Résumé

Zachary Tyler Thill

Senior Platform & Infrastructure Engineer — Platform Engineering · Cloud · AI Automation

Summary

Platform engineer who turns blurry development and operational problems into focused, stable systems the business can rely on. Five years running large-scale AWS and Kubernetes infrastructure — most recently the end-to-end data platform behind 100B+ events/day at a Fortune 100 — with a track record of cutting cloud spend, hardening delivery pipelines, and keeping bleeding-edge systems reliable under pressure. Now channeling that distributed-systems depth toward AI infrastructure: the platforms, control planes, and pipelines that let AI run reliably at scale.

Core Skills

Cloud & Platform
AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, ElastiCache, IAM, S3, VPC), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Crossplane, ArgoCD, Ansible, Cilium
Data & Streaming
Kafka, Spark (spark-operator), Redis, ClickHouse, lakehouse architecture, SQL
CI/CD & Delivery
GitLab CI/CD, Docker/BuildKit, progressive delivery, build caching
Observability
Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch
AI Automation
Agentic workflows, AI agents, MCP, human-in-the-loop automation, RAG platform operations
Security
Hardening, SAST/DAST, IAM, WAF, vuln assessment, incident response, policy-as-code (Kyverno)
Languages
Go, Python, Bash

Experience

Charter Communications — Senior DevOps Engineer, Data Platforms

Feb 2023 – Present

Own end-to-end AWS infrastructure for the Data Platforms org — ingestion → enrichment → lakehouse — supporting a pipeline processing 100B+ events/day across thousands of nodes.

  • Restored a 1,000+ node EKS fleet (plus ElastiCache, RDS, EC2) within 2 hours of a multi-day us-east-1 AZ outage by re-balancing Auto Scaling Groups across healthy zones and managing subnet IP headroom — preventing a data-pipeline SLA breach with zero data loss.
  • Standardized and optimized EKS deployments and enabled Spark-on-Kubernetes via the spark-operator during the migration off ECS/EC2, contributing to $100K+/month in cloud cost savings.
  • Built AWS infrastructure and deployment pipelines for the SpectrumGPT RAG platform (EKS, Aurora Postgres, Azure OpenAI, LangSmith) and led its migration with zero downtime, eliminating single points of failure.
  • Standardized secure multi-stage CI/CD pipelines that reduced production vulnerabilities by 40% and cut build/deploy times by 80%.

Canvas Credit Union — Network Administrator

Aug 2022 – Feb 2023
  • Owned the full Colorado enterprise network; introduced automation with Git and Ansible, replacing manual configuration.
  • Designed architecture improvements that increased resilience and reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR).

Red Rocks Community College — IT Network & Systems Administrator

Mar 2021 – Aug 2022
  • Led a campus network tech refresh end-to-end — logistics, design, deployment, configuration.
  • Designed and built an on-prem private cloud “cyber range” for student experiments, red-team exercises, and capstones.

Awards & Certifications

  • Innovative Excellence / “Tip My Cap” Award — only 50 of 3,000+ engineers.
  • Q1 & Q3 2024 — Core data services to EKS ($100K+/mo saved); Docker CI/CD security standards reducing attack surface.
  • Q2 2025 — Zero-downtime SpectrumGPT RAG migration, eliminating single points of failure.
  • CCNA — Oct 2023

Education

Western Governors University — B.S., Cybersecurity & Information Assurance

Mar 2026 – Present

Red Rocks Community College — A.A.S., Cybersecurity

Aug 2020 – May 2022

Placed 2nd in the 2021 RMCCDC, defending a live network against professional penetration testers.