Jesse Dearing
Staff SRE & Platform Engineer | Kubernetes · AWS · Terraform · Go · Rust
About
I've spent over a decade at the intersection of building software and keeping it running. I care deeply about both sides of that equation. My focus is platform engineering and site reliability: designing the infrastructure, tooling, and systems that let product engineers ship fast, securely, and with full visibility into how their code is serving customers. I've worked across the full spectrum from bare-metal in data centers to multi-region cloud deployments. Software-defined infrastructure is what makes it possible to manage, automate, and observe systems at scale, and building that foundation is where I do my best work. I'm most effective in Senior and Staff IC roles. Where shaping architecture, unblocking teams, solving problems that don't have a runbook yet requires experience and discipline but still willing to jump into codebases without hesitation. If you're building something ambitious and need someone who can design the platform and build the tooling to run it, let's talk.
Work Experience
Observable
Remote
Startup environment requiring broad ownership across infrastructure, security, and platform engineering.
August 2024 – April 2025
Senior Infrastructure Engineer
At Observable I built and operated cloud infrastructure on AWS running container workloads on Kubernetes. I wore many hats — platform engineering, security, and systems programming.
Highlights
- Built a CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure using Terraform, ArgoCD, Atlantis, and Helm
- Practiced threat modeling and risk assessment, working with pentesters to identify and prioritize fixes
- Built a private VPN in Rust using WireGuard and Postgres network types to securely access customer infrastructure
Lacework
Remote
Managed Aurora MySQL instances across our dev, staging, and production environment. I deployed monitoring to gather metric data from the instances for use in alerting, capacity planning, and cost optimization.
Our team was also responsible for the Red Panda (Kafka compliant) infrastructure, logging, and Snowflake deployment.
I built a Go-based CLI used for accessing our MySQL infrastructure.
February 2024 – August 2024
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
VMware
Remote
Worked in the Tanzu (Kubernetes) division where I helped build and run the plaform for hosting the Mission Control SaaS product
December 2018 – December 2023
Staff 2 Site Reliability Engineer
At VMware I worked on the SRE team that built and maintained the infrastructure for Tanzu Mission Control (TMC). During the time I was at VMware, I helped build a platform for running TMC across 6 regions with a global backend for sharing data between regions.
I also built tooling and software for deploying services in a reliable and consistent manner that met the compliance requirements for SOC2 and ISO/IEC 27001. The platform was even adapted to be shipped as an on premises version.
Highlights
- Built a platform that allowed a team to deploy a new service all the way to production in about 1 day with health checking, metrics collection, log aggregation, and high availability across multiple availability zones
- Built a CLI for interacting with the platform to connect through VPN, get access to the Kubernetes control plane and other services like Hashicorp Vault securely using signed tokens with MFA verification
- Proposed architectural designs to be implemented across many different teams
- Identified and mitigated poorly performing database queries
Heptio
Remote
A company focused on leveraging Kubernetes to bring about the digital transformation for companies. Heptio was founded by 2 of the founders of Kubernetes
August 2018 – December 2018
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Brought on as the 2nd SRE to help build infrastructure for a new SaaS product codenamed HQ which later became Tanzu Mission Control.
InVision
Remote
Design first focused company. Created a tool that allows designers to create prototypes and share them so that stakeholders could comment on them
June 2016 – August 2018
Senior Database Engineer
I helped run and maintain the database infrastructure at InVision for the main product. Later started a platform for building microservice deployments and managing the data involved.
Highlights
- Used log parsing to analyze query logs to find queries that had a bad query plan but was running many times a second. Upon suggesting a change to the owning service we were able to reduce the database CPU overhead by 20% and speed up the query to take less than 10 miliseconds instead of 100-200 milliseconds.
- Built a websockets front end to a streaming backend service
New Relic
Portland, OR
Specialized in collection application performance metrics and created products to help development teams monitor and fix problems in their deployed applications
November 2012 – May 2016
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
I started at New Relic to enhance the build infrastructure and move our build servers into a proper data center. I built a quick and hacky Rails based front end for creating VMs for the purposes of build and testing.
I was then pulled on to a special project where I built the the communication libraries for an attempt at a microservice deployment.
I later joined the Site Reliability Engineering team to help run the whole SaaS. As the team needed to specialize, I then moved into the database team to manage our fleet of databases for storing customer data.
Volunteer
Sitton PTA
July 2021 – June 2023
Treasurer
I served at the treasurer of my son's elementary school PTA board
Sitton PTA
July 2023 – June 2025
President
I served as president of the board of my son's elementary school PTA
Contact
Portland, Oregon US
Education
-
2002 2008
University of Texas at Arlington
Bachelors of Arts - Interdisciplinary Studies
Arlington, TX
Skills
Programming Languages
Master
Rust
Go
Bash
Platform Technologies
Master
Terraform
Vault
Kubernetes
Wireguard
Continuous Integration and Delivery
Master
ArgoCD
Container Registries
Cloud Providers
Advanced
Amazon Web Services
Google Compute Engine
Databases
Advanced
PostgreSQL
MySQL
Aurora
Kafka
RedPanda
Snowflake
Distributed Systems
Advanced
Distributed locks
Consensus protocols
Eventual consistency
Communication Formats and Frameworks
Advanced
gRPC
JSON over HTTP
MessagePack
Thrift
Observability
Advanced
Metrics
Alerting
Log Aggregation
Capacity Planning
Security
Intermediate
Zero Trust
PKI
TLS
OpenID
Threat Modeling
Penetration Testing
Interests
Coffee
Espresso
Cold Brew
Small Batch Beans
Soccer
Timbers
MLS