James Flattery

Senior Platform Engineer

US Navy veteran building large-scale infrastructure as code on AWS. Terraform platform architecture, CI/CD automation, and cloud reliability across multi-environment AWS estates.

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Summary

US Navy veteran and platform engineer with a decade spanning defense systems administration, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure. Architect of a three-layer modular Terraform platform (Core, Stack, Deploy) spanning 70+ repositories across AWS environments. Security-minded by background and instinct, with a bias toward simple, reusable, single-source solutions: reducing duplication and attack surface so infrastructure is easier to secure, reason about, and maintain.

Experience

Senior Automation & Process Improvement Manager — Maryland Benefits (DoIT)
May 2025 – Jun 2026
Remote · Platform Engineering Lead, Enterprise Terraform (ETER)
  • Led the Automation & QA team owning the Enterprise Terraform platform, a three-layer modular IaC ecosystem (Core, Stack, Deploy) spanning 70+ repositories across AWS environments.
  • Transformed a single-purpose chatbot stack into a generic, reusable IaC framework on Amazon Bedrock, OpenSearch Serverless RAG, and AWS Lex, enabling rapid provisioning of AI-powered chatbots across multiple use cases.
  • Re-architected the Jenkins shared pipeline library, consolidating duplicated per-module pipelines into a single base pipeline with centralized tooling, static analysis, automated versioning, and fleet-wide validation.
  • Diagnosed and resolved a production-blocking pipeline failure, reducing a critical method by 26% to clear a JVM bytecode limit while preserving all stage behavior, restoring every job using the shared library.
  • Led a disaster recovery deployment with a contractual 4-hour RTO and 15-minute RPO using a Warm Standby model, and eliminated 67 destructive resource replacements via targeted state migration with zero downtime.
  • Designed a grandfather-clause passthrough pattern preventing destructive recreation during major module upgrades, and decomposed a monolithic VPC into eight single-responsibility modules.
  • Built fleet management and audit tooling against the Bitbucket REST API to detect and remediate configuration drift across the module fleet; integrated security scanning (Trivy, TFSec, Gitleaks, TFLint).
  • Provisioned observability infrastructure (CloudWatch alarms, log groups, metrics, X-Ray) as codified Terraform modules; coordinated weekly technical syncs with HashiCorp vendor engineers.
Senior Systems Analyst — GovSec LLC (contractor at Maryland Benefits)
Nov 2022 – May 2025
Remote · Continuous engagement on the same program, later converted to direct state employment
  • Drove early infrastructure-as-code adoption, developing a custom Docker image with Terraform and Jenkins to replace outdated static images and remediate associated security risks.
  • Led a Salesforce-based software procurement application that improved license inventory management and eliminated outages caused by expiring licenses.
  • Directed consolidation of fragmented infrastructure documentation into a centralized platform with approval workflows, and operationalized a formal change and release management framework.
  • Contributed to the launch of the Maryland Benefits One Application, streamlining access to benefits services for hundreds of thousands of residents.
Cyber Security Engineer — Leidos
Aug 2017 – Mar 2018
Reston, VA
  • Conducted security architecture reviews, compliance assessments, and gap analyses aligned with NIST SP 800-53, FedRAMP, and healthcare regulatory requirements.
  • Led cross-functional teams designing and implementing security architectures, driving identified gaps to remediation.
Systems Administrator — Leidos
Aug 2016 – Aug 2017
Herndon, VA · GeoAxis enterprise SSO / identity platform
  • Administered Oracle identity and access management infrastructure in AWS GovCloud supporting 24/7 operations for a federal enterprise SSO platform.
  • Monitored system health with Zabbix, SoapUI, and Linux tooling, and managed the full incident lifecycle through BMC Remedy ITSM.

Technical Skills

Infrastructure as Code: Terraform (modular Core/Stack/Deploy architecture), HCL, Terraform Enterprise, grandfather-clause migration patterns
AWS: VPC, IAM, RDS, Aurora, DocumentDB, S3, KMS, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, Bedrock, OpenSearch, Lex, ECS
CI/CD & Automation: Jenkins administration, Shared Library, Jenkinsfile, Groovy, Ansible, Nexus, Docker, pre-commit frameworks
Quality & Security: Trivy, TFSec, TFLint, Gitleaks, four-phase peer review methodology, least-privilege access governance
Languages & Tooling: Python, Bash, Groovy, HCL, Git/Bitbucket, WSL 2, Jira, Google Workspace
AI-Assisted Development: Claude, Gemini, Amazon Bedrock RAG workflows

Education

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science — George Mason University, Fairfax, VA · Graduated with Honors (2021)

Certifications

CompTIA CySA+ (Cybersecurity Analyst)