Daniel Thomas

Senior Platform Engineer with 12+ years of experience delivering reliable self-service infrastructure for developer and ML-serving platforms. Brings hands-on strength in Kubernetes, GCP, and cloud-native operations, with a track record of improving deployment workflows, production reliability, and platform usability through automation, observability, and close partnership with internal engineering teams.

Senior Platform Engineer - Baseten - San Francisco, California

(2022-12 - 2026-09)

• Designed and evolved a highly available Kubernetes platform on GCP for model-serving workloads, enabling repeatable deployment and operation of cloud-native services across shared infrastructure.
• Built infrastructure automation in Terraform and Python to provision GCP environments, standardize service dependencies, and reduce manual configuration drift.
• Developed internal API services and deployment tooling for model deployment workflows, giving product and ML teams clearer paths to publish and operate inference services.
• Implemented reusable Helm deployment patterns and Kubernetes resource policies for microservices, improving consistency across application environments.
• Automated delivery workflows through GitHub Actions and ArgoCD, connecting code changes to controlled GitOps-based deployments for platform and application services.
• Strengthened GPU-backed ML infrastructure by defining container runtime, scheduling, and capacity patterns appropriate for production inference workloads.
• Established production telemetry with Prometheus and Grafana, creating actionable dashboards and alerting for cluster capacity, service health, and model-serving operations.
• Hardened platform access through IAM and secrets management practices, applying least-privilege controls to cloud resources and deployment automation.
• Explored operational patterns for AI-enabled platform workflows while partnering with engineering teams to apply MLOps practices to model lifecycle needs.
• Participated in Agile planning and on-call incident response, translating internal customer requirements into prioritized platform improvements and sharing operational knowledge with peers.

Senior DevOps Engineer - University of Tennessee - Knoxville, Tennessee

(2017-05 - 2022-12)

• Led delivery of cloud and on-premises Kubernetes infrastructure, AWS services, and CI/CD capabilities supporting university application and research teams.
• Automated environment provisioning through Terraform and Ansible, improving repeatability for Linux-based application infrastructure and reducing configuration variance.
• Built and maintained Jenkins pipelines for application build, test, and deployment workflows across internal services.
• Containerized application workloads with Docker and deployed them through Helm-managed Kubernetes configurations to standardize runtime operations.
• Administered Linux systems and shell automation for service maintenance, patching, scheduled jobs, and operational troubleshooting.
• Supported data-backed application services using PostgreSQL and Redis, coordinating reliable configuration, backup, and access practices.
• Implemented monitoring dashboards and alerting with Prometheus and Grafana, improving visibility into infrastructure health and service performance.
• Collaborated in Agile/Scrum delivery cycles with application and research stakeholders, using automation and AI/ML platform concepts to support evolving compute and data-pipeline needs.

Application Developer - Roane State Community College - Harriman, Tennessee

(2014-01 - 2017-05)

• Developed and maintained internal web application services using REST APIs and PostgreSQL to support college operational workflows.
• Built backend integrations in Python and shell scripts, automating routine data exchange and administrative processing tasks.
• Improved application deployment consistency by introducing Git-based release practices and Linux environment configuration standards.
• Supported database reliability through PostgreSQL query maintenance, backup coordination, and troubleshooting of application data issues.
• Partnered with campus stakeholders to gather requirements, test releases, and resolve production issues across student- and staff-facing systems.

Bachelor of Science - Computer Science - University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2009-08 - 2013-05)