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Howdy! I'm Braxton

Braxton Schafer

Systems Engineer at Cloudflare

I am a highly motivated, bright, and articulate individual with a wide breadth of experience and skills, a passion for technology, and a devotion to doing things the right way - especially when it is not easy. Learning new things and teaching others delight me. Currently, I am looking for my next challenge building out and automating large-scale Kubernetes as a first-class platform.

Drive to Learn
Mentorship
Leadership

Skills

Experiences

1
Cloudflare

Mar 2022 - Present

Remote US

Cloudflare is a company focused on building a better Internet.

Systems Engineer

Mar 2022 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Build and maintain large multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters as a first-class platform.
  • Develop and maintain internal applications in Go and Python, including controller-runtime-based projects.
  • Keep Kubernetes deployments DRY with CDK8S in TypeScript.
  • Contribute to upstream open-source projects including Kubernetes and Prometheus.

Epic

May 2013 - Mar 2022

Verona WI

Epic develops software to help people get well, help people stay well, and help future generations be healthier.

UNIX/DevOps Engineer

Jan 2019 - Mar 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Manage Kubernetes project and people.
  • Senior developer of internal tools, responsible for taking these applications from concept to production and providing ongoing support for them.
  • Perform code review for other software developers and maintain continuous integration infrastructure and tooling.
  • Member of Security Operations Council, on which I provide information security and policy recommendations.
  • Administer Splunk infrastructure, including creating dashboards and writing custom tooling to support Splunk deployment.
  • Support a wide breadth of UNIX systems, including Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, and AIX.
  • Manage systems via Puppet; monitor systems using Zabbix.
Desktop Support Engineer

Sep 2015 - Jan 2019

Responsibilities:
  • Senior developer of internal tools, responsible for taking these applications from concept to production and providing ongoing support for them.
  • Perform code review for other software developers and maintain continuous integration infrastructure and tooling.
  • Member of Security Operations Council, on which I provide information security and policy recommendations.
  • Administer Splunk infrastructure, including creating dashboards and writing custom tooling to support Splunk deployment.
  • Support Epic’s 9,500 end users to ensure they are productive and happy.
  • Lead the Apple administration team, supporting hundreds of Mac and iOS devices via Jamf Pro and custom scripts.
  • Mentor and train new team members.
Computer and Technology Services Student Assistant

May 2013 - Aug 2015

Responsibilities:
  • Set up an imaging and management solution for Epic’s growing number of Mac computers.
  • Worked collaboratively to design and develop a user-facing web app in C#/ASP.NET to perform circulation of loaner laptops, using Git and Jenkins CI.
  • Planned, designed, developed, and implemented a web app in C#/ASP.NET to track inventory in multiple locations.
  • Supported Epic’s 9,000 end users by performing hardware and software troubleshooting.
  • Imaged, scripted, and delivered computing equipment for 300-700 new hires each month.
2

3
School District of New Glarus

May 2012 - May 2013

New Glarus WI

Small school district.

Assistant Network Coordinator

May 2012 - May 2013

Responsibilities:
  • Responsible for managing the IT team, kept them on task and functional.
  • Maintained all district equipment.
  • Proposed, presented, and recommended new equipment and solutions to district administration.
  • Provided friendly and courteous support to administration and faculty, and dealt with mediation between IT team and faculty members.

Education

AB, Major: Computer Science (hons), Minor: Spanish, Cum laude
Extracurricular Activities:
  • Studied abroad in Seville, Spain.
  • Participated and placed in ACM and MICS programming competitions.