U1–U2, the display
Joe Martinez
Platform Engineer, Fort Lauderdale, FL
Platform engineer who runs Kubernetes where it's hardest: customer clouds, air-gapped networks and DoD-accredited environments. At Arize AI I build the operator, Terraform and observability that ship our ML observability platform into 50+ enterprise environments. At home I run a GitOps Raspberry Pi cluster that I'm turning into a small ML platform. I'm moving toward ML infrastructure: GPU scheduling, model serving and LLM operations.
U3, the switch
Experience
2025–now
Arize AI
DevOps Engineer
- Extended the Arize AX Kubernetes operator in Go and Python with reconciliation logic and health gating, removing manual steps from upgrades and cutting deployment-related incidents by 20%.
- Authored the Terraform modules and Kustomize overlays used for every production install across AWS, Azure and GKE, including air-gapped and on-prem environments.
- Built deployment validation and health monitoring on Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry, giving 50+ customer environments one signal set for install verification and triage.
- Designed the self-service install path (golden paths, preflight checks, CI/CD guidance), raising first-attempt success and cutting repeat escalations by 30%.
- Owned Kubernetes reliability across networking, storage and ingress; turned recurring failure modes into automated readiness checks.
2025–2025
Replicated
Customer Reliability Engineer
- Integrated LLM-backed tooling into incident response to pull context from logs and support bundles, reducing mean time to root cause by 20%.
- Built reference platform implementations covering Helm configuration, CI/CD pipeline templates and the Replicated release system.
- Debugged install and runtime failures on EKS, GKE, AKS, k3s and embedded clusters across CNI, storage class and admission-control layers.
- Wrote the documentation and onboarding path enterprise teams use to ship Replicated-packaged Kubernetes apps.
2024–2025
Second Front Systems
Customer Support Engineer
- Provisioned AWS infrastructure with Pulumi and authored Helm charts reproducing customer environments across DoD impact levels.
- Operated GitOps delivery with Argo CD and Flux, plus GitLab CI pipelines onboarding container images into accredited environments.
- Ran Istio, Kyverno and MinIO in-cluster alongside stateful services (Kafka, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Wrote Python tooling that automated client onboarding, cutting manual setup time by 25%.
2023–2024
Ionic
DevOps Support Engineer
- Built and debugged mobile CI/CD pipelines on GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps and AWS S3, including iOS and Android signing.
- Ran CI/CD onboarding and pipeline reviews for enterprise Appflow customers; surfaced failure trends that shaped platform reliability work.
2021–2023
American Express
Engineer III, from intern → technology associate → engineer iii
- Kept secure file transfer infrastructure moving 500+ TB a day at 99.998% availability, monitored with Splunk, Prometheus and Grafana.
- Wrote Bash automation that pulls Unix health-check reports during incidents, cutting downtime by 30–40 minutes, and Python tooling that saved an hour per annual user audit.
- Led the annual certificate rotation and disaster-recovery exercises for partner file transfers.
U4–U5, four Raspberry Pi 5s
Projects
Four Raspberry Pi 5s running k0s, managed entirely by Flux. Keycloak SSO, Sealed Secrets, CloudNativePG, kube-prometheus-stack, cert-manager, MetalLB and Traefik, backed by an Unraid NAS. This site is served from it.
Built with k0s, Flux, Prometheus and Keycloak.
An animated face on the rack's 2U touchscreen whose expression follows cluster health from Prometheus and Alertmanager. Runs as a kiosk pod, ships its own exporters and an iPhone widget.
Built with Prometheus, Alertmanager, a Chromium kiosk pod and custom exporters.
ML platform on the homelabin progress
MLflow, Argo Workflows and object storage on the cluster, then a GPU node for vLLM serving and an LLM ops assistant traced with Arize Phoenix.
Built with MLflow, Argo, vLLM and Phoenix.
U6–U8, room to grow
Skills and certifications
- Kubernetes & GitOps
- Kubernetes, Operators (Go), Helm, Kustomize, Flux, Argo CD, Istio, Kyverno
- Cloud & IaC
- AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Pulumi, Air-gapped installs
- Observability
- Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Alertmanager, Splunk
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps
- Data & messaging
- PostgreSQL (CNPG), Kafka, RabbitMQ, OpenSearch, MinIO
- Languages
- Go, Python, Bash, JavaScript
- ML platform (learning)
- LLM tooling, Arize Phoenix, MLflow, vLLM
Certifications
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
The Linux Foundation | Valid to Jan 2027 |
CompTIA Security+
CompTIA | Valid to Jan 2028 |
HashiCorp Terraform Associate (003)
HashiCorp | Earned 2024 |
Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)
The Linux Foundation | Earned 2024 |
AWS Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services | Earned 2023 |
AWS Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services | Earned 2023 |
Education
- B.S. Information Technology, Florida International University, 2019–2021
- A.A., Miami Dade College, 2016–2019