Jon Allyn

Resume

Lead Systems Engineer · Burlington, VT

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Experience

  1. Sr. Systems Engineer → Lead Systems Engineer

    May 2019 — Present

    Cox Automotive

    Architecting and automating a self-service private cloud platform across multiple datacenters. I lead a team that develops 100% of its code with AI using spec-driven development.

    • Architected and automated server provisioning for environments spanning multiple datacenters with more than 1,000 hosts, replacing manual build processes with declarative, repeatable pipelines.
    • Instantiated a self-service private cloud platform on vRealize Automation — the direct predecessor to VMware Cloud Foundation Automation — letting internal customers provision virtual machine workloads on demand.
    • Authored custom cloud templates, catalog items with approval policies, and vRealize Orchestrator workflows to extend the platform beyond its out-of-the-box capability.
    • Adopted event-driven solutions for workload and component tracking in a CMDB, keeping ownership and portfolio metadata accurate without manual upkeep.
    • Lead multiple projects on automation maturation — infrastructure as code, immutability, GitOps — and established the standards, reusable patterns and documentation other engineers build on.
    • Lead a team that develops 100% of its code with AI, specification-first, backed by automated testing, type checking, security scanning and drift detection.
    • Terraform
    • Ansible
    • Python
    • PowerShell
    • GitHub Actions
    • vSphere
    • vRealize Automation
    • vRealize Orchestrator

  2. Sr. Systems Engineer → Lead Systems Engineer

    August 2017 — May 2019

    MyWebGrocer

    Reliability engineering for high-transaction workloads across primary and DR datacenters.

    • Worked with development teammates to establish SRE practices for system reliability and performance, and developed KPIs measuring reliability against customer SLAs.
    • Leveraged Prometheus and Grafana for observability in both the private cloud and Azure.
    • Managed compute (Dell) and storage (EMC) configurations supporting high-transaction OLTP workloads across primary and DR datacenters.
    • Prometheus
    • Grafana
    • Azure
    • Dell
    • EMC

  3. IT Systems Engineer

    Apr 2013 — August 2017

    Dealer.com

    Corporate IT datacenters and applications, across primary on-site and DR locations.

    • Administered Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange and DNS, plus developer tooling including Atlassian Confluence and Jira.
    • Contributed to workload consolidation and migration projects, domain migrations, and campus networking projects.
    • Active Directory
    • Exchange
    • DNS
    • Confluence
    • Jira

Skills

Grouped by what the tool is for. Everything listed is something I would be comfortable being questioned on.

VMware and private cloud

  • vSphere / ESXi
  • vRealize Automation
  • Cloud templates
  • Service catalogs and approval policies
  • vRealize Orchestrator
  • vRealize Operations

Automation and IaC

  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitOps
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes

Languages and scripting

  • Python
  • PowerShell
  • JavaScript

Integrations

  • ServiceNow
  • Active Directory
  • REST APIs
  • RabbitMQ
  • Event-driven CMDB workflows

Platforms

  • RHEL
  • Windows Server
  • SQL Server
  • Redis
  • Elastic
  • AWS
  • Azure

Monitoring and observability

  • New Relic
  • Splunk
  • PagerDuty
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana

Practice

  • Spec-driven development
  • AI-assisted delivery
  • Code review
  • Change management (ServiceNow)

Certifications

2024
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — Amazon Web Services

Education

2007–2011
B.S. Computer Networking and Information Security — Champlain College, Burlington VT