems Engineer — Virgin Galactic

Jul 2012–Nov 2014 · Mojave, CA

  • Ran high-availability clusters for critical services and scripted their installs.
  • Handled network security: firewalls and intrusion detection.
  • Led the storage migration to SANs and Dell PowerVaults; integrated Linux servers with Active Directory. Started as a System Administrator and was promoted.

Server Support Engineer — Publix Super Markets

Mar 2007–Jul 2012 · Lakeland, FL

Skills

  • Core: Kubernetes, Terraform / OpenTofu, Python, Go
  • Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure
  • Platform & DevEx: CI/CD, Ansible, mise, uvx, Make, Git
  • AI: Multi-agent workflows, MCP / agentic tooling, Vertex AI, Copilot
  • Compliance & Security: FedRAMP (High/Moderate), NIST 800-171, continuous monitoring, vulnerability management
  • Data & Observability: OpenSearch, Apache Kafka

Certifications & Education

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
  • Polk State College, 2005–2006
  • CFCC, 1999–2001
  • Technical Mentor, Princeton University

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