Blake Ridgway

Summary

Site reliability engineer with 8+ years running production infrastructure on Kubernetes, Azure and AWS. I define SLIs/SLOs, own incidents from on-call through postmortem, and eliminate toil with Terraform, Ansible and GitOps. A deep networking background — from datacenter routing to cloud VNets — speeds up root-cause analysis across the full stack. Experienced in regulated fintech, insurance, banking and government environments (SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA). Through Arcline, I run reliability, cost and compliance engagements for regulated SaaS teams.

Experience

Cloud Engineer (SRE & Platform) · Advanced Management Services

Sep 2025 – Present · Remote

• Own production reliability and on-call for Azure (AKS with 150+ pods across four scale sets, ~10 VMs) and on-premises infrastructure; every service meets its 99.9% SLO (Azure Monitor, Grafana) with zero incidents to date.
• Cut Azure spend 55% ($40K to $18K a month) by rightsizing compute and storage through automation.
• Reduced deployment time from 30 minutes to under five (85% faster) with Terraform, ARM templates and Azure DevOps pipelines.
• Built an on-premises QA Kubernetes cluster on Proxmox HA (25–30 VMs) behind pfSense and Arista, moving pre-production testing off cloud spend.
• Deployed NetBird zero-trust mesh networking and secured hybrid connectivity with Azure VNets, VPN Gateways, ExpressRoute, NSGs, RBAC and Key Vault.

Founder & Site Reliability Engineer · Arcline IT LLC

Apr 2026 – Present · Enid, Oklahoma

Arcline is site reliability for regulated SaaS: reliability, cost and compliance engineering for teams that answer to an auditor.

• Run fixed-price Reliability & Cost Audits — one week, read-only — with every finding ranked by dollars, risk and effort, ending in a 90-day plan.
• Deliver Audit-Ready Platform engagements for SOC 2, PCI DSS and HIPAA: controls implemented in Terraform and Kubernetes, automated evidence, a prioritised gap list and an auditor walkthrough.
• Provide fractional SRE at 10–15 hours a week: SLOs and error budgets, on-call and escalation design, GitOps and release practice, plus a monthly spend and reliability review.
• Scope, price and deliver every engagement personally; fixed-price quotes before work begins and full documentation at handoff.

Systems Administrator · Triangle Insurance Company

Jul 2023 – Sep 2025 · Enid, Oklahoma

• Built Prometheus/Grafana WAN monitoring and Nagios alerting with automated escalation, cutting time-to-detect by 40%, time-to-resolve by 20% and network incidents by 25%.
• Automated provisioning, patching, configuration and DR validation with IaC, improving RTO by 30%, release speed by 15% and performance by 20%.
• Designed a policy-as-code firewall framework with geo-blocking and segmentation; managed Active Directory/SSO, EDR and vulnerability remediation across a 50–200 user environment.
• Managed the datacenter end to end — VLANs, VPN and remote access, WAN/ISP circuits, wireless, switching and physical cabling — and reported project outcomes directly to leadership.

Senior Platform Engineer · Prime Trust

Mar 2022 – Jul 2023 · Remote

• Kept a crypto custody platform serving 1M+ API requests a day reliable across six Kubernetes clusters (150+ nodes) and four environments.
• Carried bi-weekly PagerDuty on-call in a four-to-five engineer rotation; led war rooms, wrote postmortems and automated fixes that cut recurrence and alert noise.
• Ran Argo CD GitOps with trunk-based, bi-weekly releases, testing every change in ephemeral PR environments and eliminating drift.
• Built reusable Terraform modules, Helm charts and pipeline templates that standardised Azure/AWS provisioning and service delivery.
• Architected VPC networking, ingress and service mesh; supported SOC 2 and PCI controls, mentored engineers and wrote incident runbooks.
• Led the infrastructure wind-down during the company's 2023 shutdown, decommissioning cloud and Kubernetes resources across every environment.

IT Support Specialist · Vertex Solutions

Nov 2020 – Feb 2022 · Enid, Oklahoma

• Built zero-touch provisioning (PXE plus Ansible) across Air Force training bases, cutting setup time by 75%; added automated testing that cut bugs by 40%.
• Coordinated directly with military and government stakeholders to plan and execute deployments in classified and mixed military/civilian environments.
• Automated supplier communication and inventory management — demand-based ordering and RMA processing — reducing downtime.

System Infrastructure · BankOnIT

Jun 2018 – Aug 2020 · Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Promoted twice, from Cyber Prevention Specialist.

• Managed firewalls, VLANs, routing and VPN across a portfolio of banking clients, consistently exceeding uptime SLAs; led RCAs that cut incident recurrence by 30%.
• Automated Linux/Windows server management and patching, reducing configuration drift and vulnerability exposure.
• Built CI/CD automation pipelines with software engineers, cutting manual deployment intervention by 40% and improving release frequency.
• Wrote self-service runbooks and tooling that let clients resolve common network issues themselves, cutting support ticket volume by 25%.

IT Operations Support · Regional retailer

Feb 2015 – Jul 2016 · Enid, Oklahoma

• Automated deployment and management of ESXi and XenCenter virtualisation environments with IaC, and automated Cisco ASA firewall, router and switch configuration.
• Built backup and recovery with Clonezilla, reducing RTO by 50%, and automated monitoring for SQL databases.

Projects

Sailex · Founder

Jan 2018 – Jan 2023 · Personal project

• Conceived and led development of a Linux distribution, with customised services, tooling and low-level components written in x86 assembly.
• Made the call to suspend the project once the market proved saturated, rather than sink more time into it.

Education

• Computer Science — Southern New Hampshire University · 2021–2022
• IT Program — Autry Technology Center · 2013

Certifications

Held

• CompTIA Network+
• Fortinet FCF
• Fortinet FCA Cybersecurity

In progress

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

Technical skills

• Cloud — Azure, AWS, ExpressRoute, hybrid connectivity
• Containers and orchestration — Kubernetes, AKS, Helm, Argo CD, GitOps, Docker, service mesh
• IaC and automation — Terraform, Ansible, ARM templates, Pulumi, Azure DevOps, Chef, Python, Bash, PowerShell
• Observability — Prometheus, Grafana, Azure Monitor, CloudWatch, Splunk, ELK, Nagios
• Networking — BGP, OSPF, VLANs, SD-WAN, MPLS, VPN, 802.1X, load balancing, DNS/DHCP, pfSense, Fortinet, Cisco IOS/NX-OS, Arista, Aruba, NetBird, Wireshark
• Cloud cost — rightsizing, spend analysis, capacity planning
• Security and compliance — zero trust, policy-as-code, RBAC, Key Vault, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA
• Virtualisation — VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V, Citrix