Joe Watson

Senior Software & DevOps Engineer — Seattle, WA

Summary

Senior Software & DevOps Engineer with 10+ years building resilient, secure, and scalable infrastructure — across clouds, on-premises, hybrid, and air-gapped environments. That's expanded into hands-on AI enablement: shipping a Claude-integrated agentic developer toolkit, a governed SQL tool with automatic PII masking, and an internal developer platform with an AI assistant layer — all adopted as company-wide engineering standards at Versaterm after the $180M DroneSense acquisition. Proven track record leading cloud migrations, Kubernetes adoption, DevSecOps transformations, and CI/CD automation for mission-critical platforms in aerospace, public safety, and enterprise SaaS. Trusted as a technical escalation point for high-stakes production systems, and as the go-to for turning new AI capabilities into things teams actually adopt.

Core Skills

AI & Agentic Systems: Claude API, OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, MCP, agentic tooling, prompt/context engineering, RAG, vector search, evals & guardrails
Cloud: AWS, AWS GovCloud, Azure, GCP
Containers: Kubernetes, Rancher, EKS, GKE, AKS, K3s, MicroK8s, Docker, Podman, containerd
IaC & Tooling: Terraform/OpenTofu, Helm, Ansible, CloudFormation, SaltStack, Packer, AWS ACK, Argo CD/Events, GitLab, GitHub
Platform & Identity: Keycloak, Entra ID, Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault
Observability: Datadog, CloudWatch, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, OpenTelemetry, Splunk, SigNoz, ML anomaly detection
Networking & Security: Istio, Tailscale, Fortinet, F5, Cisco, Palo Alto, AWS WAF, Rapid7, Nessus, Nmap, SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, GDPR
OS: Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Alpine), Windows Server (2003–2019, AD, Exchange, O365)
Languages: Bash, Python, Go, Java, Rust, PowerShell, .NET/C#, Node.js/TypeScript, SQL/NoSQL
Protocols: HTTP/S, TLS/SSL, SSH, SFTP, SMTP, SNMP, DNS, LDAP, DHCP, TCP/IP, BGP, VLAN

Professional Experience

DroneSense / Versaterm — Senior Software/DevOps Engineer

Seattle, WA / Austin, TX | Feb 2022 – Present

Lead infrastructure architect for a mission-critical public safety platform serving 3,000+ organizations across 2 continents and 7 countries — acquired by Versaterm for $180M; platform tooling adopted as company-wide engineering standard.

  • Architect and operate multi-region, multi-tenant infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and GCP spanning dozens of accounts; maintain 99.9%+ uptime on emergency-response workloads.
  • Build and ship an AI-powered agentic developer toolkit in Go with an integrated Claude-based agent and CLI, covering the full environment lifecycle from local dev through production — adopted company-wide after the Versaterm acquisition.
  • Build an internal developer platform from the ground up: Keycloak/Entra ID auth, self-service provisioning via OpenTofu and AWS ACK, GitHub/GitLab/Rancher/EKS/Argo integrations, and an AI assistant layer built into the portal.
  • Engineer an AI-powered SQL governance tool with automatic PII masking and expiring, governed data access.
  • Build a secrets management operator integrating Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Azure Key Vault.
  • Embed SAST/SCA/secrets scanning across CI/CD; lead SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST, and GDPR audits for 3 consecutive years — zero blocking findings.
  • Operate OpenSearch + OpenTelemetry observability with ML-based anomaly detection across millions of daily events.
  • Serve as Associate Architect for the org's SDLC platform initiative; run weekly demos/workshops driving org-wide AI and platform adoption.

Base2 Solutions / Belcan (Blue Origin Contract) — Senior DevOps Engineer (Consultant)

Seattle, WA | May 2020 – Feb 2022

Embedded on Blue Origin's SRE team — Human Landing System (HLS), a $3.4B NASA Artemis contract; Belcan later acquired by Cognizant for $1.3B.

  • Primary infrastructure engineer for a classified NASA program across classified/unclassified AWS GovCloud.
  • Delivered production GitLab Enterprise on AWS GovCloud within 60 days — CI/CD source of truth for the HLS org.
  • Built security-first pipeline architecture: image scanning, admission controller registry allow-listing.
  • Migrated self-managed K8s to EKS/Rancher with zero downtime; built avionics simulation infrastructure.
  • Mentored 8+ Blue Origin SRE engineers; automated 15+ processes, cutting toil ~40% within 6 months.
  • Built a self-service API for on-demand classified AWS GovCloud account provisioning.

POP / WordFly — Senior Systems Engineer / Administrator

Seattle, WA | May 2016 – Apr 2020

Lead infrastructure engineer through a growth arc ending in acquisition — platform stability directly cited in due diligence.

  • Built and scaled a Kubernetes platform from scratch; migrated monolith to microservices in under 12 months; cut infrastructure spend 30%+.
  • Delivered CI/CD pipelines moving releases from bi-weekly to on-demand; stood up first end-to-end observability (CloudWatch, Prometheus, ELK, Grafana).
  • Reduced DR RTO from 8+ hours to under 2 hours.
  • Built an early internal developer platform for self-service infra — the foundation the current IDP work builds on.
  • Introduced and led Infrastructure as Code with Terraform across cloud and network device configuration.

iSigma — Network/Systems Engineer

Norcross, GA / Seattle, WA | May 2014 – Mar 2016

Sole engineer for an international energy billing platform serving 10M+ utility customers.

  • Initiated the org's first AWS cloud adoption and GitHub source control; maintained Hadoop cluster with zero data loss.
  • Owned all infrastructure for 10M+ customers; administered Cisco ASA firewalls, VLANs, ACLs, and MS Server environments.
  • Built automated deployment pipelines from source builds through infrastructure deployment.

Classic Home — IT Consultant

Vernon, CA / Atlanta, GA | Jan 2013 – May 2014
  • Ran IT for nationwide trade shows: servers, networks, VPNs.
  • Migrated to Fortinet, cutting costs & improving reliability.

Highlights