James Jerpseth

About James Jerpseth

Twenty-plus years of software development, deployment and customer satisfaction in different industries on both Windows and Linux platforms. Proven skills at increasing software efficiency, dependability and reliability through code optimization, automation, documentation and consistent delivery. I enjoy working with customers to understand and address both their immediate needs and long term goals. Planning, teamwork and clearly documented expectations are keys to my success in working with others both inside and outside the company. I enjoy the challenge of learning new technologies and applying them to the current situation. My greatest asset is my ability to work with others individually and in groups to form a shared strategy to tackle seemingly insurmountable problems. Teamwork and cooperation between members leverages the best each individual has to offer. From the front of the pack as a leader or amidst the others as a contributor, I work to get the whole team going towards the goal and across the finish line.

Experience

1. Senior Site Reliability Engineer

   Datavant

   Jan 2025 — Present · San Diego, US

   Apixio is now officially part of Datavant. As the two groups integrate, I migrated the Apixio Datadog account into Datavant - turns out that is not as easy as one might expect. We had to unify the tagging and do extensive exports and imports. And more applications were using the API key than we expected. Ongoing post-merger activities include discovering costly AWS clutter, over provisioned services and updating documentation.Datadog - 40% cost savings from index filtering and flex logging.Cost savings of $25K/month by migrating to Datadog from Graylog/Fluent logging. Deprecation of Graylog took extensive cooperation with the engineering teams.Identified the crucial KPI and SLA performance points for Datadog alerting and created an overview dashboard. Along with Pagerduty alerts for critical failures, I have been adding warning and drastic change informational messages to Slack Chats so we can avoid catastrophic failure when possible. Cassandra cluster maintenance and expansion are ongoing tasks as we plan updates from version 2.2 to 5.X for security and compliance reasons. We are also bumping up against limitations of the 2.2 system that prevent cluster growth. Analyzed our upgrade path and compared EC2 self-hosting with AWS Keyspaces and AstraDB.My main focus remains on Terraform as we shift away from a centralized Terragrunt Terraform model where Devops ran the plans and applies to a productized model where engineering is responsible for maintaining the Terraform. At the same time engineering was downgraded to read only access in AWS so they could not introduce drift. All future infrastructure changes will be through Terraform. For security and compliance reasons the new Terraform modules are highly opinionated.As the two companies merge the 4 or 5 Kubernetes implementation styles are being reexamined and a new standardized approach adopted along with a new set of documentation.

Education

• California Lutheran University

  Masters of Divinity, Pastoral Theology & Church Adminsitration

  1994 — 1996

• UC San Diego

  Bachelor's degree, Engineering

  1978 — 1983

Skills

• Embedded Software
• Discipleship
• Software Installation
• Software Documentation
• Nonprofit Organizations
• Program Development
• Coaching
• Written Communication
• Nonprofits
• Leadership Development
• Zabbix
• Long-Term Customer Relationships
• Fundraising
• Web Site Production
• Teaching
• Bash
• Community Outreach
• Oral Communication
• Volunteer Management
• Leadership
• Git
• Embedded C
• Elasticsearch
• Stakeholder Management
• C
• Programming
• Jira
• Jenkins
• Software Development
• Ansible
• Event Planning
• Enterprise Software
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Software Project Management
• Strategic Planning
• Powershell
• Bitbucket
• Linux
• Devops
• Public Speaking