Brett Michaelis

[email protected] 801-310-2818 Orem, UT 84057 linkedin.com/in/brettmichaelis
Summary
Infrastructure & DevOps Engineer with 10+ years of experience scaling cloud-native systems in fast-paced environments. Proven track record designing secure, reliable, and cost-optimized multi-cloud architectures (GCP, AWS) supporting SaaS and ML workloads. Skilled in Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and CI/CD automation, with hands-on contributions to Golang, Python, and Node.js services. Experienced in improving observability, SLO/SLI adoption, and incident response processes. Thrives in startup-style, high-autonomy environments where versatility and ownership drive success.
Core Skills
Experience
Operations Engineer 03/2025 - Present
Smarty.com | Orem, UT
  • Manage multi-cloud deployments (Tiernet, UpCloud, GCP, Hetzner) with Terraform, Nomad, and Bitbucket pipelines, improving uptime and decreasing deployment time.
  • Automate repetitive workflows with Bash and Go, increasing efficiency and reducing manual error.
  • Monitor and optimize system performance across production environments.
JavaScript Instructor 2019 - 01/2026
Mountainland Technical College (MTEC) | Lehi, UT
  • Teach and mentor adult and high school students in full-stack web development, focusing on JavaScript, Node.js, and modern frameworks.
  • Develop and maintain curriculum, ensuring alignment with industry practices and evolving technology trends.
  • Build coding labs and real-world projects, reinforcing best practices in version control, debugging, and application deployment.
  • Guide students on DevOps fundamentals, fostering an understanding of CI/CD workflows and cloud-based deployments.
Senior DevOps Engineer 04/2020 - 10/2024
Five9.com
  • Orchestrated multi-cloud deployments on GCP using Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform to support high-availability SaaS workloads.
  • Built infrastructure automation scripts that reduced downtime and increased deployment speed across critical services.
  • Streamlined incident response with Five Whys, improving on-call processes and reliability through blameless postmortems.
  • Partnered with product and engineering teams to define and track SLOs/SLIs, supporting customer-facing uptime goals.
  • Collaborated cross-functionally to balance rapid delivery with long-term platform scalability.
Software Engineer / DevOps Engineer 03/2017 - 04/2020
Vivint SmartHome
  • Managed infrastructure for GCP-based ML pipelines and 1.5 PB data lake, enabling scalable model training and inferencing.
  • Developed and deployed Golang-based microservices, optimizing performance and reducing latency.
  • Implemented TICK stack for observability, analytics, and system health monitoring.
  • Automated infrastructure and data center operations with Saltstack and Jenkins, ensuring reliability at scale.
Director, IT & Software Development 2011 - 2017
Unicity International
  • Led global infrastructure modernization, migrating legacy apps to containerized, cloud-native environments.
  • Standardized multi-cloud deployments (AWS EC2, S3) to improve scalability and global availability.
  • Introduced reliability practices, including error budgeting and deployment automation.
Assistant Director, Web Development 2005 - 2010
Utah Valley University
  • Directed university-wide web development projects, improving service reliability and scalability for mission-critical systems.
Counterintelligence Agent 1998 - 2006
U.S. Army – Utah National Guard
  • Conducted secure intelligence operations, leveraging structured incident response and AAR methods.
Education
Bachelor of Science: Information Systems 2005
Utah Valley University | Orem, UT