Hi, I'm Nick.

Nicholas Santiago

Senior DevSecOps Architect at GeneDx

I am a security-centric DevOps Engineer with over 15 years of Linux experience. My love for Linux, continuous delivery, containerization, and web services knows no bounds.

Learning
Doing
Teaching
Humor
Snark
Sarcasm

Skills

Linux
Linux

On a day-to-day basis, my containers and servers run varied distributions of Linux. Though I can run just about any desktop operating system, Linux is my happy place. Red Hat, Debian, Alpine, something else: no worries. Let’s do this.
Git
Git

Source control is the foundation of good continuous delivery. While most comfortable in GitLab (and using its CI), I’m no stranger to GitHub.
Docker
Docker

It works in my container. It’s the 2018 equivalent of “but it works on my local,” and I’m not even ashamed. Being able to run the same exact environment from local, to test, to production - is key in ensuring a stable and predictable environment.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes

While at first, it cost me a lot of sleep, Kubernetes has since become the thing that helps me sleep at night. Its declarative nature of managing deployed apps, and plethora of sysadmin tools, have made me come to embrace the abstract.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services

Most of my production workloads run in AWS, using its wide variety of managed products. Whether I’m using EC2 VMs, an EKS cluster, CloudFront distributions in front of S3 storage for static content, AWS usually has something to offer me to efficiently deliver my product.
Terraform
Terraform

Programmatically building and enforcing state of infrastructure by running a simple pipeline is pure and utter magic. This is a huge part of why I love Terraform.
Ansible
Ansible

Automate everything. Don’t install agents. Ansible made many years of working on virtual machines and consuming REST APIs easier, and is still one of my favorite tools on the belt.
Python
Python

Admittedly, I’m a noob at any real development language, but Python is the one that makes the most sense to me at the moment and the one I’m working hardest on learning.

Experiences

1
Senior DevOps Engineer
GeneDx

June, 2024 - Present, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

GeneDx believes that everyone deserves personalized, targeted medical care - and that it all begins with a genetic diagnosis. Fueled by one of the world’s largest rare disease data sets, world’s largest rare disease data sets, our exome and genome tests translate complex genomic data into clinical answers. It all starts with a single test.

Responsibilities:
  • Ensure uptime and resiliency of customer- and workforce-facing web applications in a multi-cloud Kubernetes environment.
  • Migrate applications from multiple cloud environments of predecessor companies to a central environment, establishing CI/CD processes for container builds, application deployments, and IaC definition.
  • Accelerate application delivery by forging partnerships with application teams, and by mentoring application developers.
Architecture Senior Advisor, Digital Platform Engineering
Evernorth Health Services

March, 2024 - June, 2024, Bloomfield, CT, USA

Evernorth Health Services, a member company of The Cigna Group, exists to elevate health for all, because health is the starting point for human potential and progress. As champions for affordable, predictable and simple health care, we solve the problems others don’t, won’t or can’t.

Responsibilities:
  • Accelerate software delivery by provisioning infrastructure in public and private clouds using a gallimaufry of tools, including Terraform and Ansible.
  • Author self-service tools to help application delivery teams deliver new applications, ensure appropriate security scanning, and SOC2 compliance.
  • Create and maintain CI/CD processes and patterns for Angular.JS, React.JS, Node.JS, Java, Go, and Python applications in an assortment of orchestrators, including GitLab CI, Jenkins, and Tekton.
  • Serve as custodian for role-based access control for a delivery team of approximately 200 persons, including stateside and offshore personnel.
  • Manage an early career technical professional through their first foray into the space of DevOps engineering.
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3
Cigna Healthcare

June, 2016 - March, 2024, Bloomfield, CT, USA

Cigna Healthcare, a member company of The Cigna Group, is a global health service company, offers health, pharmacy, behavioral, dental, supplemental insurance and Medicare plans to individuals, families, and businesses.

Architecture Senior Advisor, Digital Platform Engineering

January, 2022 - March, 2024

  • Accelerate software delivery by provisioning infrastructure in public and private clouds using a gallimaufry of tools, including Terraform and Ansible.
  • Author self-service tools to help application delivery teams deliver new applications, ensure appropriate security scanning, and SOC2 compliance.
  • Create and maintain CI/CD processes and patterns for Angular.JS, React.JS, Node.JS, Java, Go, and Python applications in an assortment of orchestrators, including GitLab CI, Jenkins, and Tekton.
  • Serve as custodian for role-based access control for a delivery team of approximately 200 persons, including stateside and offshore personnel.
  • Manage an early career technical professional through their first foray into the space of DevOps engineering.
Architecture Senior Advisor, Digital DevSecOps

November, 2019 - December, 2021

  • I work predominantly on helping deliver our customer-facing web entities to the market quickly and iteratively. With a greater emphasis towards containerization and cloud-native architecture, I work with my delivery partners in their efforts to move applications to containers, and provide self-service tools to move their applications to a combination of public and private cloud infrastructures.
Architecture Advisor, Digital DevOps

July, 2018 - November, 2019

  • I work predominantly on helping deliver our customer-facing web entities to the market quickly and iteratively. With a greater emphasis towards containerization and cloud-native architecture, I work with my delivery partners in their efforts to move applications to containers, and provide self-service tools to move their applications to a combination of public and private cloud infrastructures.
Infrastructure Engineer Senior Specialist

June, 2016 - July, 2018

  • I work predominantly on automating processes currently being used by Cigna to improve uptime and availability on customer-facing web entities, powered by IBM WebSphere, Java with Spring Boot framework and Node.JS. This role includes general Linux and Unix system administration, as well as the design of waterfall-style and continuous delivery pipelines.
DevOps Engineer
ProctorFree

April, 2015 - April, 2016, Huntersville, NC, USA

ProctorFree is an on-demand, convenient, and cost-effective online proctoring solution for education and corporate environments.

Responsibilities:
  • In my role as DevOps Engineer, I assist in optimizing system uptime, performing preventative maintenance and identifying room for improvement within the company’s infrastructure.
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5
Linux Systems Administrator
RealTech, LLC

March, 2014 - July, 2014, West Chester, OH, USA

RealTech is a custom software development company that builds advanced solutions for mortgage professionals who wish to focus on purchase mortgage business and maximize profits and results through technology.

Responsibilities:
  • In my role as Systems Administrator, I am responsible for the emotional and nutritional well-being of our server environment.
Technical Support Engineer
iFAX Solutions, Inc.

December, 2012 - September, 2013, Plymouth Meeting, PA, USA

iFAX Solutions is the developer of HylaFAX Enterprise Edition, the world’s most popular fax server software and the leading fax server for business.

Responsibilities:
  • I am responsible for the diagnosis and repair of any hiccups that may occur in the HylaFAX software for our clients, as well as providing appropriate care to the clients themselves. In addition, I get to serve as a “jack of all trades,” providing operational support for the core business of the company and its now-defunct secondary operating unit, TelephonyDepot.com.
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7
Director of Information Technologies
Community Action of the Lehigh Valley

October, 2003 - December, 2012, Bethlehem, PA, USA

Community Action Lehigh Valley is a multifaceted non-profit organization that operates financial education programs, provides food assistance, job placement, mortgage foreclosure diversion, aid for the homeless, neighborhood revitalization, small business assistance, energy assistance and computer classes for children.

Responsibilities:
  • As the Director of Information Technology, I led a team of three people to manage the voice and data infrastructure for twelve drastically varied worksites spread across two counties in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Projects

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
April 2021

Earners of this certification have a fundamental understanding of IT services and their uses in the AWS Cloud. They demonstrated cloud fluency and foundational AWS knowledge. Certified individuals are able to identify essential AWS services necessary to set up AWS-focused projects.

Details
LaunchDarkly Self Service
LaunchDarkly Self Service
Contributor Q2 2021

Created an enterprise onboarding tool for LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform. Integrated with corporate access controls using GitLab CI processes built in Terraform and Ansible to provision entitlements in Active Directory and Okta, projects and roles in LaunchDarkly.

Kubernetes SPA Migration
Kubernetes SPA Migration
Architect Q2 2021

When an existing OpenStack infrastructure was on the chopping block, it was time to move some legacy Angular SPAs from their Nginx VMs to Kubernetes. Moving the build process from Maven to GitLab CI was easy, and creating a commonized Helm chart to for the dozen legacy web apps made the integration and migration a breeze.