Brett Buskirk · Platform Engineer
Senior infrastructure work at startup speed — I pair deep engineering judgment with agentic tooling to ship in days what used to take weeks.
Services
Bounded, fixed-scope engagements — each maps to real infrastructure problems I've already solved.
Stand up a production-ready cloud environment from scratch — networking, compute, security, and deployment automation, all codified so it's reproducible from day one.
~2–4 week fixed-scope engagement
Move your app off legacy, on-prem, or basic managed hosting onto a clean, modern, automated cloud foundation — minimal downtime, no mystery infrastructure left behind.
Scoped per project, milestone-billed
Turn click-ops infrastructure into clean, version-controlled Terraform — so changes are reviewable, repeatable, and not one person's tribal knowledge.
~1–3 week fixed-scope engagement
Finally see what production is doing. A complete metrics, logs, and alerting stack — deployed as code — so you catch problems before your users do.
~1–2 week fixed-scope engagement
Ship faster and safer with an automated delivery pipeline — from commit to deploy — on GitHub Actions or GitLab CI.
~1–2 week fixed-scope engagement
Help your team adopt AI coding agents safely and productively — guardrails, CI integration, and the discipline that keeps agents shipping real work instead of driving into a ditch.
Focused 1–2 week engagement
Selected Work
Four projects: the problem, what was built, and the tools that shipped it.
Problem
Build an offline-capable, phone-first reentry simulation for returning citizens — complex branching logic, 56+ life events, and 148 automated tests, deployed to production with zero manual steps.
What was built
React 19 / TypeScript / Vite PWA with Dexie for offline state and serializable run codes. GitHub Actions CI runs typecheck, tests, and production build on every PR. Merge to main: DigitalOcean App Platform picks it up automatically via .do/app.yaml.
Problem
A publishing site on WordPress + Elementor was expensive to maintain, impossible to customize without fighting the platform, and returning poor Lighthouse scores.
What was built
Custom Astro 5 static site with Tailwind CSS v4, Pagefind full-text search, and full content migration of 22 articles with optimized images. GitOps deployment: push to main, DigitalOcean App Platform rebuilds and ships automatically.
Problem
Production services running across multiple DigitalOcean droplets with no centralized visibility — no metrics, no log aggregation, no alerts. Flying blind.
What was built
DigitalOcean VPC managed entirely via Terraform + Ansible. Prometheus scrapes every node, Grafana surfaces dashboards, Loki aggregates logs, and Alertmanager routes alerts to Slack. Remote access via Tailscale — zero public management surface.
Problem
AI coding agents can move fast — but without project context and guardrails, they produce plausible-looking code that misses the architecture, drifts from the brief, or can't be merged.
What was built
CLAUDE.md specification patterns and scoping conventions that give agents enough context to do real implementation work on production builds — this site included. Paired with CI integration to keep agent output reviewable and mergeable.
About
I'm a platform/DevOps engineer specializing in cloud infrastructure — greenfield builds, cloud migrations, and Infrastructure as Code. I help startups and small teams stand up reliable, automated, production-ready systems (Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD, observability) on a project basis, so they get senior platform engineering without the cost or lead time of a full-time hire.
Five years building production systems across AWS, GCP, and DigitalOcean, with a full MERN-stack background that means I understand the application layer, not just the infrastructure beneath it. I lean on AI coding agents as horsepower under that judgment — which means startup-grade speed without giving up the operational rigor production demands.
Stack
Contact
Tell me what you're working on — the problem, where you're at, and what you need. I'll get back to you within one business day.
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