Derek Chisholm

About Derek Chisholm

Platform engineering leader with 10+ years designing secure, air‑gapped, and industrial platforms that accelerate developer velocity. I convert manual operations into automated, code‑driven workflows powered by Kubernetes, Terraform/Terragrunt, and GitOps.Core strengths: Platform Engineering—builting self‑service internal developer platforms that cut provisioning time from days to hours; Infrastructure as Code—replacing click‑ops with reusable modules; Resilience—designing highly available architectures for mission‑critical industrial edge systems.

Experience

1. Infrastructure Engineer

   Redwood Materials

   Oct 2023 — Present · US

   Enterprise Kubernetes Platform: Architected and deployed a production-grade on-premise Kubernetes environment using SUSE Rancher and RKE2. Transformed infrastructure provisioning from a static manual process to a dynamic \"Infrastructure as Code\" model, reducing environment spin-up time from days to hours.Infrastructure Automation (IaC): Developed a comprehensive library of Terraform/Terragrunt templates to standardize downstream cluster deployments. Implemented GitOps workflows (Fleet) to eliminate configuration drift and ensure security compliance across distributed nodes.High-Availability Architecture: Migrated critical facility operations from a legacy redundant-pair model to a resilient Scale-Out Architecture. This design eliminated single points of failure, reducing failover latency from minutes to milliseconds and achieving 100% availability. Concurrently hardened the security posture by integrating Keycloak for centralized identity federation.Edge Compute Strategy: Directed the hardware selection and lifecycle management for ruggedized industrial edge compute nodes. Validated hardware for extreme thermal environments (-40°C to 70°C) and developed streamlined imaging pipelines to reduce node configuration time by ~80%.DevOps Transformation: Spearheaded the organizational shift toward DevOps methodologies, mentoring the engineering team on containerization and observability best practices to foster a culture of shared infrastructure ownership

Education

• Morrison University

  Bachelor of Science in Information Systems

  2010 — 2013

Skills

• Windows Server
• Sap Solution Manager 7.1
• Sap Netweaver Gateway
• Sap Basis
• Sap R/3
• Sap Tdms
• Computer Hardware
• Microsoft Exchange
• Software Installation
• Networking
• Microsoft Office
• Customer Service
• Ip
• Windows
• Vmware Esx
• Troubleshooting
• Web Design
• Crystal Reports
• Ms Project
• Servers
• Operating Systems
• Disaster Recovery
• Visio
• Ip Networking
• Microsoft Visio
• Sap Erp