Leslie Ault III

Experienced DevOps / SRE Technologist

Experienced DevOps / SRE technologist with over 25 years of experience, specializing in scalable, highly available architecture and management. Currently focused on CI/CD and HA pipeline infrastructure, with a personal emphasis on observability, and automation.

Employment History

DevOps Automation Engineer (Contractor)

Dec 2025 – Present

Federal Reserve System

  • Created ansible playbook to manage VIPs and WIPs on F5 devices.
  • Created ansible playbook to perform node pre-checks including ICMP, Socket, TLS, and mTLS checks.
  • Created python service to display device inventory that auto updates.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

May 2023 – Mar 2025

ShareFile

  • Migrated from Elasticsearch 2.x running on EC2 instances to AWS OpenSearch alongside 2 team members.
  • Created a custom management tool in Python to manage OpenSearch Indexes, Aliases, and ISM policies.
  • Configured New Relic Observability Metrics using Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code.
  • Deployed and configured Backstage.io as a centralized software catalog.
  • Managed Kubernetes deployments utilizing Kustomize and Helm.
  • Created and maintained robust CI/CD pipelines within Jenkins.
  • Managed global cloud resources efficiently using Ansible.
  • Participated actively in Blameless postmortems and authored engineering run-books for incident management.
  • Mentored junior engineers to promote modern SRE best practices.

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Dec 2021 – May 2023

Penn Interactive Ventures (Barstool Sportsbook)

  • Architected and managed deployments across AWS ECS and GCP Kubernetes (GKE) Clusters.
  • Built on-premise Kubernetes clusters using Canonical MaaS.
  • Utilized Google Anthos to orchestrate cloud management of on-premise infrastructure.
  • Created and managed complex ArgoCD ApplicationSets for automated deployments.
  • Orchestrated Kubernetes application lifecycles with Kustomize and Helm.
  • Maintained Jenkins CI/CD pipelines, including dedicated configurations for building iOS and Android applications.
  • Managed AWS CloudFront distributions to seamlessly execute blue/green deployment patterns.
  • Participated in tier-1 on-call rotations and generated incident response run-books.

Senior Engineer, DevOps

Jan 2018 – May 2021

Align Technology

  • Collaborated in a 4-person team to optimize environment setup, reducing new test environment creation timelines from 3 weeks down to 6 hours via a custom Python CLI tool.
  • Provisioned and managed expansive AWS infrastructure using Python and Terraform (EC2, EBS, VPC, Security Groups, RDS, S3, Route53, and EKS).
  • Installed, configured, and optimized the Istio Service Mesh layer.
  • Automated the deployment and lifecycle of HashiCorp Consul and Vault via native APIs and Terraform scripts.
  • Automated WSO2 API Gateway and IAM infrastructure deployments.

DevOps Engineer (Contractor)

Sept 2016 – Jan 2018

Cisco Systems

  • Handled the installation and configuration of RedHat OpenStack Director and core OpenStack Cloud environments.
  • Planned and successfully executed a critical environment upgrade from Puppet 2 to Puppet 4.
  • Designed and implemented a structured Puppet module release management workflow.
  • Managed Jenkins-as-a-Service, automating deployments for CloudBees Jenkins and automated plugin patching.
  • Developed a custom REST API to manage HAProxy backend pools, enabling zero-downtime server patching workflows.
  • Developed automated workflows interfacing with Nagios APIs to dynamically configure maintenance windows.
  • Configured jFrog Artifactory infrastructure to native Git Large File Support (LFS).
  • Automated infrastructure state enforcement with Ansible and managed multi-tenant environments with Rancher.
  • Deployed and tuned centralized logging clusters utilizing Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and logspout.

Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Feb 2014 – Sept 2016

Jewelry Television

  • Rebuilt the core Unix Engineering Team from a single engineer to a fully collaborative staff of 5.
  • Integrated legacy Unix/Linux authentication mechanics natively into Microsoft Active Directory.
  • Administered mission-critical NetApp and Oracle ZFS high-performance Storage Servers.
  • Supported multiple distributed agile scrum teams by engineering dependable Jenkins CI/CD pipelines.
  • Executed day-to-day Unix/Linux systems administration (RedHat/CentOS) strictly adhering to tight PCI-DSS compliance landscapes.
  • Introduced automated configuration state enforcement utilizing Puppet.
  • Automated bare-metal and virtual OS installations using RedHat Spacewalk and Kickstart.

Education

ITT Technical Institute

Knoxville, TN

Bachelor of Applied Science — Electronics Engineering Technology

ITT Technical Institute

Knoxville, TN

Associate of Applied Science — Electronics Engineering Technology

Professional Training

Linux Foundation

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

In Progress

Linux Foundation

Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate

Certificate #LF-8i9j5fgmdd

VMware

VMware Certified Professional

Certificate #34565

RedHat

Red Hat Certified Engineer

Certificate #110-625-324

RedHat

Red Hat Certified System Administrator

Certificate #110-625-324