$ whoami

Robert Puffe

DevOps Lead · AWS · Terraform · CI/CD

Remote (US) · based in Jamestown, ND

I've spent nine years at the same company, growing from IT support into DevOps, long enough to learn that whatever I build, I will be the one maintaining it. I work on the pipelines, environments, and automation that help our dev teams ship, and I try to automate anything I catch myself doing twice.

9+ yrs in tech 5 yrs hands-on AWS 3 promotions
headshot.jpg
Robert Puffe

## experience

DevOps Lead

Eldermark Mar 2024 – Present · promoted from DevOps Engineer, Apr 2026

Platform and infrastructure steward for Eldermark's AWS environments, leading DevOps work that usually splits across release engineering, infrastructure architecture, and platform engineering. A lot of the job is connecting dots: catching risky infrastructure and deployment changes before they become operational issues, and keeping releases moving across teams while making the platform more self-service, more secure, and less reactive.

  • Own AWS infrastructure for two SaaS products (8 accounts spanning 10 environments) and help support two additional product platforms
  • Redesigned the CI/CD pipeline architecture and rebuilt hand-created pipelines as reusable Terraform modules, cutting roughly 20 minutes of downtime from every production deployment
  • Build and maintain 20+ pipelines with GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, and Terraform, including staging promotion flows and automated builds for shared ECR base images
  • Replaced a manual, multi-system environment refresh process with a push-button CodePipeline, saving hours of work per refresh and removing human error from production database restores
  • Built a deployment tracking system on Lambda and CodePipeline events that notifies Teams and updates Jira automatically, so nobody has to chase release status
  • Drove the company's initial adoption of AI development tools, from early proofs of concept to everyday use that improves development efficiency and code quality
  • Respond to production infrastructure issues and review changes early in the SDLC to catch architecture and deployment risks before they reach an environment
  • Implement infrastructure and container security practices that meet compliance and reliability requirements
  • Collaborate with leadership on company-wide initiatives including Jira migrations, security audits, and penetration-test remediation

System Administrator

Eldermark May 2021 – Mar 2024

End-to-end administration of AWS and on-premise infrastructure supporting multiple internal and customer-facing products.

  • Managed DevOps responsibilities, overseeing environment and pipeline management
  • Led successful transition of DevOps team to in-house, resulting in improved efficiency and cost savings
  • Migrated workloads to AWS using EC2, S3, Transfer Family, and Terraform
  • Collaborated closely with development and QA teams to establish and maintain environments
  • Consolidated multiple Office 365 and Google Workspace environments into a single shared Office 365 tenant

IT Specialist

Eldermark Sep 2016 – May 2021
  • Led the project to transition teams to remote work during the pandemic, ensuring uninterrupted productivity
  • Managed Office 365 including user provisioning, licensing, and security
  • Planned and executed the rollout of Microsoft Teams
  • Maintained Dynamics 365 instance including customizations and reporting
  • Managed Windows Server and network infrastructure in datacenters, offices, and cloud environments
  • Maintained customer databases including backups and routine management tasks

Earlier Experience

2012 – 2016
  • Central Business Systems · Document Management Specialist, Computer Repair Technician
  • RadioShack · Store Manager
  • Built foundation in technical troubleshooting, small business IT consulting, and team leadership

## skills

AWS Compute & Containers

ECS EC2 Lambda Docker AWS Copilot Fargate

AWS Data & Storage

RDS Aurora PostgreSQL DynamoDB S3 Transfer Family

AWS Networking & Security

VPC Route 53 CloudFront API Gateway Cognito IAM ACM Secrets Manager

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform Terraform Cloud CloudFormation AWS Copilot CLI

CI/CD Pipelines

GitHub Actions AWS CodePipeline AWS CodeBuild Git GitHub

Observability & Monitoring

CloudWatch CloudWatch Alarms Elastic APM SNS Notifications Log Monitoring

Scripting & Automation

Python Boto3 Bash PowerShell Liquibase

Systems & Platforms

Linux Windows Server Jira Office 365 LaunchDarkly

## how this site works

This page is its own portfolio piece: my take on the Cloud Resume Challenge. It's static HTML on S3 served through CloudFront. The visitor counter below is a live call to API Gateway, handled by a Lambda function that increments a count in DynamoDB. All of the infrastructure is defined in CloudFormation, and every push to main kicks off CodePipeline to rebuild and redeploy, including the change you're reading right now. It's not a one-off, either: I run a couple of other sites on this same pattern.

AWS · defined in CloudFormation you browser CloudFront CDN + TLS S3 static site origin API Gateway HTTP API Lambda counter fn DynamoDB visit count site GET /counter GitHub rpuffe/CRC CodePipeline CodeBuild → s3 sync git push deploy site + invalidate CDN
$ curl api/counter → you are visitor counted by Lambda, stored in DynamoDB

Want the details? View the source and CloudFormation template on GitHub →