Brian Snelgrove

DevOps Engineer · Platform Architect · Software Developer

Seattle, WA · b.w.snelgrove@gmail.com · linkedin.com/in/bwsnelgrove · github.com/b-snel · bsnel.com

Ten years at Benaroya Research Institute, from the helpdesk to designing the platform its research runs on: infrastructure as code, GitOps delivery, research computing and AI tooling, built mostly on open source and hardware the institute already owns.

Experience

  1. DevOps Engineer · Benaroya Research Institute

    2020 – Present · Seattle, WA

    • Designed and led BRI’s infrastructure-as-code platform: Packer images, Terraform (26 state roots, ~600 resources, 24 providers), Ansible/AWX, and four Kubernetes clusters (46 nodes) on owned hardware.
    • Built the GitOps delivery path: FluxCD for ~53 apps, build-once / promote-by-retag releases with blocking backups and verified rollouts, and self-hosted CI runners on Kubernetes at $0 a minute.
    • Own security patching across the fleet: Dependabot on every repo; Trivy on IaC, images and the running clusters; CodeQL gates; node2shell (CVE-2026-111497) went from triage to a verified fix in under three hours.
    • Built the observability stack in FluxCD (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager) with 72 custom alert rules for databases, HPC hardware, certificates and storage, routed to Slack.
    • Built the research computing platform on open-source Coder (~52 workspaces, up to 48 cores / 360 GB), replacing Slurm and a Posit Workbench license: $25K a year, now $0.
    • Cut cold-storage cost 93% with JuiceFS Community on S3 Intelligent-Tiering, avoided ~$24.6K a year in enterprise licensing, and reclaimed ~76 TB of primary storage.
    • Created BRI’s Claude Code plugin marketplace (org-wide, zero secrets on disk); a non-engineer shipped a production app in one afternoon — 46 minutes from pull request to production.
    • Wrote Humani (~40K lines of TypeScript; HR and payroll integrations; PostgreSQL migration proven with golden files) and dater (Go + TypeScript genomics data catalog and mover).

  2. Helpdesk Technician · Benaroya Research Institute

    Jun 2016 – 2020 · Seattle, WA

    • Supported every lab and department: imaging, firmware, accounts and access.
    • Automated the repetitive work with PowerShell modules for directory, mail, file sharing, virtualization, HR and procurement, and an employee-onboarding command that built Linux hosts through Ansible.

Skills

Infrastructure as code
Terraform · Ansible · AWX · Packer · vSphere
Containers & GitOps
Kubernetes (Kubespray) · FluxCD · Helm · Docker
CI/CD & security
GitHub Actions · Self-hosted runners · Trivy & Trivy Operator · CodeQL · Dependabot
Cloud, storage & data
AWS S3 · Azure Entra ID & Key Vault · JuiceFS · PostgreSQL · MongoDB · Velero
Languages
TypeScript · Go · PowerShell · Bash · HCL · C# · R
Research computing & AI
Coder · Snakemake · Nextflow · renv · Claude Code plugins · MCP servers
Observability
Prometheus · Alertmanager · Grafana · Loki · Zabbix

Side projects