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G. Andre Vaillancourt

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Executive Summary
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Principal DevSecOps engineer and automation platform architect with over 20 years of experience delivering platforms, CI/CD, and automation in federal, defense, financial, and enterprise environments. Hands-on background designing and building Kubernetes/OpenShift platforms, GitLab CI/CD systems, infrastructure as code, Linux and container environments, security-focused modernization, and internal developer tooling. Experienced leading engineering teams, advising senior stakeholders, mentoring engineers, and contributing to contract technical solutioning. Active security clearance. US citizen. US Army Veteran.

Skills
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  • Leadership and Architecture: technical leadership, systems architecture, software architecture, platform architecture, automation platform design, team leadership, program delivery, stakeholder advisement, mentoring, training
  • DevSecOps and Platform Engineering: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Linux systems, containers, Docker, Podman, CI/CD pipelines, GitLab, GitHub, GitHub Actions, Tekton, AWS, release automation, developer platforms
  • Infrastructure as Code and Automation: Ansible, Terraform, Bash, Python, PowerShell, configuration management, orchestration, repeatable deployment workflows
  • Software Development: Go, Python, REST APIs, command-line tools, terminal user interfaces, automation tooling, internal developer tools
  • AI Tooling: Claude, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, local AI models, custom AI applications
  • Systems and Operations: RHEL, Arch Linux, Alpine, VMware, Proxmox, virtualization, backup, monitoring, troubleshooting
  • Security and Compliance: DevSecOps, cybersecurity, vulnerability management, security assessment, FedRAMP-informed cloud security, FIPS-199, POA&M support, GRC workflows
  • Communication: executive briefings, technical documentation, cross-team coordination, customer-facing technical guidance, training development, written and verbal communication

Employment History
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TISTA Science and Technology Corp. - March 2022 to Present
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Role: Chief DevSecOps Engineer, Chief Architect - VA Customer - March 2024 to Present
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Contractor role for US Dept. of Veterans Affairs Team Lead for the Modernization & Innovation team under VA Infrastructure Operations

Responsibilities:

  • Lead the 13-person Modernization & Innovation team and ensure delivery of key contract deliverables
  • Set senior technical and architectural direction for team projects, coordinating with other senior architects as needed
  • Serve as senior technical advisor to VA Infrastructure Operations senior leadership
  • Coordinate with program-level leaders to shape direction, manage risk, and provide technical guidance
  • Continue to support efforts as individual contributor (same as Chief DevSecOps Engineer role below)

Key Achievements:

  • Restructured the 13-person Modernization & Innovation team of senior engineers (many with 20+ years of experience) to refocus on technical delivery
  • Led the Modernization & Innovation team in investigating over a dozen different modernization opportunities within VA Infrastructure Operations for proposal to the VA Infrastructure Operations Technical Innovations Board
  • Drove multiple high-priority projects to completion, including:
    • Implementing AI solutions for VA’s Site Reliability Engineering systems for rapid assessment of ongoing issues/outages and historical analysis of incidents
    • Implementing an end-to-end tracker for IT systems hosting requests, tracking requests across multiple different systems and support queues
    • Implementing automation of configuration of Commvault backup system to backup newly created systems via Ansible playbooks
    • Developing a reusable Governance, Risk, and Compliance framework for container orchestration platforms within the VA

Role: Chief DevSecOps Engineer - VA Customer - March 2022 to March 2024
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Contractor role for US Dept. of Veterans Affairs

Responsibilities:

  • Provide architecture, security, integration, and technical management support for VA cloud and on-premise systems
  • Design, implement, and maintain solutions spanning public cloud, private cloud, and client data centers
  • Automate management and orchestration tasks, improve documentation, and develop validation tooling for engineering teams
  • Partner with architects, application teams, and internal groups on DevSecOps design, modernization, resilience, and deprecation of outdated systems
  • Advise on capacity planning, operations, performance monitoring, reliability, and infrastructure risk
  • Support FIPS-199 categorization, eMASS evidence, SA&A documentation, SOPs, and POA&M tracking
  • Coordinate vulnerability, penetration, risk, and security assessments and recommend remediation with developers, DBAs, and system owners

Key Achievements:

  • Designed and taught multiple VA-internal OpenShift Kubernetes trainings for approximately 50 application development and OpenShift support engineers
  • Designed and implemented semi-standardized baseline CI/CD pipelines for OpenShift (Tekton) with live code examples of a demo application written in Go
  • Designed and built GitHub Actions workflows within repositories and established CI best practices for multiple VA teams
  • Led development and was a founding member of VA’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Center of Excellence and SRE Community of Practice
  • Instrumental in defining senior level SRE roles within the VA
  • Assisted VA in rollout of Software Factory model across higher-level IT organization with a focus on integrating common, shared infrastructure components into the model
  • Presented as key/featured speaker on a variety of topics within the VA; namely SRE, automation, and the VA’s primary OpenShift Kubernetes platform (VA Platform One)

Role: Principal Engineer - March 2022 to Present
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Company-wide technical leadership role alongside customer-facing assignments

Responsibilities:

  • Design systems architecture for internal platforms, software prototypes, and contract technical solutions
  • Support and contribute to contract proposal development, including technical volumes, solutioning, staffing estimates, and oral presentations
  • Advise capture and program leadership on technical feasibility, risk, and level of effort for proposed approaches
  • Provide independent technical review of engineering work, designs, and delivery risks across contracts
  • Represent TISTA to customers and provide technical expertise at conferences and growth engagements
  • Guide technical training, mentoring, and internal engineering standards
  • Serve as a sitting member of the company-wide AI Committee that governs AI use throughout the organization

Key Achievements:

  • Contributed technical solutioning, architecture, staffing estimates, and oral presentations to multiple contract proposals
  • Designed and built multiple software prototypes including:
    • A containerized Certification Authority with integration to Event Driven Ansible architecture for automatic certificate checking and issuance
    • Internal project and employee task tracking software; React front-end, Go REST API, PostgreSQL backed
  • Contributed to an internally developed platform designed around rapidly building and deploying AWS based infrastructure that application teams could use for testing and training
  • Assumed leadership of multiple teams to address gaps and issues with contract delivery

MAXISIQ - February 2025 to Present
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Role: DevSecOps Automation Engineer - February 2025 to Present
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Remote and part-time

Key Achievements:

  • Contributed to the overall technical design by validating requirements and vetting proposed approaches before implementation
  • Built proofs of concept for candidate build and scanning processes, using the results to inform production pipeline design
  • Delivered a shared GitLab CI environment now used by more than five software teams, shortening new-pipeline onboarding by 80%
  • Built shared automation for required security and contract artifacts, removing hours of per-release manual work
  • Automated movement of source and build outputs between isolated, security-controlled development environments
  • Split the application build into concurrent stages, reducing overall compile time by half
  • Put in place artifact promotion across Impact Levels to support delivery into classified environments

IBM - June 2021 to March 2022
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Role: DevSecOps Consultant, Application Architect - June 2021 to March 2022
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Responsibilities:

  • Prepare gap analyses and DevSecOps adoption roadmaps
  • Analyze client IT environments against business goals across conventional and cloud environments
  • Architect DevSecOps tooling, build/deploy workflows, release management strategy, and tool integrations
  • Work with the customer to execute DevSecOps and Agile implementation strategies

Role: DevSecOps Consultant, Automation Architect, Team Lead - Truist Bank Customer - July 2021 to March 2022
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IBM consulting engagement for Truist Bank

Responsibilities:

  • Led CI/CD and DevSecOps automation for the Financial Crimes Compliance Technology (FCCT) team
  • Developed short- and long-term plans for end-to-end build, test, and deployment automation
  • Coordinated with Truist enterprise DevSecOps and senior management on shared resources, requirements, and Agile transition gaps

Key Achievements:

  • Managed seven junior DevSecOps engineers supporting 30+ Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering applications
  • Designed and implemented multi-team, reusable CI/CD pipelines and led migration from manual process to CI/CD driven automation, drastically reducing major system upgrade failure rate

ActioNet, Inc. - April 2021 to June 2021
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Role: DevSecOps Engineer - April 2021 to June 2021
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US Government contractor role

Responsibilities:

  • Provide DevSecOps and system integration expertise in an Agile government environment
  • Maintain OS and application patching across the DevSecOps environment
  • Implement CI/CD, infrastructure as code, deployment, and configuration management systems
  • Design automation workflows for application source, build, deployment, and cloud operations
  • Collaborate with developers to troubleshoot applications and improve DevSecOps processes
  • Delivered advisement documentation on container platform selection on AWS

Assured Information Security - September 2016 to April 2021
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Role: DevSecOps Engineer, Enterprise Wide - October 2020 to April 2021
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Responsibilities:

  • Design and extend company-wide automation platform capabilities across AIS engineering teams
  • Address company-wide DevSecOps needs spanning source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and shared developer infrastructure
  • Align IT, engineering, and compliance requirements with minimal impact to development workflows
  • Build and manage infrastructure supporting engineering development and test efforts
  • Develop long-term DevSecOps and automation platform strategy, practices, documentation, and training

Key Achievements:

  • Designed and rebuilt large portions of the company-wide software engineering and automation platform
  • Established CI/CD, source-control, and automation practices used by most engineering teams
  • Coordinated company-wide training on GitLab, CI/CD, and related platform topics
  • Served as a member of the company-wide senior engineer Technical Council

Role: DevSecOps Engineer, SecureView - June 2018 to October 2020
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SecureView is a GOTS Type 1 end-user hypervisor for cross-domain access

Responsibilities:

  • Design, build, and operate the engineering and automation platform that supported SecureView development, including source control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, Kubernetes, and test environments
  • Implement DevOps strategy, automation practices, documentation, and supporting infrastructure
  • Support SecureView development, testing, customer deployment, and product-specific engineering needs

Key Achievements:

  • Designed and built the team’s engineering and automation platform from the ground up, including domain, systems, and server architecture, with a focus on security, reliability, and emulating customer environments for test
  • Defined and implemented Infrastructure as Code as the standard for the team; built and tracked all critical services using this methodology
  • Built and implemented a Kubernetes cluster as a shared platform for internal services, software compilation, automation, and testing
  • Built and operated an internal GitLab server as the team’s source-control and CI platform and migrated the entire codebase from Bitbucket
  • Instrumental in migrating the team to nearly 100% work-from-home during the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Trained junior engineers in DevOps practices, product knowledge, and scripting
  • Served as a member of the company-wide senior engineer Technical Council

Role: Lead and Deployment Engineer, SecureView - September 2016 to June 2018
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SecureView customer deployment and integration

Responsibilities:

  • Led engineers and subcontractors supporting SecureView deployments and integrations
  • Coordinated customer deployments, site surveys, and IT infrastructure installs at CONUS and OCONUS sites
  • Designed SecureView-compatible customer solutions and procured supporting hardware
  • Supported SecureView development and test teams with deployment-specific product expertise

Key Achievements:

  • Became team’s subject matter expert (SME) in Certification Authorities
  • Designed and built PowerShell automation for rapid deployment of Windows CA and OCSP infrastructures to support SecureView deployments
  • Led and assisted in training of external customers in SecureView User and Administrator training on multiple occasions
  • Contributed to SecureView training and Management Server development

North Country Savings Bank - February 2015 to September 2016
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Role: IT Manager - February 2015 to September 2016
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Responsibilities:

  • Managed day-to-day IT operations, staff coverage, and long-term technology planning for the Bank
  • Led information security strategy protecting corporate data, proprietary information, and intellectual property
  • Served as chairperson of the Bank’s IT Steering Committee and senior IT interface for non-technical departments
  • Supported Disaster Recovery and Business Resumption planning and administrative recovery responsibilities
  • Developed employee training and bank-wide project implementation criteria for hardware and software selection

Key Achievements:

  • Completely revised Information Security policies and procedures in conjunction with Bank’s Information Security Officer
  • Implemented effective, company-wide user training to enhance Information Security with emphasis on development and use of strong passphrases
  • Enhanced Bank’s overall Information Security posture by addressing key vulnerabilities and enhancements including decommissioning outdated servers, removing local admin rights from non-IT personnel, creating and enforcing separation of user accounts for different roles within IT, and enhancing security on inter-branch network connectivity
  • Developed long-term, multi-year plan to address company-wide IT and cybersecurity needs

Army National Guard - November 2006 to November 2017
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  • Deployed Active Duty October 2013 to October 2014
  • Honorably discharged November 2017

Exiting Role: Information Systems Team Chief & CSSAMO NCOIC (E6 - Staff Sergeant)
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Responsibilities:

  • Managed battalion-level communications, IT, and security support for approximately 300 users
  • Administered networks, Windows Server, Active Directory, Group Policy, and related systems
  • Trained and supervised junior IT specialists
  • Provided user security, IT training, policy advisement, and assurance support

Key Achievements:

  • While deployed (Oct 2013 to Sept 2014), served as Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC) of battalion network and systems support element (S6)
  • Worked directly with senior officers to develop IT solutions for various missions and projects
  • Serviced over 300 users and administered over $1 million worth of network and computer systems
  • Developed and implemented battalion level security policies
  • Awarded Army Commendation medal for efficient management of physical and network security operations and for personally overseeing the training of 12 assigned junior technicians

Freelance and Open Source Work
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NCAE Cybergames Red Team DevSecOps - September 2023 to Present
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Responsibilities:

  • Design and build Go-based Red Team software for containerized C2 and competition systems
  • Automate CI/CD, testing, and deployment workflows with GitLab, Ansible, Bash, and related tools
  • Operate as a mock adversarial actor during hackathon events
  • Mentor and guide participating students during hackathon events

Key Achievements:

  • Key developer on the Saprus system, a hackathon competition focused command and control (C2) system for “compromised” remote systems
  • Developed system for rapidly testing a large number of Ansible roles used to build and deploy hackathon competition systems

Other Projects
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  • Design and maintain personal open-source Go projects focused on local-first developer tooling, terminal applications, game/rules engines, simulators, and automation
  • Develop tooling for personal projects with Go, Bubble Tea TUIs, SQLite, NATS, HTTP APIs, containerized services, Bash, and Just automation
  • Created Xorc (xorc), a local-first Go AI agent and terminal interface with configurable inference backends, SQLite-backed memory, project-aware configuration, tool orchestration, persona support, and skill discovery
  • Designed the Adaptable Dice System (ADS) table-top RPG project family, including reusable Go rules-engine components, simulator CLIs, AI game-master server/client workspaces, generated-content validation, and cross-repository documentation and specification standards