G. Andre Vaillancourt

I am a Principal Engineer and have spent over 20 years building systems, platforms, and automation that let engineering teams ship quickly without giving up on security.

I got my start in the US military, where I served 12 years (active + National Guard) and finished as an Information Systems Team Chief (Staff Sergeant E6). I ran networks, servers, and security for a battalion of about 300 users, led its systems support section on a year-long deployment, and trained the junior technicians. When not on active duty, I worked in civilian IT and security roles, including various private-sector organizations and secure systems for US government customers. That work is where I found my footing in DevOps; I built engineering platforms from the ground up, made infrastructure as code the team standard, stood up Kubernetes and GitLab CI, and moved whole codebases onto them.

Since then my work has been Kubernetes, OpenShift, GitLab CI/CD, and infrastructure as code for federal, defense, financial, and enterprise teams. These days I lead modernization teams, set technical direction, and advise senior leadership, while staying hands-on in the engineering work.

On my own time I write local-first tools in Go, including an AI agent that can run on local or hosted models. I like software that runs on my own hardware, that I can understand end to end, and that stays out of the way. I enjoy mentoring students in cybersecurity competitions and am an active Red Team member of the NCAE Cybergames and CNY Hackathon. For the Cybergames I help build the Go-based command and control software our red team uses, play the adversary during events, and mentor the students we compete against.

I also design tabletop RPGs, including the Adaptable Dice System, Tesseris and Blackline Frontier TTRPGs. I’ve always been deeply interested in TTRPG mechanics, and many of my TTRPG projects are built around as-code principles. I’m working on full-fledged, AI-enabled game engines and simulators for the games I design, plus tooling and resources for myself, my gaming groups, and other GMs.

I live in Rome, NY, and have worked remotely since 2020.

Focus

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Projects

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Open-source work on AI agents and developer tooling, red team systems, platform automation, and tabletop games.

AI Agents & Developer Tooling

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Red Team & Security

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Platform & Automation

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Tabletop RPGs

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The Adaptable Dice System (ADS) is my family of tabletop RPG projects, with a Go rules engine, simulator command-line tools, and AI game-master tooling.