Aaron Crate

Professional Profile

• DevSecOps and cloud infrastructure engineer who has built and maintained CI/CD pipelines and AWS environments, supporting Theater Battle Management Core Systems (TBMCS 2.0), U.S. Marine Corps and Navy’s air operations command-and-control system.
• Experienced with delivering classified military software across cloud, on-premises and field-deployed environments.
• Hands-on with AWS (EC2, EKS, IAM, VPC, Route 53, ACM), Terraform and Ansible infrastructure as code, self-hosted GitLab CI/CD, Docker/Podman, and Kubernetes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Focus on impact across engineering and business needs, experience with planning and delivering technical projects for Helena Agri-Enterprises LLC, a national agribusiness with more than 6,000 employees and 450 locations.
• Trusted by development, infrastructure, and mission teams as a go-to person for reliable and repeatable system delivery.
• Lifetime ACM and SIGSOFT special interest group member with multiple CompTIA industry certifications.
• Built and maintains clustered hypervisor homelab environment that hosts live workloads and services for users across the U.S., connecting cloud and local resources to serve as a unified personal datacenter for experimental use.

Professional Achievements

• Built and maintained self-hosted GitLab instance along with CI/CD pipelines serving more than 30 engineers, delivering weekly builds for evaluation by Navy and USMC.
• Cut integration and backend test time from six hours to 15 minutes by containerizing test suites and utilizing auto-scaled infrastructure for parallel workloads.
• Standardized AWS environments for classified projects using Terraform and Ansible, taking advantage of automated deployment and version control to mitigate risk of security regression or unexpected downtime.
• Wrote Python-based tools for deployment and configuration of military software on air-gapped endpoints, with customized operating system (RHEL) and Kubernetes-based application stack for security, reliability and ease of use by field personnel.
• Wrote documentation, training materials, and technical analyses for use by internal engineering teams and high-level decision makers.
• Created and shipped hardened container images with proprietary executables with package including SBOM and up-to-date analysis for CVE.
• Created mirrored scripted configuration for Linux and Windows (bash/batch) to reduce discrepancies between development environments while writing software with high security and reliability requirements.

Technical Skills

• Linux (RHEL, Debian/Ubuntu, Alpine/BusyBox, Arch)
• Programming/Scripting (Python, Bash, C#, Rust)
• DevSecOps, CI/CD Automation & Administration
• Virtualization (Proxmox, VMware, VirtualBox)
• Containerization (Docker, Podman, Kubernetes)
• Cloud Infrastructure (AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure)
• Network Infrastructure (Firewall, Routing/VLAN, Reverse Proxy/Ingress)
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)
• Resource Monitoring (e.g. Prometheus/Grafana)
• Security (TLS, WireGuard, OpenVPN, Software/Infrastructure Vulnerability Analysis)

Certifications

• CompTIA A+
• CompTIA Project+
• CompTIA Linux+
• CompTIA Network+
• CompTIA CIOS, CNNP, CSSP
• Water Treatment Operator Grade II (Arizona, California)

Professional Experience

CommIT Enterprises, Inc.

Software Engineer (DevSecOps), Theater Battle Management Core Systems

May 2025 – August 2026

Contributed to the development of next-generation software capabilities supporting airspace management, Air Tasking Order planning and approval, mission execution, and theater-level command and control.

• Built and maintained AWS-hosted GitLab instance and CI/CD pipeline workloads.
• Built, containerized, and configured auto-scaling integration-testing processes, improving reliability and reducing developer wait times by 90%.
• Designed and administered AWS infrastructure, including EC2, EBS/S3, Auto Scaling Groups, EKS, IAM, Lifecycle Manager, certificates (ACM), Route 53, secure VPN endpoints, VPC networking, and security groups.
• Provisioned and managed repeatable cloud infrastructure using Terraform and Ansible, deployed via GitLab pipeline.
• Developed Python-based automation for configuring Kubernetes deployments within Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments.
• Developed and supported secure deployment and infrastructure requirements for classified military software applications.
• Collaborated across software development, DevOps, infrastructure, and mission-focused teams to support reliable system and package delivery.

Helena Agri-Enterprises, LLC

Technical Project Manager, Solutions Delivery

July 2023 – April 2025

Supported the planning and implementation of technology initiatives by connecting business requirements, operational needs, and technical resources. Guided projects from initial discovery through delivery while helping stakeholders evaluate, adopt, and maintain new technologies.

• Planned, initiated, executed, and delivered IT projects supporting infrastructure and business needs.
• Coordinated stakeholder meetings and facilitated discussions regarding project requirements, challenges, and technical decisions.
• Documented objectives, infrastructure configurations, procedures, technical challenges, and recommended workarounds.
• Assisted with the design, deployment, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of new technologies and assets.
• Developed training materials and technical documentation for support personnel.
• Facilitated communication among management, technical teams, and business users.
• Evaluated technical options and provided recommendations to support informed decision-making.

Education

University of Arizona

BFA Studio Art, Photography (Incomplete)

August 2009 – April 2014

San Bernardino Valley College

AAS Water Treatment Chemistry

August 2015 – May 2017

Independent Technical Project Experience

Self-hosted Software, Infrastructure & Virtualization Homelab

Designed, built, and continuously maintains an advanced Linux-based home datacenter that serves as a hosting platform and sandbox for evaluating new and legacy infrastructure technologies, strengthening technical skills, and testing secure system configurations.

• Maintains a home-built five-node clustered hypervisor environment (Proxmox) supporting containerized workloads and virtual machines for many users across the United States.
• Custom hardware for WAN gateway running OPNsense (firewall, routing and traffic shaping, VPN, certificate and IP address management, filtered/recursive DNS-over-TLS).
• AI servers hosting popular mid-sized local inference models including Gemma4, Phi4, Mistral, Qwen 3.6, DeepSeek, Granite and others.
• Kubernetes cluster running distributed protein-folding workload (Folding@home), auto-scaled to accommodate resource demand.
• Media server, file servers, remote workstation, and local certificate authority, with network and security analysis running on periodic intervals (Wazuh).
• Configured hardware pass-through and advanced virtualization capabilities to support specialized workloads (LLM inference, media transcoding, virtual workstation).
• Hardware monitoring through Prometheus/Grafana and Netdata, automated email alerts for unusual activity, resource usage, or power interruption (via network-connected UPS).
• Implemented automated on- and off-site (3-2-1) backups & disaster recovery procedures.
• Configured reverse-proxy SNI routing, ingress, containerized workstation and VPN-based remote administration, with secure external access from any endpoint.
• Manages network services, storage, system availability, upgrades, and ongoing CVE patching & performance optimization.