Resume
David Vavra
Senior DevOps Engineer with 12+ years at Phoenix Contact, progressing from manufacturing operations into cloud infrastructure and enterprise platform engineering.
Experience
Phoenix Contact · Middletown, PA (Remote)
- Lead cloud-native infrastructure design and optimization for global web and e-commerce platforms on AWS.
- Serve as the primary technical lead for global Okta integrations, driving enterprise SSO and identity architecture using OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and SAML.
- Architected a blue/green deployment strategy for AWS RDS PostgreSQL upgrades, cutting downtime from 60+ minutes to ~10 minutes through targeted automation.
- Drive observability standards using CloudWatch, OpenSearch, and Dynatrace.
- Integrate security scanning and quality gates into CI/CD pipelines to improve DevSecOps maturity.
- Support enterprise web security and API gateway initiatives using OpenResty, NGINX, and Akamai CDN/WAF.
- Partner with architects to design and roll out scalable headless API architectures for e-commerce.
Phoenix Contact · Middletown, PA (Remote)
- Managed and optimized a robust AWS environment handling ECS Fargate, ALB, CloudFront, S3, EC2, and CloudFormation.
- Designed, built, and maintained deployment workflows using GitLab, AWS CodePipeline, and CodeBuild for containerized application deployments.
- Standardized platform deployments and drove infrastructure-as-code adoption using Terraform, Ansible, and Docker.
- Provided dedicated production support and troubleshooting for infrastructure, database, pipeline, and web server issues across multiple global product teams.
Phoenix Contact · Middletown, PA (Remote)
- Supported migration from on-premise OpenShift environments to AWS.
- Architected and supported Linux-based application hosting across legacy VMware infrastructure and modern AWS deployments.
- Developed and maintained automation workflows using Ansible, Docker, Bash, and Python.
- Evaluated multiple identity providers, selected Okta as the best fit, and helped implement it as the new website identity provider.
Phoenix Contact · Middletown, PA (Remote)
- Owned Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS environments, identifying opportunities to automate manual work.
- Automated routine server provisioning, patching, and configuration management using Ansible, Bash, and Python.
- Collaborated with development and security teams to onboard AWS-hosted applications and support early containerization efforts using Docker.
Phoenix Contact · Middletown, PA
- Completed a 12-month cross-functional IT apprenticeship with rotations across business operations, sales, product, and multiple IT teams.
Phoenix Contact · Middletown, PA
- Built an early foundation in systems administration while supporting manufacturing operations and seeking opportunities to automate manual processes.