Brett Michaelis

brett.michaelis@gmail.com 801-310-2818 Orem, UT 84057 linkedin.com/in/brettmichaelis
Summary
Senior Site Reliability & Platform Engineer with 10+ years designing and operating multi-cloud Kubernetes infrastructure at scale. Track record building self-service platforms, GitOps-driven observability systems, and IaC automation (Terraform, Helm) across GCP, AWS, and Azure. Committed to governance over administration—eliminating manual processes through policy-enforced automation that lets engineering teams provision and ship safely without ops bottlenecks. Experienced in SLO/SLI-driven reliability, incident response, and cross-functional platform ownership across high-availability SaaS environments.
Core Skills
Experience
Operations Engineer 03/2025 - Present
Smarty.com | Orem, UT
  • Leading migration of a legacy Grafana observability platform to a GitOps-managed deployment, auditing and rationalizing all alerting across production services as part of the initiative.
  • Operate observability stack using Prometheus, Grafana, Mimir, and Alloy for metrics collection, long-term storage, and dashboarding.
  • Driving company-wide migration from Bitbucket to GitHub, including full re-implementation of all CI/CD workflows in GitHub Actions.
  • Manage multi-cloud deployments (Tiernet, UpCloud, GCP, AWS, Hetzner) with Terraform, Nomad, and Bitbucket Pipelines, improving uptime and deployment velocity.
  • Automate repetitive workflows with Bash and Go, reducing manual toil across operations.
JavaScript Instructor 2019 - 01/2026
Mountainland Technical College (MTEC) | Lehi, UT
  • Taught full-stack web development to adult and high school students, covering JavaScript, Node.js, and modern frameworks.
  • Guided students on DevOps fundamentals including CI/CD workflows, version control, 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 self-service deployment tooling and automation, enabling engineering teams to provision and release independently while preserving platform standards.
  • 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.
  • Drove platform reliability improvements that reduced engineering toil and enabled teams to operate with greater autonomy.
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