Open to opportunities

Sam Harden

@samharden

Senior DevOps engineer building secure, cost-optimized cloud platforms and developer infrastructure on AWS with Kubernetes.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m actively looking for a remote role focused on internal developer platforms, software supply chain security, and FinOps—where I can keep building secure, self-service infrastructure and improve reliability and governance at scale.

I’m a DevOps engineer with 7+ years building and running cloud-native infrastructure across financial services, healthcare, and Fortune 100 environments. I started in Linux sysadmin at Navy Federal, moved into DevOps consulting shipping Kubernetes pipelines for Cigna and Truist, and now work at RTX on platform engineering and DevSecOps at scale.

At RTX, I built an internal developer platform with Crossplane on Kubernetes so engineers can self-provision standardized AWS environments in under 2 hours, and I locked down the software supply chain across CI/CD using Sigstore, Syft, Snyk policy gates, and supporting tools like Trivy and HashiCorp Vault. I also roll out zero-trust mTLS with Istio, improve reliability with Datadog SLOs and error budget alerts, and reduce costs through FinOps practices like Karpenter and Infracost—while standardizing governance with Control Tower and Terragrunt.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Senior DevOps Engineer

RTX

Apr 2023 - Jul 2026 (3 years 3 months)

Built an internal developer platform on Kubernetes with Crossplane to enable self-provisioning standardized AWS environments. Implemented software supply chain security, zero-trust service mesh, FinOps controls, multi-account governance, and reliability and disaster-recovery automation.

Crossplane Kubernetes AWS EKS Sigstore Snyk GitHub Actions Istio mTLS Zero Trust Karpenter Control Tower Terragrunt Datadog SLOs Error Budgets AWS Fault Injection Simulator Terraform

DevOps Engineer @ Truist

Techclomate LLC

Aug 2020 - Feb 2023 (2 years 6 months)

Consolidated AWS environments post-merger by standardizing accounts, VPCs, IAM, and S3 governance. Migrated pipelines to unified GitHub Actions, adopted ArgoCD for GitOps deployments, packaged environments with Docker and Helm, and enforced PCI-DSS policies using Open Policy Agent.

AWS VPC IAM S3 GitHub Actions ArgoCD GitOps Docker Helm Kubernetes Open Policy Agent (OPA)PCI DSS

DevOps Engineer @ Cigna

Techclomate LLC

Aug 2020 - Feb 2023 (2 years 6 months)

Developed HIPAA-compliant Kubernetes infrastructure on AWS EKS with secure pod and network policies and production-ready routing. Modernized CI/CD with GitHub Actions and security scanning, automated secret management with Vault, and delivered Terraform-based environment provisioning with observability via Prometheus/Grafana and CloudWatch.

ECR HIPAA Kubernetes Network Policy GitHub Actions Snyk Trivy Vault Terraform RDS VPC S3 Prometheus Grafana Cloudwatch Ansible

Systems Engineer

Navy Federal Credit Union

Oct 2018 - Jun 2020 (1 year 8 months)

Managed Linux server infrastructure for critical banking services, including patching and 24/7 operations. Automated operational tasks with Bash and Python, built Jenkins pipelines for internal deployments, and supported AWS EC2/S3/VPC with Ansible for consistent server configuration.