DAVID STANEK

Summary

Principal Engineer and Platform & Infrastructure Architect with 27+ years of experience designing, building, and operating secure, scalable, highly available systems. I define and deliver production platforms under real-world constraints — including regulated environments, remote and air-gapped deployments, and 24/7 uptime requirements. I lead architecture for cloud-native, multi-service products (Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GitOps) and build the tooling, standards, and deployment practices that let teams ship independently with confidence. I mentor engineers, teach at the university level, speak publicly, and drive culture: I raise the capability of the organization, not just the quality of the code.

Selected Impact Highlights

• Earned technical leadership across every organization — consistently took on architectural ownership, set standards adopted org-wide, and became the go-to for critical decisions regardless of title, at companies ranging from startups to HPE.
• Built the Kubernetes platform that became the foundation of a strategic HPE product — owned end-to-end architecture for a 98-service platform used by 12 teams, accelerating release cadence from monthly to daily.
• Core contributor to OpenStack Keystone — helped secure identity and authentication for one of the largest open source cloud platforms, with deployments spanning thousands of tenants.

Professional Experience

Principal Cloud Engineer
Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Remote | Jan, 2020 - Present

• Lead architect and hands-on builder for a new Kubernetes-based microservices platform that underpins a strategic HPE product. Defined the core service architecture, deployment model, isolation boundaries, and operational standards to support 98 independently deployable services owned by 12 teams.
• Designed and implemented a repeatable Infrastructure-as-Code model (Terraform, GitOps) to provision full, production-like environments on demand. This eliminated fragile, one-off snowflake clusters and enabled faster experimentation, consistent security controls, and auditable change history.
• Established the service onboarding model and delivery standards for new teams, including runtime contracts, health/readiness expectations, observability requirements, and rollout / rollback procedures — creating an internal “platform product” instead of one-off infrastructure.
• Drove production readiness for complex, high-availability workloads, including strategies for zero-/low-downtime deployment, safe rollback, and resilience under real-world constraints — accelerating release cadence from monthly to daily deployments.
• Mentored junior and mid-level engineers in distributed systems design, fault tolerance, infrastructure automation, and pragmatic shipping. Raised the bar on code quality, review discipline, and operational thinking across the org.

Adjunct Professor
Case Western Reserve University | Cleveland, OH | Jan, 2019 - Present

• Teach Python fundamentals to 50–75 business students per semester with no prior programming background, building practical skills in automation, data handling, and problem decomposition.
• Emphasize algorithmic thinking and structured problem solving, tying loops, conditionals, and data structures to real business use cases.
• Run the class around hands-on projects where every student ships a working final program tied to a real scenario (automation, analysis, or decision support).

Senior Software Engineer
Cray Inc. (Acquired by HPE) | Remote | Aug, 2019 - Dec, 2019

• Guided the modernization of build and deployment workflows for supercomputer control-plane microservices, moving the team toward safe, repeatable releases in remote and sometimes air-gapped environments.
• Contributed to the design of a zero-downtime upgrade strategy for critical microservices — rolling / blue-green style releases with health checks and rollback safety — to protect availability during production updates.

Senior Software Engineer
Rackspace | Remote | Aug, 2013 - Jul, 2019

• Built and shipped internal platforms on OpenShift with automated Jenkins delivery pipelines, enabling teams to self-deploy production services on-demand instead of waiting on manual ops.
• Re-architected high-risk legacy systems into independently deployable microservices, reducing coupled releases and enabling teams to ship changes without full-system downtime.
• Served as a core developer on OpenStack Keystone (identity/auth) used across large-scale OpenStack deployments to secure thousands of tenants and services.
• Contributed upstream changes across multiple OpenStack projects to keep Rackspace’s production cloud aligned with mainline code and reduce internal fork/maintenance burden.
• Designed an identity bridge between Rackspace’s legacy auth system and Keystone, enabling a seamless migration path without breaking customer authentication.
• Coordinated identity integration across teams and organizations as part of the OSIC initiative, driving Rackspace toward community-aligned Keystone-based authentication.

Software Consultant
dstanek.com | Mentor, OH (Remote) | 2008 - 2018

• Advised startups and internal teams on Python and cloud architecture, de-risking early technical decisions.
• Delivered cloud-ready deployment patterns (infra-as-code, observability, security baselines) so clients could scale from prototype to first real customers without hiring a full DevOps team.
• Engaged as the ‘make this work’ engineer in high-risk or first-production situations — standing up architecture, deployment patterns, and technical direction when clients didn’t yet have internal senior engineering.

Senior Software Architect
AG Interactive (American Greetings) | Cleveland, OH | Feb, 2001 - Jul, 2013

• Owned the end-to-end architecture for high-traffic, revenue-critical Python applications serving tens of millions of transactions at peak (Valentine’s Day), ensuring performance, security, and maintainability at scale.
• Set architectural direction and established standards that other teams adopted across the organization.
• Led scalability initiatives across core transactional systems, improving throughput and reliability for high-volume online transactions.
• Designed and delivered production Python services that powered customer-facing features and enabled the business to launch new products quickly.
• Led post-acquisition technology consolidation, integrating acquired platforms into a unified architecture to eliminate redundant systems and reduce operational overhead.
• Served as the organization’s Python subject matter expert, mentoring engineers, reviewing critical code, and raising code quality across a 50-person engineering organization.

Web Developer
Cardinal Commerce | Mentor, OH | 1999 - Jan, 2001

• Built a configurable, XML/XSLT-driven white-label portal system that let the company spin up new partner/customer portals for non-profit organizations in minutes instead of building each one from scratch.
• Unified Java services, VB COM Automation, MTS components, and SQL Server 7 into a consistent portal runtime, ensuring each new portal could securely access the right customer and transaction data.

Software Engineer
New Millennium Conquest | Dublin, OH | 1998 - 1999

• Rebuilt the prepaid calling card telecom interface, migrating it from legacy ColdFusion to a maintainable ASP implementation that eliminated tech debt and stabilized a revenue-critical workflow.
• Built custom VB/C++ line-of-business applications that let customer service reps resolve account and service issues faster and with fewer escalations.
• Automated data extraction and reporting with Perl, converting multi-hour manual analysis into on-demand dashboards for leadership.
• Identified and remediated Y2K defects across critical production systems to ensure continuity and regulatory compliance during the 2000 rollover.

Community & Leadership

Open Source

• Long-time contributor to Python and Kubernetes open source projects
• Core contributor to OpenStack Keystone; contributed across multiple OpenStack projects
• Contributor to various cloud-native open source projects

Cleveland Area Python Interest Group

• Co-founded CLEPY, growing it to over 2,000 members; provided capital, content, and leadership during the early days.

Public Speaking

• Spoken at PyOhio, PyCon, CodeMash, StirTrek, and local user groups and meetups