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Alex Christophe Mckinnon

@alexchristophemckinn

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Senior Cloud/DevOps architect specializing in secure, observable Azure platforms.

United States

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What I'm looking for

I seek senior roles building secure, observable cloud platforms (Azure-focused) with strong SRE practices, IaC, and CI/CD—where I can mentor teams, reduce incidents, and optimize cost and reliability.

I am a Cloud/DevOps architect with 18+ years building secure, observable, and cost-efficient platforms, specializing in Azure, Windows/Linux, and .NET. I focus on production-grade SRE practices, infrastructure as code, and robust CI/CD pipelines to deliver reliable services.

At SmartBear I designed AKS clusters with OIDC Workload Identity, Key Vault integration, egress mTLS, and enforced runtime policies with OPA/Gatekeeper while standardizing OpenTelemetry into Application Insights and Log Analytics. I built reusable Terraform modules and multi-stage GitHub Actions pipelines, introduced blue/green and canary releases, automated image pipelines, and established cost governance to control cloud spend.

I embed pragmatic automation and safety practices—ephemeral PR namespaces, secret scanning, runbooks, GameDay chaos drills, and LLM-assisted workflows under strict guardrails—to accelerate delivery while keeping human review first. I enjoy mentoring teams on SLO-driven ops, secure platform design, and observability that materially reduces incident time-to-resolution.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Lead Azure Cloud Engineer

SmartBear

Jul 2021 - Jul 2025 (4 years)

Designed and operated production-grade AKS platforms with OIDC Workload Identity, Key Vault per-service secrets, image provenance enforcement, and automated blue/green/canary releases tied to SLOs, reducing p95 latency and improving deployment safety.

Terraform Bicep GitHub Actions OpenTelemetry Key Vaults Kubernetes Security (OPA Gatekeeper)CI CD Packer

Senior DevOps Engineer

Mendix

Oct 2019 - Jun 2021 (1 year 8 months)

Migrated monoliths to App Service and containers with Managed Identity and Key Vault, provisioned per-tenant stacks via Terraform, and implemented telemetry-driven release gates that enforced SLO regressions to block promotions.

Terraform Azure DevOps Application Insights Private Endpoints SLOs Arm CI CD

Senior Cloud/DevOps Engineer

QuickPlay Media

Jul 2016 - Sep 2019 (3 years 2 months)

Containerized workloads and migrated long-running jobs to AKS, implemented App Insights distributed telemetry and automated cert rotation via Key Vault/Managed Identity, and introduced Cosmos DB with TTL for cost-controlled event logs.

AKS Key Vaults Cosmos PowerShell BASH CI CD Octopus Deploy

Senior DevOps .NET Engineer

PageFreezer

Dec 2013 - Mar 2016 (2 years 3 months)

Built scheduled capture/export WebJobs with retry and dead-letter handling, centralized secrets in Key Vault, and implemented App Insights instrumentation for SLA reporting and live diagnostics.

Key Vaults Application Insights TeamCity PowerShell BASH ASP.NET MVC SQL Server CI CD

Senior Networking Engineer

Electronic Arts

Sep 2012 - Oct 2013 (1 year 1 month)

Developed scalable multiplayer networking systems using C++ and RakNet, implemented lag compensation and delta compression to reduce bandwidth, and improved synchronization and reliability across clients and servers.

C++RakNet Networking Real Time Systems Visual Studio WinDbg Performance Profiling

Gameplay & Systems Engineer

Radical Entertainment

Sep 2009 - May 2012 (2 years 8 months)

Engineered in-game advertising and cross-platform ports, optimized CPU/GPU performance, and integrated telemetry and automated test pipelines to ensure stable releases across consoles.

C++Performance Optimization XML)Telemetry Perforce

Junior Engine Engineer

Silicon Knights

Oct 2007 - Aug 2009 (1 year 10 months)

Assisted in engine component development and optimization using C++ and DirectX 9, implemented shader effects and profiling improvements, and built tooling to support level designers and QA workflows.

C++DirectX Performance Profiling Shaders Python Perforce Debugging

Education

Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science

2003 - 2007

Activities and societies: Dean's List (multiple terms); Member of ACM and Upsilon Pi Epsilon; academic projects in game development, compiler design, and networking.

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with coursework in data structures, operating systems, databases, networking, software engineering, and compiler design; completed multiple projects including a 2D Java game and a simple C-subset compiler.