Brendan Putek

About Brendan Putek

Over the last 20+ years, I’ve worked across software engineering, infrastructure, and DevSecOps, from hands-on engineering to leading platform and security initiatives in regulated environments. My focus is building high-velocity engineering systems where teams can ship confidently without accumulating hidden risk or operational drag.As a Fractional CTO / DevSecOps leader, I partner with teams that are:– Growing quickly but feeling slowed by process, compliance, or tooling sprawl– Struggling to shift security and quality earlier in the SDLC without burning out developers– Trying to adopt modern tooling (including AI) without losing consistency, trust, or controlMy work centers on:– Shift-left security and quality that scales with team growth– Developer enablement and platform patterns that increase throughput, not friction– Practical governance for CI/CD, documentation, and engineering knowledge– Designing systems that are auditable, maintainable, and boring in productionI’m also the founder of Smoothdev.io, where I’m applying these same principles to one of the most persistent problems I see: documentation and engineering knowledge that can’t be trusted because it isn’t standardized or governed. Smoothdev.io isn’t about “AI writing docs”. It’s about making engineering knowledge reliable enough to support speed, compliance, and long-term teams.If you’re an engineering leader looking to increase velocity without gambling on security, quality, or institutional knowledge, I’m always open to thoughtful conversations.

Experience

1. Director of Devops

   Relay Network

   Sep 2019 — Present · Radnor, PA, US

   Led platform and infrastructure strategy across DevOps, SecOps, FinOps, CloudOps, and Developer Experience, enabling secure, scalable delivery for fast-moving product teams.• Served as principal systems architect, setting technical direction for infrastructure, security, and reliability while balancing speed, cost, and regulatory constraints.• Designed and executed a disaster recovery and resilience strategy achieving a 12x improvement in RTO, exceeding business continuity requirements at a fraction of typical enterprise cost.• Owned cloud and engineering vendor strategy, including AWS and all DevOps/security tooling—covering procurement, contract negotiation, cost governance, and usage optimization (~10% of total company spend).• Acted as executive owner of security operations, serving on the security council and driving compliance posture, risk management, and security architecture decisions across the organization.• Architected and implemented an infrastructure-as-code platform using Terraform, supporting multiple compute and data architectures and a fully automated CI/CD system, scaling to 800+ deployments per week across environments for 25 engineers.• Defined and led cross-functional platform initiatives spanning compliance, security, reliability, observability, and cost optimization, aligning technical execution with business priorities and delivery timelines.• Enabled engineering leadership and teams through standards, tooling, and automation that reduced operational friction while increasing delivery velocity and confidence.

Education

• Widener University

  BS, Computer Information Systems

  2003 — 2007

Skills

• Storage
• Wordpress
• Fortinet
• Vmware
• Hadoop
• Rhel
• Nispom
• Tomcat
• Confluence
• Crowd
• IT Strategy
• Subversion
• Microsoft Sql Server
• Cdh
• Chef
• Apache 2
• Sql
• Office 365
• Network Security
• Ozone Widget Framework
• Sdlc
• Fisheye
• Facility Security
• Network Administration
• System Architecture
• Splunk
• Java
• Ruby
• Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server
• Watchguard
• Terminal Services
• Velocity Templates
• Iis
• Xml
• Ubuntu
• Active Directory
• Windows Server
• Security
• Atlassian Jira