Matt Friesen

I analyzed resource usage and cost across AWS, GCP, Datadog, and GitHub at the organizational level, then right-sized and eliminated waste. This cut AWS spend by over 20%, about $100K per month, before counting any Savings Plan commitments. I also feed that usage data into capacity planning decisions.

I led the move from EC2-hosted services to Kubernetes, with ArgoCD handling GitOps deployments and GitHub Actions replacing CodeDeploy. I also set the organization's CI/CD strategy and standards so every team's pipelines are consistent, secure, and reliable instead of each team reinventing its own.

I rolled out LiteLLM as the organization's shared gateway to LLM providers, and I established standardized skills repositories and AI usage standards across engineering, so teams build on common, governed tooling instead of one-off setups.

Rather than staying in a single lane as an infrastructure, DevOps, backend, or frontend engineer, I work at the full-stack level and deliver vertical slices end to end: frontend, backend, CI, and the infrastructure underneath. Seeing the whole path is what let me improve local development and streamline onboarding, so new engineers get productive sooner and day-to-day work has less friction.

I defined the SLO/SLI framework that product teams adopted and now use to make tradeoff decisions, along with the incident response protocols, on-call standards, and operational runbooks behind it. I partner with product engineering early in design so reliability is built in from the start instead of retrofitted after launch.

I instrumented distributed tracing and closed the visibility gaps that slowed down diagnosis of production issues. I rebuilt alerting so it catches real problems without paging people for noise, and I keep tuning the signal-to-noise ratio as the platform changes.

I design and evolve Topstep's cloud infrastructure across AWS and GCP, balancing reliability, security, scalability, and cost efficiency. I set the infrastructure-as-code strategy so every AWS account is provisioned the same way with Terraform, which makes environments consistent, repeatable, and reviewable, and I inform capacity planning for infrastructure and platform services.

I lead incident response and run blameless post-mortems that turn outages into systemic improvements. I established and keep refining incident classification, escalation paths, and communication protocols, and I set documentation standards for infrastructure architecture, operational procedures, and platform decision records.

Developed and implemented the policies and procedures to achieve SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliance, and built security best practices for AWS services into the platform for strong data protection. Automated most of the ongoing compliance work with Strike Graph, significantly reducing manual effort.

Led two CI/CD migrations, first from CircleCI to GitHub Actions and then to GitLab CI. Both succeeded, improved developer experience, and cut deployment time by 40%.

Rebuilt the AWS infrastructure as code with Terraform, and built a robust delivery pipeline on GitHub Actions, AWS CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline.

Designed and implemented region redundancy and centralized authentication for the platform.

Designed a shorter-lived secrets lifecycle with more tightly scoped permissions and secrets injected at runtime.

Designed, wrote, tested, and deployed microservices in Kotlin.

Implemented HAProxy backed by Consul for dynamic routing to microservices (blue/green, percentage-based, and geo). This enabled zero-downtime deployments and fully unlocked CI/CD.

Led the architectural strategy and decision-making behind a successful product modernization, turning a monolithic system into a scalable, efficient microservices architecture.

Established and maintained the security compliance protocols for PCI-DSS and SOC-certified systems.

Implemented Vault for secrets management, authentication, and a certificate authority for the microservices.

Implemented Consul for service discovery. This reduced network latency across geographic locations, added fault tolerance, and gave services a consistent configuration store.

Moved new and existing infrastructure to code with Ansible, eliminating one-off configuration issues and long-lived legacy servers.

Built the program dev teams went through to opt in to the fully automated continuous deployment pipeline.

Built a customer management database that resolved billing discrepancies in a pay-for-use model, generating an additional $500,000 in annual revenue. The same database made Microsoft SPLA licensing reports more accurate, saving $120,000 per year.

Implemented Datadog monitoring across AWS, GCP, and two private datacenters. This made operations proactive, improved visibility, and reduced downtime.

Worked with dev, QA, and product teams to develop the architecture, delivery methods, and deployment pipelines for the release.

Used the CMDB to report SPLA licensing more accurately, saving the department $120,000 per year.

Developed an automation framework of PowerShell deployment packages, reusable scripts, and scheduled jobs covering group policies, API calls, SQL tasks, migrations, software upgrades, and maintenance, which system admins and support reused in their workflows. Also implemented infrastructure as code with PowerShell DSC.

Built dashboards, budgets, and alerts with CloudWatch, Stackdriver, Google Data Studio, and BigQuery, giving executives insight into usage for resource allocation and cost optimization.

Handled backups, troubleshooting, maintenance jobs, and performance tuning.

Awarded by upper management for going beyond the job description and for excellence in the workplace. Also provided tier-3 support for clients when needed.

Moved on-premises servers, Active Directory, and email to Azure and Office 365.

Specced new servers for clients and advised on system architecture. More than half of all work was billable, client-facing work.

Administered Microsoft SQL Server (2000 through 2014) and wrote reports.

Managed Active Directory, web servers, DNS, DHCP, and the firewall. Administered SharePoint 2007, 2010, 2013, and SharePoint Online, and set up virtual environments for testing software implementations.

Won the 2011 USL championship, became Kitsap's all-time leading goal scorer, and was named to the 2012 USL Best XI.