Joe Rogers

About

I’m a Site Reliability Engineer and hands-on builder with 20+ years in scalable infrastructure and AWS automation. I specialize in modernizing platforms with Kubernetes (EKS and on-prem), ECS/Fargate, IaC (Terraform/Ansible), and AI-driven tools—empowering engineering teams to deliver faster, safer, and smarter. While I thrive as a high-impact individual contributor—building, automating, and running production systems—I also enjoy enabling others through training, technical workshops, and book clubs that raise the whole team’s skillset.

Recent Projects

• AI Slack Bot using OpenAI or Gemini
• Free Account AWS InfraLow-Cost AWS Dev & Prod Playground (Terraform)

Recent Career Highlights

• Containerized 50+ services, migrating from EC2 to ECS/Fargate and prototyping workloads on EKS, cutting infra/tooling costs by >50%.
• Reduced new app delivery time by 86%—from 14 days to 2—by building reusable CI/CD pipelines, enabling shift-left testing, and launching GitLab Cloud Ultimate with AI-assisted code review tools.
• Built Kubernetes training labs and Terraform/Atlantis sandboxes, mentoring engineers in EKS, kubectl/k9s, and containerization practices.
• Migrated from on-prem GitLab to GitLab Cloud Ultimate, enabling nightly secrets/code scans, GitLab DUO AI analysis, and eliminating monthly upgrade toil.
• Championed AWS cost optimization, keeping infra consistently under budget by implementing forecasting, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and application right-sizing strategies.
• Automated autoscaling GitLab Runners on EC2 with Terraform, delivering on-demand 4x capacity at 10x lower cost than static runners.
• Led a company-wide IaC transformation, migrating legacy deployments to Terraform and GitOps workflows, eliminating configuration drift and increasing platform reliability and repeatability.
• Developed an internal Python + Bedrock AI Slackbot, enabling natural-language infrastructure queries and creating a bridge between LLMs and real-time AWS platform intelligence.