Levi (The Automated) De Haan

Artificial Intelligence and Automation Architect — building AI‑centric, scalable systems. What else could you be doing instead of the same thing over and over again?

About: From early days building sites for local businesses to leading DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure Services teams at Petco within six months, I focus on measurable impact and empowering teams through automation.

• Rapidly mastered new roles; led DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure Services at Petco within six months of joining.
• Transformed teams with AI automation—reduced ticket closure time from six months to hours.
• Driving efficiency through automation—took deployments from 3–4 weeks to less than a day.
• Architects AI‑centric systems and LLM serving frameworks across AWS, Azure, and on‑prem GPU clusters.
• Single father of four; remote‑first, disciplined, and outcome‑driven.
• Specialties: LLM Automation & Deployment, Scalable Architectures, DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Cloud Infrastructure (AWS/Azure), Server & Network Management, Software & System Architecture, Web Development, VR/AR.
• Top skills: Team Leadership • Artificial Intelligence (AI) • Large Language Model Operations (LLMOps) • Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) • System Architecture.
Petco - Online Retail 08/2022 – 10/2024 Manager - DevOps COE/SRE/Cloud Infrastructure Services + AI Systems Architect In my tenure at Petco, I've had the privilege of spearheading multiple teams and initiatives that have significantly enhanced our operational efficiency and technological capabilities. I've been able to accomplish this by leveraging my experience to build a team of highly skilled engineers and architects. I regularly assist in interviewing and evaluating candidates for other teams in order to ensure we have strong complimentary skills around the company. I was able to take the one of my less performant teams from a 6 month ticket closure time to hours by automating systems and reallocating resources efficiently. Initiated an internal advertising campaign, enhancing collaboration across teams. Within a span of six months, I was entrusted with the leadership of the DevOps, SRE, and Cloud Infrastructure Services (CIS) teams, reflecting my capability to drive results and manage diverse teams. Centralized logging and statistics into a unified dashboard, streamlining SRE and DevOps collaboration. Deployed an Azure OpenAI Fine-Tuned Curie model, automating ticket responses and liberating resources. Implemented a custom Backstage system for seamless cloud deployments, integrated with Terraform tools and internal user management. Designed an advanced AI chatbot powered by a customized Langchain agent, transforming research hours into minutes. Established a pipeline for fine-tuning OpenAI and Hugging Face models using Sagemaker workflows. Pioneered AI agents tailored for pet-related tools, enhancing customer experience and providing veterinarians with instant contextual information. Implemented Langchain workflows for rigorous AI output checks, ensuring quality and accuracy. Revolutionized the CIS team's ticket closure time from six months to hours, automating numerous systems and reallocating resources efficiently. Onboarded talent for day-to-day reporting, focusing on crafting solutions and kickstarting projects with other teams. Continuously sought opportunities for innovation, reducing costs by millions and paving the way for user-centric solutions. Healthpointe Solutions - AI Healthcare 03/2020 - 08/2022 Director - Cloud Infrastructure Designed and built the base infrastructure for the business using Terraform on AWS/Azure. when I worked at Enable Data I was brought on as a jack of all trades to get HPS up and running quickly and securely. This was a continuation of my work at Enable Data. Designed and built Terraform Manager, an internal project for managing hundreds of different terraform configurations allowing easy push button deployment of multiple configurations to any cloud. Designed and built Imaging Manager using Packer and Ansible, an internal project for managing the automation of machine images for use on all platforms with built in security checks, virus checks, and testing before pushing new images to dev/test/prod environments for further testing. Designed and built TerraMatch - a system for ensuring that the only systems running are the ones deployed by Terraform in order to ensure systems are exactly to spec. Designed and built the entire process for deploying Databricks on our Azure and AWS private cloud and the process for ingesting/transforming client data. I wrote the software for processing and analyzing Patient data from healthcare/insurance companies on Databricks using a mix of python and scala. I built and managed the custom docker images for our Databricks clusters and worked with our Data Science teams to better understand their needs and implement tools in those images to make their jobs easier. Worked on a Successful POC with Dell ECS where I designed and deployed a Kubernetes + Tableau based solution so Dell can offer HPS products on their ECS platform to healthcare providers. Worked on HITRUST certification security implementations, and procedures. Security Security Security. C Suite security/network consultant for international travel to our potential clients. Mentored and Educated fellow employees on any technical matters they were interested in or needed to know to be successful at their jobs. Enable Data Consulting 10/2018 - 03/2020 Sr. Systems Architect Designed and built a scalable web application for Greenwich.HR which scans the internet for changes in specific web based properties in order to provide Labor Market Intelligence. The application launches and manages thousands of ECS jobs and tracks their progress. The system has built in job creation, reporting, customer management, and a fully manageable queue system. Converted a production R project to the Databricks spark platform for IRI Worldwide as a poc to show the possibility of converting all their R systems to Databricks. I was able to get the project to run in 15% of the production run time; saving time and money as well as reducing complexity of the project. I also tested out other solutions such as building out a test Kubernetes cluster running spark jobs managed using Jupyter. Worked with a team to build the base infrastructure, security, processes and automation infrastructure for HealthPointe Solutions Cognitive AI. Using terraform, ansible, and jenkins we built a system to automatically deploy the entire infrastructure on multiple platforms like aws and azure. We defined the security posture and built the security into the system using automated tooling to scan, log and detect every aspect of the systems in order to provide the best security solution possible. Initial Interviews for client companies ranging from low level spark to high level systems management positions, and everything between. Nielsen ( Contracted through Oxford ) 02/ 2018 - 9/2018 Sr. DevOps Architect (K8s) Designed and built Azure AKS/ACS interface to launch big data jobs into Kubernetes clusters using Jenkins Created a new and faster workflow to save time on job runs and on the time it takes to create them. Brought best practices and upgraded the team with CI/CD practices for faster code delivery and tracking. Trained other departments in the company on how to deploy jobs as quickly as ours using in person training and documentation. Worked on documenting that allowed us to bring our new team mates up to speed much faster. Designed and built a GUI interface for the kubernetes/jenkins system allowing the creation and deletion of clusters/jenkins installs/jobs ( Using Vue.js / Express ). Reduced big data deployment time and improved big data workflow. Helped my team improve their scripting and backend skill sets as well as educating them on containerization and orchestration systems like kubernetes and mesos. De Haan Consulting, LTD Oct 2012 - Current Sr. SysAdmin/Devops Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality Personal Projects: Designed and developed software platform for managing server systems in virtual reality named ORCA. https://youtu.be/zTdES-rOgcY (VR Video) Designed Microsoft Hololens application for making oil refinery inspections easier to verify and manage. Recent Clients: VR Garage- Jan 2017-Feb 2018 RG is building a toolset that enables users to easily create VR video / image / 3D model experiences using our web based platform. I designed the first Unity VR Concept at the beginning, and a team of developers took it to its conclusion. While they were working on that I spearheaded the web based experience. My team and I built it out using JHipster microservices and A-Frame. I designed the backend services of the platform around fabric8 running on kubernetes. It's a very performant system and has enabled us to easily add to our engineering team with very little ramp up time (our newest guy was fully setup with full ide integration with all the projects and cluster within a day). One of the huge benefits of microservices and clustering is the ability to dynamically scale services up and down to keep the cluster balanced and requiring far fewer machines, the cluster is only costing a 120 a month on linode servers, but is running a full toolstack and production ready services with blue green jenkins pipelines, full integration between services, such as a image processing service that converts all 360 images between mono and stereo, resizes based on bandwidth, etc.. I was able to design everything from the ground up, which is a rare and fun occurrence.. Simple Energy- Jan 2017 - April 2017 Trained a local company to assume my full time tasks. Reduced future deploy complexity through scripting for common tasks. Assisted in transition to aws, provided insight into best ways to migrate existing infrastructure. Simple Energy 08/ 2015 - 04/2017 DevOps Manager Created a new DevOps workflow focused on improving automation and system deployments. Took deploy time from 3-4 weeks to less than a day, and platform updates to minutes from hours. Instantiated the use of Docker/Mesos to reduce deploy times and increase uptime on volatile systems. Instantiated the use of Jenkins/GitLab to increase developer productivity and accountability. Reduced time to test for developers and reduced complexity to get to production. Improved testing strategies and implemented automated recovery for simple systems. Continuing to reduce costs across the board by further automating services and deployments to more cost effective methodologies (such as GCP/AWS) when possible. Worked on and deployed Various big data systems working with Scala and Python to help clients better understand energy usage. Promet Source 01/ 2015 - 07/ 2015 Sr. Developer Sr. SysAdmin / DevOps Mgmt Helped design and start new implementation and build of the DevOps team. Transferred important servers from Promet's various clients onto a similar monitoring/deployment and server infrastructure to allow for smoother deploys and to reduce time to production for developers. Designed and built a new server infrastructure using Google Cloud, saving money for the company and our clients. Some clients saved more than half what they used to pay moving to the new infrastructure. Worked within the infrastructure to implement new tool stacks to increase the efficiency of the team and to allow the DevOps team to incorporate automation in their processes. We successfully went from several days to do a deployment to several hours to get the same amount of work done. Managed several development projects utilizing multiple programming languages, php, javascript, java, and python. Worked on a new drupal module that ties in Tika and Solr to index millions of pdf's efficiently on a small server using an incremental job runner that can run the downloading, parsing and indexing jobs during low server usage. Built a Jenkins automation cluster to run all various types of jobs from backups to builds and the team is adding new things daily as they learn how to better utilize the tool. Designed and implemented an Elasticsearch cluster service using Docker, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes that stores the logs from all sites and servers enable more efficient troubleshooting and debugging. Developed a node.js application using Tika to convert pdf’s to text and made the data available via a restful api. It has full caching and cache control as well. Using the data from elasticsearch in conjunction with a monitoring framework that notifies the team when a service goes down or passes a load threshold. Developed an IMAP mail application using node.js and express for the server and Angular.js for the frontend UI. Apex Systems/Time Warner 05/ 2014 - 11/2014 Systems Administrator/DevOps Engineer Utilizing tools like Jenkins, Docker, Mesos, and Puppet my team and I designed and implement new processes for continuous integrationto enable the data scientists on our team to quickly write and test their code, allowing for greater efficiency, compartmentalization of their builds, minimized debug time, better enabled dry practices and a greater focus on the code not the systems. I built new processes for onboarding using a tool called Vagrant to build customized deploys that the new hires could load onto their machines to become productive much faster than setting them up on the development servers and all the other endless tasks that used to be done to onboard someone. Introduced Docker as a tool for development and system administration: Designed big-data workflows using docker to containerize the platforms that we were using on bare metal. This saved a lot of money on hardware because we could use one of our big servers for more than just a couple processes. This enabled us to create clusters within a single machine to test out larger deployments using the same stack. Designed an entire big-data workflow around mesos/marathon and built a UI in angular.js to accompany the backend technology in order to utilize consul and registrator. The developers are able to pull the most recent image from any deployed server and instantly have it up and running. This enables developers to quickly iterate on code changes, share those changes, and it provides a reliable testing environment because everyone has access to the same images. De Haan Consulting, LTD 10 / 2012 - Current Team Lead - Systems/Software Architect Feb - April 2013 I worked with a company based out of Omaha as a JavaScript expert consultant. The job was rescuing a failing project before it was shut down. The project was a Java platform serving a javascript frontend. One of the core problems were the programmers who initially wrote the first iterations of the product. They were writing javascript like Java code. After a couple sessions discussing the current code structure, its issues, and what we could do about them we created policies to streamline the process, and a timeline to fix the bugs and submitted them to the executives for approval. They did not want to move forward with the changes and after transitioning out, the project was shut down due to system failure. Jan – Feb 2013 I worked with a company called WeatherCloud to develop an android application that connects to several bluetooth transmitters affixed to cars and converts and processes that data within a second to show real time stats to the driver. The application was written using apache cordova and angular.js for the frontend. I wrote a bluetooth LE plugin for cordova to allow for the fastest transfer of data from the devices without slowing the phone down too much. The first iteration of the project was a success and I delivered an alpha to them to show to investors. Nov - Dec 2013 I worked with a company called o2o developing a yellow pages type application for argentina. It was written in php using a customized framework developed by o2o. The task I was given was to introduce a better onboarding process for new programmers, to integrate Docker into the development workflow, and the rest of my duties were to write customized modules for the framework and the frontend in javascript. I was able to design and build an onboarding platform using Docker and Vagrant to get new programmers ready to code immediately. Allowing them time to go and change things in the framework without breaking our development servers copy. The introduction of Docker was very helpful in providing a clean image that could be pushed to testing, and then production without the hassle of setting up all the needed services and specific versions of packages needed by the framework. Oct - May 2012 I worked with a company called Pearson Education developing a customized javascript framework so they could easily write frontend applications for their student portal. Initially I started out writing it myself, as the project progressed my team grew, and we implemented agile methodologies to improve our workflow. We had to design and implement an entire stack from the backend server architecture using node.js to the front end framework which the company named Pearson.js. We also had to provide documentation and training to the individuals who would be taking our place and so we designed our framework to be as user friendly as possible by extrapolating the complexities and taking care of them in our framework. appendTo, LLC 07 / 2010 - 09 / 2012 Sr. Programmer / Systems Administrator Managed the servers for the business and clients, securing, updating, and configuring them for speed and reliability. Designed and developed server architectures for clients using many different platforms, frameworks and languages. Most commonly php based frameworks and javascript based platforms. Helped create and steer the culture towards a fun and supportive environment, and did interviews with potential hires. It was challenging to do this because we were a fully remote company. We primarily used Skype for communication. Created the onboarding process with my team in order to get our new hires up to speed quickly. Which was challenging because we had no standard systems and so I had to build for all major operating systems. We used virtualbox and some custom images to build out environments to get people up to speed quickly. Developed a chat robot that watched Skype chat rooms and listened for questions and also would give you stats on servers and code bases when asked. It was our version of hipchat. Spearheaded the website design and mobile development from the ground up for many projects including some internal projects that helped manage servers autonomously. Helped create and nurture relationships with clients like research in motion and Microsoft. Springs Hosting 01 / 2010 - 07 / 2010 Programmer / Sys Admin Wrote custom applications in several different programming languages as well as implementing custom solutions/modules for different CMS's such as Drupal, ELGG, Joomla, wordpress etc. Designed and implemented the current VPS hosting solution using XEN and HyperVM, and customized HyperVM's core to implement certain aspects of XEN that were missing from the HyperVM Platform at the time. Applied several Aegir Distributions for clients and internal use. Tied Aegir into VPS distributions with custom packages tailored to a client’s specific Drupal needs. Managed several clients who use the VPS platform to design and keep their systems running at optimum efficiency. Monarch Digital 04 / 2009 - 11 / 2009 App Dev/Sys Admin/Web 2.0 Programmer Built drupal websites, wrote custom modules, rewrote backends, managed customer servers, managed monarch servers, designed client server architecture, created backup solutions that worked, internal tech support, client web site/server tech support. Defined the standards for coding, quality, and server builds. Trained new employees on php coding standards and built vm's for them so they could get into a project and start working right away. Defined and implemented business ideas, identified potential clients and earned their confidence. Keystone Symposia 04 / 2008 - 11 / 2008 Web Designer / Systems Analyst I worked on the web platform which was written in cfml, at the time a new language for me. I caught on quickly and started closing tickets. My primary job was to assist the senior programmers with basic tasks until I learned enough to start working on more complex systems. Rof.net 03 / 2006 - 03 / 2007 Programmer I was hired to do customer tech support and wireless installations. We got so many calls about web design that I finally convinced my boss to let me start building websites. I'd already done a few for CMC using php and so I went from support to web development. My first client's website is still up and running and I built it using one of the earlier versions of drupal. DeHaan Design and Development 01 / 1996 - 05 / 2010 Consultant (DevOps/App Dev) We focused on our customers' needs and delivered a product that goes above and beyond their expectations. We understood that money is hard to come by in this recession. We created many solutions for our customers to help ease the financial strains. We didn't stop at just providing a site, application or service. We also wanted to help our customers build their customer base by creating solutions that helped them attract business and meet their customer's needs. EDUCATION Colorado Mountain College 2004 - 2007 I took classes for programming, writing, and math. I was thinking about getting a degree but ended up starting a company writing software for local nonprofits and local businesses. High School 1996-2001 I started attending college classes at 13, mostly programming and networking classes. I was hired as a system administrator for all the campuses when I was 15 after taking the cisco networking academy and becoming a TA. ASSOCIATIONS Ran a javascript/node.js meetup when I lived in Colorado Springs. I started the Boulder Google Developers Group, we meet a couple times a month at the google campus in Boulder.