Sam Merwin

Professional Summary

Site Reliability and Infrastructure Engineer with 10+ years of hands-on experience across cloud platform operations, incident management, and escalation support. Progressed from frontline systems administration through two promotions at DigitalOcean to senior engineering, management, and FinOps roles at NS1 and FanDuel. Track record of building tooling that reduces resolution times, automating manual operational workflows, and serving as a calm, reliable escalation point during high-severity incidents. Comfortable working across the full stack from DNS and networking through Kubernetes orchestration to cloud cost governance and customer-facing communication.

Professional Experience

First Light Technologies | Poultney, VT

• Making big glass into small glass
• Took a manufacturing role for the health insurance, since the tech job market remains historically brutal

FanDuel | Remote

• Managed AWS Reserved Instance and Savings Plan portfolio, including purchase planning, coverage analysis, and utilization oversight
• Advised engineering stakeholders on infrastructure design decisions to improve cost efficiency across the AWS environment

• Maintained reliability of AWS production infrastructure supporting a platform with millions of active users during peak sporting events
• Built proactive monitoring and alerting pipelines in Datadog, enabling early detection of degradations before they escalated to customer-facing incidents
• Partnered with application engineering teams to diagnose performance bottlenecks, contributing to improved system stability across high-traffic services
• Participated in 24/7 on-call rotation covering critical production systems, consistently meeting response SLAs for P1/P2 incidents
• Built early cloud spend visibility tooling to improve financial transparency across the AWS environment

Low Key Internet Concerns | Remote

• Provide IT consulting services for small businesses and startups
• Perform code review, refactoring, and technical debt remediation
• Structured as a single-member LLC so that Claude Code, Cursor, and other AI tooling subscriptions are, technically, deductible business expenses

NS1 | Remote

• Managed a team of customer success engineers responsible for incident response and escalation handling for enterprise DNS customers
• Standardized incident response procedures, improving consistency of communication and resolution across high-severity events
• Developed custom REST API debugging and integration tooling that accelerated troubleshooting workflows for both internal engineers and customer-facing teams

• Served as primary escalation point for high-severity incidents involving managed DNS and DDI services for enterprise accounts
• Reproduced complex customer-reported issues in isolated lab environments, enabling engineering teams to identify root causes faster
• Built and maintained internal knowledge base documentation, reducing repeated escalations for known issue patterns

• Triaged and resolved customer issues with managed DNS services as part of a 24/7 on-call support rotation
• Provided technical guidance on DNS configuration, DNSSEC, and traffic management to customers ranging from startups to large enterprises
• Contributed to internal platform operations, supporting Nomad-based service deployments and Docker pipeline maintenance

DigitalOcean | New York, NY

• Contributed to operations of multiple production Kubernetes clusters, managing L3 networking transitions, BGP peer configurations, and cluster annotations across datacenter regions
• Built debug tooling and operational automation for Kubernetes clusters, including Vault token integration and HAProxy ingress upgrades for production load balancers
• Maintained Chef-based configuration management for Kubernetes components, including etcd alert routing, delivery pipeline upgrades, and NTP cookbook updates across staging and production environments

• Supported infrastructure running millions of customer VMs across 8 global datacenter regions spanning North America, Europe, and Asia
• Authored thousands of Chef commits automating server provisioning, cookbook development, and configuration management across the full hypervisor fleet; built Ansible playbooks for Mesos cluster management and Spectre/Meltdown remediation
• Operated Mesos/Marathon and Presto data infrastructure, built Prometheus monitoring and alerting for Chef and platform services, and managed Vault secrets policies across engineering teams
• Promoted from Cloud Operations Engineer based on demonstrated ability to take ownership of complex infrastructure problems

• Triaged and resolved customer-facing escalations across Linux, networking, and storage systems as part of a 24/7 operations team
• Built internal tooling and scripts for hypervisor operations, including force-create automation and Prometheus-based performance dashboards
• Contributed to hypervisor preflight validation tooling and operational documentation, improving consistency of datacenter provisioning workflows

New York Public Radio (WNYC) | New York, NY

• Managed AWS infrastructure for streaming platforms, web properties, and audio archival systems

Ogilvy & Mather | New York, NY

• Provided systems administration support across New York, Atlanta, and Chicago offices
• Maintained Windows and Linux server environments; troubleshot end-user and infrastructure issues

Internap Network Services | New York, NY

• Developed PHP and JavaScript features for Ubersmith datacenter management platform

Alley | New York, NY

• Built custom web solutions using Drupal 6 and 7; managed deployment pipelines

Voxel dot Net | New York, NY

• Provided frontline customer support and implementation services for managed hosting clients
• Diagnosed and resolved server, networking, and application issues across diverse customer environments
• Onboarded new customers and provided technical guidance on hosting configurations

Noble Desktop, LLC | New York, NY

• Created and tested workbook exercises for web and print design software curriculum

Technical Skills

Education

Skidmore College | Saratoga Springs, NY

Certifications & Languages

FinOps Certified Practitioner (FinOps Foundation) | FAA Remote Pilot License (Part 107) | English (Native) | Spanish (Limited Working Proficiency)