Blake Johnson

Software Engineering | Technical Leadership | Cloud Infrastructure | Developer Platforms

TS/SCI CLEARED

United States 847-380-0927 blakeejohnson39@gmail.com github.com/johnson2427 LinkedIn Download PDF

Engineering leader with 8+ years of experience architecting distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and developer tooling — from Kubernetes operators and GitOps pipelines to full-stack Rust platforms and data-driven analytics engines. Proven ability to build and lead high-performing engineering teams, drive cross-functional initiatives, and deliver mission-critical infrastructure across defense, enterprise, and startup environments. Equally effective writing low-level systems code in Rust and Go as leading platform strategy and mentoring engineers.

$ Currently Working On

Keyslate

Blackslate Inc

Full-stack Rust platform for secure Kubernetes deployments — building out GitOps orchestration, identity management, IaC generation, and dual Dioxus WASM frontends across 19 crates.

AI/ML Infrastructure

Clarity Innovations

Leading the architecture and deployment of AI/ML infrastructure on Kubernetes — vLLM inference serving, NVIDIA NIM/NeMo, Open WebUI, MCP servers, and lightweight language model evaluation.

$ Core Competencies

Engineering Leadership & Mentorship

Technical Strategy & Architecture

Cloud-Native (AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean)

Kubernetes (EKS, Talos, K3s, RKE2, Crossplane)

Kubernetes Operator Development (Go, Rust)

GitOps (FluxCD, ArgoCD, Helm, Kustomize)

Identity & Access (Keycloak, OIDC, Vault, Zero-Trust)

Developer Platforms (Backstage, IDPs, Internal Tooling)

CI/CD Automation & DevSecOps

Event-Driven Systems (Kafka, NATS, RabbitMQ)

Microservice & Distributed Architectures

Observability (OpenTelemetry, Grafana LGTMP)

AI/ML Infrastructure (NIM, NeMo, Open WebUI)

Data Analytics & Algorithm Development

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Crossplane)

Python, Golang, Rust, SQL, VBA

WASM Frontends (Dioxus), React, FastAPI, Gin

$ Work Experience

Clarity Innovations — Herndon, VA (Remote)

Senior Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Manager

Oct 2022 – Present

Team & Organizational Leadership

Lead and mentor a growing engineering team, driving performance reviews, 1:1s, and individualized career development plans.
Collaborate with product and executive leadership to align engineering strategy with long-term platform objectives.

Platform Architecture & Cloud Infrastructure

Architected and deployed a highly available Kubernetes platform on AWS using Talos and Crossplane.
Designed internal developer platforms (IDPs) integrating Keycloak, ArgoCD, Backstage, and Gitea to accelerate developer onboarding and self-service infrastructure.
Engineered a custom Kubernetes operator in Go for IP address management with PrefixClaim CRDs, eliminating the heavyweight Netbox dependency while preserving full IPAM functionality.
Deliver end-to-end engineering contributions across EKS cluster management platforms, spanning bug resolution, feature development, and infrastructure enhancements.
Developed a Backstage plugin for Keycloak user and group administration, centralizing identity management within the developer portal.
Reverse-engineered and restored a Helm testing pipeline to re-establish CI capability following a key personnel departure.
Optimized FastAPI services with async concurrency and gunicorn/uvicorn load balancing to improve throughput and reliability.

AI/ML Infrastructure & Model Deployment

Promoted to lead an AI/ML deployment initiative, driving the architecture and delivery of machine learning infrastructure on Kubernetes.
Deployed Open WebUI as a self-hosted conversational AI interface, providing teams with secure, on-premise access to large language models.
Orchestrated model deployments using NVIDIA NIM microservices for optimized GPU inference at scale.
Integrated NVIDIA NeMo for model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation workflows within the platform's Kubernetes infrastructure.
Deployed vLLM as a high-throughput inference engine for serving large language models with efficient memory management and continuous batching.
Evaluated and deployed lightweight language models to optimize for latency, cost, and resource-constrained environments while maintaining task-specific accuracy.
Implemented Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to standardize tool integration and context management across AI agents and LLM-powered workflows.
Established model serving pipelines with GPU scheduling and resource management to support production AI/ML workloads.

Developer Experience, Tooling, & Analytics

Authored reusable Helm charts and GitHub Actions workflows to standardize and accelerate deployment pipelines.
Built a Task/Make CLI for provisioning ephemeral Kubernetes clusters, streamlining IaC development and testing workflows.
Implemented Python-based analytics pipelines using Pandas and Polars to surface performance insights from telemetry data.
Established automated performance testing frameworks with Pytest and Locust to validate system behavior under load.

Scalable System Design & Algorithms

Designed and implemented a custom OpenTelemetry receiver/exporter for NATS JetStream in Go, enabling secure transport of traces, metrics, and logs across isolated Kubernetes environments with end-to-end latency instrumentation for Falco security events.
Architected an event-driven messaging system with Kafka, NATS, and Go to orchestrate communication across thousands of Linux devices, reducing compute overhead by 95%.
Migrated legacy Python workloads from deprecated stream processing libraries (Faust) to async Kafka-based systems, improving maintainability and performance.

Minerva Engineering Solutions — Remote

Founder / System Architect

Jan 2018 – Present

Keyslate — Secure Kubernetes Platform

Architecting Keyslate, a full-stack Rust platform for secure Kubernetes deployments that unifies GitOps orchestration, identity management, and infrastructure-as-code generation across 19 crates and 60+ deployable services.
Engineered a custom Vault operator with Kubernetes CRDs (VaultStore, VaultSecret, VaultPolicy), eliminating SOPS-encrypted secrets in favor of Vault as the authoritative secret store.
Developed a cluster-local git server in Rust (SSH via russh, HTTP API) enabling FluxCD reconciliation from an in-cluster mirror independent of external repositories.
Implemented OIDC authentication with Keycloak, featuring multi-tenant realm management, per-tenant admin client pooling, and an event bus for plugin-based integrations.
Built dual Dioxus WASM frontends — an admin portal for identity management and an IaC portal with an interactive provisioning wizard supporting bare-metal, K3s, RKE2, Talos, and cloud providers (AWS, DigitalOcean, Google Cloud, Azure).
Designed a service dependency resolution engine with topological ordering to generate FluxCD kustomizations for the complete platform stack (Cilium, Istio, Vault, Keycloak, CNPG, Grafana LGTMP, and more).
Integrated a Go sidecar wrapping the Helm SDK for programmatic chart installations, eliminating CLI shell-outs for improved reliability and auditability.

Minerva Platform — Sports Analytics & DFS Strategy Engine

Designed and built the Minerva platform, a distributed sports analytics engine for developing, backtesting, and deploying data-driven Daily Fantasy Sports strategies across DraftKings and FanDuel contests.
Architected a 25+ node Talos cluster for high-performance computing, enabling automatic horizontal and vertical scaling of SQL, NoSQL, and backtesting microservices.
Built queue-based data ingestion pipelines using RabbitMQ and Apache Airflow to aggregate player statistics, game schedules, and contest data from MySportsFeeds, DraftKings, and other sources.
Rewrote a critical data retrieval service from FastAPI to Golang's Gin, reducing compute overhead and significantly increasing throughput against Postgres.
Developed FastAPI and Go (Gin) REST services to expose metrics, scoring results, and backtesting outputs across PostgreSQL and MongoDB data stores.
Built a React-based administrative dashboard for managing configurations, viewing analytics, and monitoring platform health.
Developed "Recon," a Rust-based data integrity tool using hash-based diffs to verify dataset consistency across heterogeneous sources.
Built "Minoxide," a modular Rust workspace providing core libraries, CLI tooling, data migration utilities, and charting capabilities for the platform.

Consulting & Client Work

Advised early-stage startups on infrastructure modernization, migrating from synchronous RPC backends to FastAPI with Celery-based task queues.
Designed containerized backend architectures and deployment strategies for clients transitioning from monoliths to microservices.
Provided fractional engineering leadership and architecture reviews, improving platform reliability and developer velocity across client organizations.
Delivered hands-on training in GitOps workflows, Kubernetes debugging, and Terraform-based IaC to client engineering teams.
Implemented zero-trust security policies and secret management using Vault and KMS.
Led backend architecture for a Web3 container platform on AWS EKS, leveraging FastAPI, kr8s, Golang's Gin, GitHub Actions, and Terraform.
Developed an open-source KMS plugin for secure key handling within the Ape ecosystem.
Spearheaded infrastructure modernization efforts for startups adopting Kubernetes and GitOps practices.

The Boeing Company — Huntsville, AL

Systems Engineer III

Apr 2021 – Apr 2022

Built a FastAPI REST service with a Python Dash front-end for real-time data visualization of model health.
Supported simulation infrastructure with analytics for propulsion model system behavior.
Developed data processing pipelines to extract and surface model performance metrics.

CECO Environmental — Wood Dale, IL

Project Engineer → Senior Project Engineer (promoted)

Sep 2017 – Apr 2021

Developed a Python package to extract sales data from Microsoft Cloud (Excel) and programmatically populate data sheets in 3D AutoCAD, streamlining the model design workflow.
Led the transition from 2D CAD to 3D CAD across the engineering organization, modernizing design processes and improving accuracy.
Established the structural design standard using ASCE codes with finite element analysis (FEA), adopted as the team's baseline for structural evaluation.

Fresenius Kabi — Melrose Park, IL

Project Engineer

Aug 2016 – Sep 2017

Led VBA development for a state-of-the-art pharmaceutical manufacturing facility, building automated tools for manufacturing load calculations and capacity forecasting.
Engineered workload projection models to support long-term production planning and facility scaling decisions.
Identified $50M in avoided capital expenditure by demonstrating through efficiency analysis that a planned additional production line was unnecessary, directly influencing executive investment decisions.

$ Projects & Open Source

Blackslate Inc Private

Secure Kubernetes platform company. Home of the Keyslate platform for GitOps-driven cluster deployments, identity management, and infrastructure-as-code generation.

Key projects: keyslate (Rust, 19 crates), helm-api (Go sidecar), vault-operator