Role Summary

Chris Ward is a DevOps Engineer II with extensive experience deploying, automating, and maintaining cloud and platform services across Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud, and hybrid environments. He specializes in infrastructure automation, CI/CD pipeline development, system administration, and secure, scalable cloud operations for enterprise and research workloads.

He works at the intersection of platform engineering, cloud operations, and service delivery, applying security‑aligned and standards‑driven practices informed by hands‑on experience with systems, virtualization, and critical infrastructure management.

Focus Areas

• Cloud infrastructure engineering (Azure, AWS, IBM Cloud, VPC, GovCloud)
• CI/CD pipeline architecture and automation (Azure DevOps, GitHub, IBM Cloud)
• Configuration management and automated provisioning with Ansible & Python
• Linux systems administration and virtualization
• Backup, recovery, data lifecycle management (Azure Blob, cloud storage)
• Platform reliability, monitoring, documentation, and operational excellence
• Coordinating cross‑functional teams to support platform scaling and service uptime

Background and Experience

• Leading deployments of WatsonX.ai and other AI/ML workloads across AWS and Azure
• Managing EC2, GovCloud, VPC infrastructure, and hybrid cloud networking
• Building end‑to‑end CI/CD pipelines for rapidly updated, globally deployed products
• Developing and executing Ansible playbooks for enterprise environment automation
• Supporting large research and academic workloads in Azure Cloud
• Documenting complex system deployments, upgrade paths, and operational workflows

Education and Credentials

• B.S. Technology Management – Texas A&M University
• Minors in Cybersecurity and Business Administration
• ITIL 4 Certification