$ whoami
Katherine McClintic
Senior DevOps Engineer
$ skills
KubernetesCI/CD ModernizationSystems ThinkingObservability & ReliabilityLeadership and MentoringAWSDocumentation & Enablement
System Architecture & Projects
Slice by Slice Deployment Pipeline
Designed and implemented a production-grade slice-by-slice Kubernetes deployment pipeline from scratch
Key Achievements:
- Rethought the pipeline architecture entirely after the initial approach proved structurally misaligned — the rewrite was significantly cleaner and more maintainable
- Validated across pre-production environments and incorporated stakeholder feedback between rounds before promoting
- Coordinated rollout to multiple app teams with cross-team communication throughout
- Documented rollout requirements to enable adoption beyond the initial test case
- Iterated post-launch: added hotfix improvements, per-cluster slice map adjustments, approval stages, and TSM straight-to-online deployment based on dev feedback
Azure DevOpsYAMLKubernetesDeployment StrategyCI/CD
Suite Routing Architecture
Identified a gap in developer understanding of how requests travel from browser to application pods — and took it on independently
Key Achievements:
- Recognized the knowledge gap from a support ticket and self-directed the research from scratch
- Reached out to relevant teams and dug into unfamiliar code to reconstruct the full request path, including components like Nginx that some engineers didn't know were involved
- Created and iterated on an architecture diagram based on feedback before delivering the presentation
- Received strong feedback from engineers across teams, including those who had never had visibility into parts of the routing flow
KubernetesNginxIstioAkamaiNetworkingDocumentation
Nudgit PR Bot
Noticed a recurring team-wide problem with open and stale PRs going unaddressed because there was no visibility into them in day-to-day team channels. Built a solution from scratch
Key Achievements:
- Core functionality is a notifier that surfaces open PRs and flags stale ones to encourage closure, draft mode, or merging
- Self-initiated after observing the problem; no ticket, no ask
- Refined the time window logic to avoid notifying on legitimately old PRs while still surfacing stale ones with appropriate context
- Transitioned pipeline-based POC to containerized solution running on an internal Kubernetes cluster for scale
- Thoroughly documented to ensure minimal friction for company-wide onboarding
AutomationAzure DevOpsAPI IntegrationDocumentationTooling
Toil Reduction & Automation
Proactively identified and automated repetitive operational tasks to reduce team burden, cut down on manual effort, and improve reliability across clusters and pipelines
Key Achievements:
- Built a Cilium remediation pipeline after recognizing a recurring on-call pattern to automatically detect stuck "ContainerCreating" pods and remediate them, reducing alert noise for multiple teams while a permanent fix was developed
- Created an infrastructure testing pipeline to proactively surface Cypress, Selenium, and build agent failures before developers were affected
- Developed scripts to automate service connection and pipeline discovery ahead of cluster upgrades, and backwards compatibility checks ahead of blue-green releases
- Built checks for cluster health issues (e.g., missing podAntiAffinities, stuck pods) and automated remediation for known problems
- Developed tooling to scale down deprecated models and services, saving resources and reducing noise
AutomationKubernetesObservabilityPagerDutyOperational Efficiency
Impact & Achievements
Development & Leadership
Team Impact
- • Mentored engineers across the team — including one who credited the mentorship with giving her the confidence to speak up and push for improvements she previously didn’t think were possible
- • Created wiki tagging system for the entire DevOps organization
- • Reorganized the DevOps runbook repo for discoverability and ease of contribution
- • Overhauled DevOps onboarding documentation and served as primary onboarding resource for new joiners, leading KT sessions on Kubernetes, Helm, pipelines, and release process
Technical Leadership
- • Took initiative to implement several impactful projects (Suite routing review, Nudgit PR bot, runbook reorg, wiki reorg)
- • Led several cross-functional project rollouts (slice by slice templates, Virtual Service changes)
- • Pushed back on established approaches when appropriate (pod vs node affinities, Thanos, etc.)
- • Often the first port of call for developers getting onto our roadmap--rerouted appropriately to team leadership for prioritization
Infrastructure & DevOps
Cloud Infrastructure
- • Achieved a 95% on CKA (2024)
- • Co-led EKS and on-prem kubernetes upgrades with zero downtime across clusters
- • Ran targeted patch efforts to reduce cost and operational noise
CI/CD
- • Migrated 30+ AZDO pipelines from classic to YAML
- • Mentored developers to feel empowered to create their own YAML pipelines
- • Fixed faulty Cypress and k6 pipelines before developers noticed
$ contact --info
Let's Connect
$ location --current
Washington, DC
$ contact --email
kdmcclin@gmail.com$ ls ./social-links