Brian Sauer

Quality Focused Devops Engineer

Building high-quality systems to enable software development that is low cost, low risk, and low friction.

Adapting classic quality assurance principles to the modern devops landscape. Using the scientific method to observe, experiment, repair, and learn about complex systems. Automating all aspects of software development for consistent, robust, low-risk deployments. Thinking hypothetically to bridge the theory and reality of software systems. Reducing technical debt by developing extendable, maintainable, and well documented internal tools.

Technical Skills

Programming Languages: Python, Java/Groovy, PHP, C, Tcl, Ada

Servers / Tools / Databases: httpd, nginx, Apache Airflow, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB

Monitoring and Alerting: Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK

CI/CD: Jenkins, AWS Codebuild, Github Actions

Infrastrutre as Code: Ansible, Terraform, Vagrant

Development Environments: Linux, FreeBSD, AWS, Docker / Rancher / ECS, Digital Ocean

Github Profile: https://github.com/bmsauer

Work Experience

Senior Devops Engineer, Renaissance Learning Inc, Wisconsin Rapids, WI 2015-2021, 2023-2025

Originally worked for Schoolzilla (a small startup), that was acquired by Renaissance (a medium sized company) in 2020. At Schoolzilla, wore many hats, from internal tools developer, systems administrator, operations specialist, and networking engineer. Developed a cloud agnostic ecosystem with open source tools. Once acquired, evolved into a more traditional devops role focused on CI/CD, cloud architecture, and containerized application deployments.

  • Designed and implemented ECS Airflow deployment with autoscaling, fully Terraformed. Completed over 11,000 DAGs in under 6 hours with 99.99% success rate, at a lower cost, than the old non-scaling EC2 based deployment.

  • Researched and implemented modern Gradle, Boot, and Docker build features and dropped build times from minutes to seconds. Overall time from feature development to deployment significantly reduced with fewer errors, reducing deployment risk and developer toil.

  • Migrated legacy Jenkins build pipelines to new Github Actions pipelines and releases. Releases had audit trail, changelogs, and version history published in the UI, resolving inconsistent versioning and reporting that made releases difficult to audit during troubleshooting.

  • Customer support couldn’t do "lights on" testing for customer VPN sites and relied on a cumbersome manual process. Built web application with HTMX, Flask, and Celery. Saved customer support staff hours of effort per week.

  • Designed a Terraform repository structure and CI pipeline that would run Terraform as dependent layers. Only ran when layers were changed, increasing efficiency. Cloud platform could be recovered from disaster scenario and audited regularly. Retrofitted hand rolled cloud architecture to new paradigm.

  • Developed a method of automated smoke testing with Jupyter notebooks and papermill, resulting in a low lift, low tech way to increase confidence and have test reporting. Many legacy codebases did not have adequate test coverage, making them risky to deploy and error prone.

  • Kept a personal lab notebook, synced to git and shared with team to disseminate knowledge and record troubleshooting sessions.

  • Routine cleanup tasks were not getting done, leading to bloated caches, databases, and NFS filesystems. Performed deep dive on cause, documented potential longterm fix, wrote agile card, and used Python containers to temporarily fix. Balanced quick results with reducing technical debt.

  • Adopted Divio’s documentation system, standardizing project documentation and making information easier to access and comprehend.

  • Developed Python desktop application that allowed DBA’s to safely transfer databases between MS SQL Server servers, improving success rate and disaster recovery time compared to manual, error prone, process.

Assistant Professor of Practice, Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, KY 2021-2023

  • Developed course to teach students software testing, maintenance, and quality fundamentals. Students worked through all four phases of testing a multi-tiered web application. Focused teaching on building a culture of quality and the power of metrics to make data driven quality decisions.

  • Developed course to teach students how quality can be affected by human factors such as estimation, design, and development processes. Introduced students to agile methodologies and how they relate to quality. Incorporated devops experience into course for teaching how automated testing and deployment improve quality.

Web Developer, TutorGen, Inc, Fort Thomas, Kentucky 2014- 2015

  • Worked with a small team of 3 that built, tested, and deployed software in an agile setting (scrum). Implemented and maintained the in-house server that was the CI and dev deployment server. Developed web applications in Django and Flask with full unit test coverage. Used Selenium to test front end applications.

Education

Masters of Science in Computer Science May, 2014

Northern Kentucky University, Highland Heights, Kentucky

Thesis: Partitioning NoSQL Databases using data mining and cluster analysis

Bachelors of Science in Digital Game and Simulation Engineering Technology May, 2012

Shawnee State University, Portsmouth, Ohio

Volunteer Experience

Organizer, CincyPy Python Programming User Group 2014-Present

Volunteer Mechanic/Tinkerer/Troubleshooter, Mobo Bicycle Co-op 2023-Present