About
Jesse Michelsen
Senior DevOps / Platform Engineering Manager. Utah, open to remote.
For the last decade I've led the platform and reliability function for a globally distributed video infrastructure company, through its evolution from VDMS to EdgeCast, Edgio, and Uplynk, as both a technical lead and an engineering manager.
Security and identity sit at the center of how I run platforms: my team owned and operated a self-hosted HashiCorp Vault platform on Kubernetes for years, with zero-trust authentication for CI/CD pipelines and workloads (machine identity without static secrets), least-privilege and RBAC, and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 readiness.
I build teams and systems that stay quiet under pressure: deep observability, disciplined incident response, GitOps delivery, and relentless cost engineering. I lead from close to the work, hands-on with the pipelines, observability configs, and containers my teams rely on, and I grow people, having mentored engineers from intern to senior and staff.
Skills
Secrets & Identity
HashiCorp Vault (self-hosted on Kubernetes, multi-year team ownership), CI/CD & workload authentication, Kubernetes auth, Machine Identity / Workload Access Control, Zero-trust IAM, RBAC, PIM / JIT privilege elevation, SSO Flows
Security & Compliance
SOC 2, ISO 27001, DevSecOps, Secure-by-default Infrastructure, Least-privilege Enforcement, Static Analysis Integration, Security Hardening, Compliance Documentation & Training
Infrastructure & Orchestration
Kubernetes (EKS, GKE, AKS), Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform, CloudFormation, Docker, Service Mesh, Autoscaling, Multi-cloud
CI/CD & Developer Tooling
Pipeline Design & Ownership, Self-service Templates, Ephemeral Environments, GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Screwdriver, Azure DevOps, Release Engineering
Observability & Reliability
Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, fluentbit, Distributed Tracing, SLO/SLI/SLA, Error Budgets, Incident Management, On-call, MTTR, Blameless Postmortems, HA, DR
Cloud & FinOps
AWS (primary), GCP, Azure, Kubecost, Cost Optimization, FinOps Governance, Reserved Instances / Savings Plans, Vendor Negotiations
AI & Automation
Enterprise AI Tooling Evaluation & Rollout (GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q, Kiro), AI Governance & Safety Guardrails, AI Policy Development, LLM-assisted Workflow Automation, Operational Automation, Toil Elimination
Data & Messaging
RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Redis / Valkey, PostgreSQL, MongoDB
Leadership
Engineering Management, Hiring, Coaching & Career Development, OKRs, Roadmap Ownership, Cross-functional Coordination, Technical Strategy, Software Maturity Model
Languages
Python, Django, Flask, PHP, Bash, SQL