$ whoami

Robert Puffe

DevOps Lead · AWS · Terraform · CI/CD

Remote (US) · based in Jamestown, ND

I look after the AWS infrastructure, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines behind two HIPAA-regulated healthcare products, as half of a two-person DevOps team. I grew into DevOps from IT support over ten years at one company, which taught me to build things I'd be happy to maintain. Where I'm heading is platform engineering: pipelines, environments, and self-service tooling that let dev teams ship without waiting on me.

10
years at Eldermark
5
years hands-on AWS
20+
pipelines maintained
3
promotions
Get in touch Résumé (PDF) See my work ↓
robert.jpg
Robert Puffe playing guitar at a live show

## experience

Eldermark

healthcare SaaS · remote · Sep 2016 – Present · 3 promotions

DevOps Lead

Apr 2026 – Present

DevOps Engineer

Mar 2024 – Apr 2026

Same role, new title: promoted to Lead in April 2026. The work below spans both.

Platform and infrastructure steward for Eldermark's AWS environments, leading DevOps work that usually splits across release engineering, infrastructure architecture, and platform engineering. A lot of the job is connecting dots: catching risky infrastructure and deployment changes before they become operational issues, and keeping releases moving across teams while making the platform more self-service, more secure, and less reactive.

  • Look after AWS infrastructure for two SaaS products (8 accounts spanning 10 environments) and help support two additional product platforms
  • Redesigned the CI/CD pipeline architecture and rebuilt manually configured pipelines as reusable Terraform modules, cutting roughly 20 minutes of downtime from every production deployment
  • Build and maintain 20+ pipelines with GitHub Actions, AWS CodePipeline, and Terraform, including staging promotion flows and automated builds for shared ECR base images
  • Replaced a manual, multi-system environment refresh process with a push-button CodePipeline, saving hours of work per refresh and removing human error from production database restores
  • Built a deployment tracking system on Lambda and CodePipeline events that notifies Teams and updates Jira automatically, so nobody has to chase release status
  • Built internal self-service tools, including a CLI that lets engineering managers run deployments to lower environments themselves and a tool that lets support staff provision users, so routine requests don't have to wait on DevOps
  • Leading the migration of our infrastructure-as-code from AWS Copilot to Terraform, converting live production services module by module without downtime
  • Manage branching strategy and release management across the GitHub organization: branch models, staged promotion, and versioned container images
  • Helped lead the company's early adoption of AI development tools, from proofs of concept to everyday use
  • Respond to production infrastructure issues and review changes early in the SDLC to catch architecture and deployment risks before they reach an environment
  • Work with leadership on security audits, penetration-test remediation, and company-wide initiatives like our Jira migration, and implement infrastructure and container security practices that meet HIPAA and reliability requirements

System Administrator

May 2021 – Mar 2024

End-to-end administration of AWS and on-premise infrastructure supporting multiple internal and customer-facing products.

  • Took on DevOps responsibilities for environments and pipelines
  • Helped bring the DevOps function in-house from an outside contractor
  • Migrated workloads to AWS using EC2, S3, Transfer Family, and Terraform
  • Collaborated closely with development and QA teams to establish and maintain environments
  • Consolidated multiple Office 365 and Google Workspace environments into a single shared Office 365 tenant

IT Specialist

Sep 2016 – May 2021
  • Helped move the company to remote work during the pandemic
  • Managed Office 365 including user provisioning, licensing, and security
  • Planned and executed the rollout of Microsoft Teams
  • Maintained Dynamics 365 instance including customizations and reporting
  • Managed Windows Server and network infrastructure in datacenters, offices, and cloud environments
  • Maintained customer databases including backups and routine management tasks

Before Eldermark

2012 – 2016
  • Central Business Systems · Document Management Specialist, Computer Repair Technician
  • RadioShack · Store Manager
  • Built foundation in technical troubleshooting, small business IT consulting, and team leadership

## skills

AWS Compute & Containers

ECS EC2 Lambda Docker AWS Copilot Fargate

AWS Data & Storage

RDS Aurora PostgreSQL DynamoDB S3 Transfer Family

AWS Networking & Security

VPC Route 53 CloudFront API Gateway Cognito IAM ACM Secrets Manager

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform Terraform Cloud CloudFormation AWS Copilot CLI

CI/CD Pipelines

GitHub Actions AWS CodePipeline AWS CodeBuild Git GitHub

Observability & Monitoring

CloudWatch CloudWatch Alarms Elastic APM SNS Notifications Log Monitoring

Scripting & Automation

Python Boto3 Bash PowerShell Liquibase

Systems & Platforms

Linux Windows Server Jira Office 365 LaunchDarkly

## how this site works

This page is its own portfolio piece: my take on the Cloud Resume Challenge. It's static HTML on S3 served through CloudFront. The visitor counter below is a live call to API Gateway, handled by a Lambda function that increments a count in DynamoDB. All of the infrastructure is defined in CloudFormation, and every push to main triggers a CodeBuild job that syncs the site to S3 and invalidates the CDN, including the change you're reading right now. It's not a one-off, either: I run a couple of other sites on this same pattern.

AWS · defined in CloudFormation you browser CloudFront CDN + TLS S3 static site origin API Gateway HTTP API Lambda counter fn DynamoDB visit count site GET /counter GitHub rpuffe/CRC CodeBuild validate → s3 sync → smoke test git push deploy site + invalidate CDN
$ curl api/counter → you are visitor … counted by Lambda, stored in DynamoDB

Want the details? View the source and CloudFormation template on GitHub →

## contact

Let's talk.

I'm always glad to hear about DevOps and platform work, or to trade notes on AWS, Terraform, and CI/CD. Email is the best way to reach me.

LinkedIn GitHub Résumé (PDF)