Cliff Erson

Senior DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer with 10+ years of experience designing, securing, and scaling mission-critical infrastructure across enterprise retail, gaming, healthcare, and high-traffic internet platforms. Specialized in cloud modernization, Kubernetes orchestration, infrastructure automation, CI/CD security, and hybrid cloud transformations using modern platforms including AWS, Azure, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Docker, and Kubernetes. Proven record of building resilient infrastructure systems that improved deployment speed by 70%, reduced downtime by 45%, and optimized operational costs by 30% across global-scale environments.

Strong history of driving business-critical transformation by aligning infrastructure strategy, security compliance, and automation to accelerate product delivery and improve customer experience.

Senior Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer at Trader Joe's (2025-10 – Present)

• Led the Enterprise Cloud ERP & Supply Chain Modernization Platform, designing Azure-based infrastructure with Terraform, reducing ERP deployment lead times by 42% while improving supply chain system uptime by 28%.
• Built secure CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Docker, and Prisma Cloud, increasing release frequency by 38% and reducing security validation time by 55%.
• Integrated Azure Key Vault into deployment workflows, improving secret rotation efficiency by 65% and eliminating manual credential exposure risks.
• Automated infrastructure provisioning for vendor onboarding APIs supporting Microsoft Dynamics 365 and legacy SAP ECC6, reducing integration errors by 31%.
• Implemented policy-as-code cloud compliance controls, improving audit readiness by 40% and reducing cloud misconfiguration incidents by 27%.

Lead Platform & Infrastructure Engineer at Data SIVS (2024-01 – 2025-09)

• Architected the Privacy-First Local Validation Engine & Client Integration Pipeline, building secure WebAssembly delivery pipelines using GitHub Actions and AWS CloudFront, improving artifact delivery reliability by 34%.
• Designed zero-trust CDN deployment architecture with signed asset validation, reducing unauthorized artifact exposure by 48%.
• Built automated secure Wasm build pipelines with checksum validation and code signing, improving release integrity verification by 61%.
• Optimized client-side processing deployment infrastructure using Docker and Node.js, reducing onboarding setup times by 29%.
• Improved delivery observability and package integrity monitoring, decreasing failed production releases by 26%.

Senior DevSecOps Architect at Riot Games (2020-04 – 2024-01)

• Led the Global Game Server Platform (Amazon EKS Migration), migrating Riot's live services from Mesosphere into Amazon EKS, reducing infrastructure costs by 22% and improving deployment consistency by 41%.
• Built reusable Terraform modules for multi-region Kubernetes deployments, cutting environment provisioning times by 58%.
• Integrated HashiCorp Vault for dynamic secret injection across thousands of services, reducing credential management risks by 63%.
• Standardized container image scanning pipelines using Jenkins and Buildkite, reducing critical image vulnerabilities by 47%.
• Improved cluster autoscaling strategies using Prometheus and Grafana, increasing resource efficiency by 33%.

Senior DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Riot Games (2016-01 – 2020-03)

• Built the Riot Games API & Global Edge Platform, deploying scalable API gateways using Netflix Zuul, improving API response latency by 19%.
• Automated regional infrastructure rollouts using Ansible and Terraform, reducing market launch times by 65%.
• Migrated physical workloads into AWS cloud environments, improving infrastructure scalability by 37%.
• Developed infrastructure monitoring using ELK Stack, reducing incident detection times by 44%.
• Implemented Docker-based service packaging for API workloads, improving deployment consistency by 32%.

Infrastructure Operations Engineer at Riot Games (2010-10 – 2015-12)

• Led the International League of Legends Deployment & Audit Pipeline, reducing China deployment time from 48 hours to 4 hours using Chef and custom automation.
• Built large-scale bare-metal deployment automation across global regions, improving deployment repeatability by 53%.
• Managed Riot's global Ejabberd chat infrastructure supporting millions of concurrent players, improving service uptime by 21%.
• Developed Tencent-compliant deployment integrations, improving CCP audit compliance efficiency by 46%.
• Reduced global downtime impact by 38% through optimized deployment orchestration and phased cutovers.

Systems Engineer at Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (2006-09 – 2009-11)

• Built the HIPAA-Compliant EHR & Local Intranet Mesh, migrating Oracle healthcare systems to Red Hat infrastructure, improving processing efficiency by 35%.
• Designed HIPAA-compliant backup and disaster recovery systems, reducing restore times by 49%.
• Engineered Oracle RAC workload optimization for HL7 intake systems, reducing daily processing backlog by 57%.
• Implemented secure IDS and firewall segmentation, improving threat visibility by 39%.
• Built standardized automated server deployment pipelines, reducing provisioning time by 51%.

NetBackup Engineer (Consultant) at IBM Global Services (2006 – 2007)

• Led the Enterprise Backup Audit & Recovery Optimization Initiative, improving backup coverage across multi-datacenter environments by 36%.
• Automated Veritas NetBackup policy improvements, reducing failed backup jobs by 24%.
• Improved enterprise recovery readiness by redesigning large database backup workflows, reducing restore delays by 29%.

Systems Engineer at Los Angeles Times (2004 – 2005)

• Built the Newspaper Print Cluster Modernization Project, migrating Solaris workloads into Linux clusters, improving print system stability by 31%.
• Implemented centralized SAN storage consolidation, reducing storage fragmentation by 43%.
• Designed automated Kickstart deployment systems, reducing server setup time by 58%.

Senior Network Control Analyst / System Administrator at The Walt Disney Company (2002 – 2004)

• Built the Corporate Intrusion Detection Correlation Platform, processing over 1M+ security events daily, improving incident response speed by 41%.
• Implemented global host IDS deployment across multi-OS systems, increasing infrastructure visibility by 33%.
• Built secure audit log retention systems for compliance, reducing audit retrieval times by 47%.

Site Manager / System Administrator at AboveNet (2000 – 2001)

• Designed the Global Inventory Tracking Infrastructure Platform for international retail operations, improving cross-region application availability by 26%.
• Automated Veritas cluster resource deployment, reducing rollout time by 37%.
• Built Oracle + SAN infrastructure for globally load-balanced operations, improving failover efficiency by 29%.

Software Engineer II at Walt Disney Internet Group (2000 – 2000)

• Improved the Go.com Travel Commerce Platform, increasing daily transactions from under 100 to over 4,500 through performance optimization.
• Tuned Java/WebSphere queuing and TCP stack configurations, improving concurrency capacity by 72%.

System Administrator at Homepage.com / XO Communications / Global Micro Solutions (1998 – 2000)

• Managed Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD infrastructure supporting web hosting, ISP operations, and data center migrations, improving system uptime by 18–24%.
• Automated provisioning and service configurations across Apache, DNS, Sendmail, and NFS systems, reducing manual admin tasks by 33%.
• Supported multi-datacenter migration projects and operational scaling initiatives, improving deployment consistency by 27%.