DEVOPS · PLATFORM ENGINEERING · SRE · AI INFRASTRUCTURE

Christopher
Whyland

25 years building systems that don't go down.

Now building systems that think.

25+
Years
Production infrastructure
DGX Spark
Private inference cluster
397B
Parameters
Largest model served
99.99%
SLA Record
PCI-DSS · SOX · HIPAA

Experience


Cognizant 2023 – Present
Senior Manager, DevOps Engineering
Fortune 500 consulting engagements across retail, healthcare, and financial services.
  • Led GKE right-sizing initiative for Michaels ($5B+ retail) — validated 3× Black Friday capacity headroom through HPA tuning, cluster autoscaling, and pod resource optimization
  • Delivered SRE maturity assessment for OptumRx (healthcare) that became the foundation of their reliability practice roadmap
  • Architected SRE transformation program for a confidential financial services client — full-stack maturity audit, improvement backlog, and tailored engineering training curriculum
AI R&D alongside professional role — 2024–Present
Jetty 2022 – 2023
Manager, DevOps Engineering
Early-stage insurtech startup. Owned CI/CD, IaC, and the entire AWS footprint.
  • Containerized legacy Python services to ECS Fargate — $800K annual cost reduction, 70% performance improvement
  • Ground-up IaC rewrite in Terraform with custom modules + GitHub CI (TFLint, TFSec, vulnerability scanning) — 30% reduction in deployment errors
Covetrus 2020 – 2022
DevOps Manager → Lead DevOps Engineer
Fortune 1000 ($4.3B revenue) veterinary health technology. Post-merger unification.
  • Unified 25-person global DevOps org post-merger (Azure + AWS) across international markets
  • Microservices modernization: Terraform, Kubernetes, Confluent Kafka, Harness — 60% reduction in time-to-market
  • Zero audit findings across SOX and PCI. $2M annual cloud cost reduction. GOAT Award Q2 2022.
EVO Payments International 2017 – 2020
Senior Lead Infrastructure Engineer / Enterprise Architect
Global payments platform operating across North America and Europe.
  • Established Systems Architect group supporting payments expansion into 5 new markets
  • DR strategy reducing potential revenue impact by 80%. SRE practice across 5 global dev centers — 60% MTTR reduction.
Earlier Career 2002 – 2016

Progressive roles in DevOps, systems administration, network engineering, and infrastructure across Vets First Choice, EVO Payments, MEMIC, and others — building the Linux, networking, virtualization, and storage foundations that underpin modern platform and AI infrastructure work.

Independent AI Infrastructure R&D


Self-directed research conducted alongside professional work, 2024–present. Private GPU hardware, production-pattern systems, real evaluations — not proofs of concept.

Private GPU Inference Cluster

2× NVIDIA DGX Spark · vLLM · Tensor Parallel

Dual-node cluster serving 30B–397B parameter models (Nemotron, Qwen, Cascade). SRE discipline applied to inference: quantitative benchmarking, config management, Prometheus/Grafana observability, custom vLLM fork for hardware-specific optimizations.

Multi-Agent Operations Platform

7 specialized agents · Matrix/Signal · Real infra tooling

Production multi-agent system with agents for infrastructure ops, automated evaluation, project tracking, and workflow automation. Integrated with real operational tooling — not a demo.

LLM Evaluation Framework

GPQA-Diamond · IFEval · MATH Hard · Custom agentic phases

Comprehensive eval combining industry-standard benchmarks (via lm-evaluation-harness) with custom agentic testing: 16 tool-calling tests, text quality assessment, multi-turn reasoning scenarios. InfluxDB + Grafana dashboards.

Model Fine-Tuning Pipeline

ORPO · LoRA · Mamba-2/Transformer MoE

Executed preference alignment and parameter-efficient fine-tuning on hybrid architectures. Full-cycle pre/post evaluation for catastrophic forgetting detection. Developed internal guidelines for small-active-parameter MoE models.

RAG & Knowledge Systems

pgvector · FastAPI · Redis · Celery

Semantic search pipelines providing persistent contextual memory across agent sessions. Multi-phase AI pipelines with swappable LLM backends.

ACTIVE STACK
vLLM ORPO/LoRA NVIDIA Nemotron Qwen3.5-397B Kubernetes Terraform Prometheus Grafana Proxmox ZFS Docker Python FastAPI pgvector

Open Source


AI-Agents

Production-pattern RAG stack — FastAPI + pgvector + Redis + Celery

Python

vllm-custom-main

vLLM fork with DGX Spark inference patches

Python

Agentic-HomeLab

Agentic automation for infrastructure management

Python

critical_user_journeys

2

CUJ framework reference for production SRE

Markdown
CERTIFICATIONS AWS DevOps ProfessionalCCNAGenAI Capstone — Agent FrameworksCompTIA Network+Dell DCSECisco DCUCI
Speaker — DevOps 207, Portland ME · Computer Network Information Systems, Wentworth Institute of Technology