Nicholas Jerdes

Technical operations and infrastructure engineer with 20+ years supporting mission-critical, customer-facing Linux platforms across distributed 24x7 environments. Owns operational work from deployment and upgrades through monitoring, incident response, root-cause analysis, and Engineering escalation.

Built

Bash, AWK, and Tcl/Expect tooling for fleet-wide prechecks, configuration changes, validation, metrics collection, and diagnostics, reducing repetitive manual effort by approximately 80%. Strong record of collaborating directly with clients and software engineers to resolve difficult cross-layer problems. Hands-on Docker and Azure Bastion experience, with active development in Terraform, Ansible, AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and Python fundamentals.

Staff VOD Technical Support Engineer at Vistance Networks / Aurora Networks / CommScope / ARRIS / C-COR (2014-06 – 2026-05)

Staff VOD Technical Support Engineer with earlier progressive roles: Senior VOD Technical Support Engineer; VOD Technical Support Engineer II; VOD Technical Support Engineer (Oct 2005 - Jun 2014). Continuous employment: Oct 2005 - May 2026

• Supported and troubleshot hundreds of physical and virtual servers across dozens of customer sites in globally distributed, 24x7 video-delivery and advertising environments; later monitoring scope reached approximately 600 systems.
• Owned critical incident triage and service restoration across Linux, IP networking, storage, server hardware, Oracle data, and application layers; ran technical bridges, coordinated clients and Engineering, preserved evidence, and drove root-cause follow-through.
• Facilitated and executed multi-site platform deployments and upgrades with zero customer downtime through readiness reviews, scripted prechecks, maintenance-window coordination, validation, rollback planning, and post-change monitoring.
• Modernized legacy RHEL and Oracle Linux server estates to Oracle Linux 9.x, resolving package, service, network, storage, BIOS, remote-installation, and application compatibility issues through deployment and verification.
• Developed and maintained Bash, AWK, and Tcl/Expect automation for cluster-wide prechecks, Oracle verification, configuration changes, upgrade preparation, diagnostics, and log/core collection, reducing repetitive manual effort by approximately 80%.
• Built a platform- and cluster-aware Engineering escalation utility that collected logs, performance data, database results, application snapshots, core dumps, and matching binaries, then validated and packaged evidence for consistent handoff.
• Expanded a basic interface-ping script into a configuration-driven validation tool that parsed XML, identified actual source interfaces and cluster nodes, tested downstream paths, and produced PASS/FAIL/WARN/SKIP summaries with optional CSV reporting.
• Administered and improved Nagios monitoring, supported its migration across data centers, analyzed availability and performance signals, and led recurring reviews to close coverage gaps and reduce noisy or incomplete alerting.
• Investigated under-performing and intermittent infrastructure by correlating system metrics, logs, network paths, Oracle results, hardware health, recent changes, and application behavior until a defensible cause or next action was identified.
• Automated remote hardware and operating-system deployment work with IPMI/ipmitool and Samba-backed virtual media, accelerating provisioning, upgrade, and recovery tasks across dispersed systems.
• Implemented an Azure Bastion thin-client access workflow for controlled remote administration and supported VMware-based environments, VM deployment, and Linux application stacks.
• Served as the support team's Engineering liaison and led recurring escalation and monitoring-improvement reviews across Support, Engineering, Operations, Product, clients, and customer stakeholders.
• Maintained detailed operational documentation including technical procedures, runbooks, change and recovery plans, customer-facing knowledge articles, RCA reports, training references, and weekly metrics.

Owner / IT Support at Tsunami Tech Services, LLC (2020-01 – Present)

• Provide practical small-office IT support including device inventory, printers, user login and access issues, Windows workstation troubleshooting, and laptop battery and display replacement.

Technical Support - Broadband, Systems & Creative Software at Stream International (1999-01 – 2005-12)

• Progressed through remote technical support and escalation work for DSL, broadband, Cisco routers, MSN services, Dell systems, and Adobe applications; diagnosed network, operating-system, hardware, configuration, and software issues.

Coursework in Computer Science – University of Oregon (1992 – 1994)

Diploma – Eagle Point High School 1991