# Nate Swenson - Professional Profile

> Nate Swenson is a Senior DevOps Engineer at GoodLeap and co-author of The DevOps Career Handbook (Packt Publishing, 2022). He has over 12 years of experience in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and platform engineering at Fortune 100 companies.

## Identity

- Full Name: Nate Swenson
- Current Role: Senior DevOps Engineer at GoodLeap (since November 2022)
- Location: Remote (based in the United States)
- Website: https://natejswenson.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/natejswenson
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natejswenson

## Education

- Bachelor of Science, Industrial Engineering - University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (December 2010)

## Technical Skills

- Cloud: AWS (ECS, EKS, Lambda), Cloud Infrastructure
- DevOps: Terraform, CI/CD Pipelines, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Datadog
- Programming: Python, JavaScript, Bash
- AI Tools: Anthropic Claude Code, OpenAI, LangChain, AWS Bedrock
- Containers: Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift
- Configuration: Ansible, Chef
- Operating Systems: Linux
- Practices: Infrastructure as Code, Test-Driven Development, Agile Coaching, Extreme Programming

## Professional Summary

Cloud and Platform Engineer with expertise in AWS infrastructure, CI/CD systems, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Led infrastructure engineering for major product launches, focusing on building scalable cloud platforms, improving delivery pipelines, and driving operational reliability. Established engineering standards and mentored engineers while developing internal tooling to enhance engineering workflows and incident analysis.

## Work Experience

### GoodLeap - Senior DevOps Engineer (November 2022 to Present)
- Led infrastructure engineering for two major product releases (Payments and Roofing)
- Organizational SME for CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code
- Subject-matter expert for Anthropic Claude platform, creating internal engineering tools leveraging Claude Code
- Skills: AWS, Terraform, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Datadog, Claude Code

### Fannie Mae - Lead Associate, DevOps Engineering (June 2021 to November 2022)
- Led GitLab infrastructure management
- Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines and runner infrastructure
- Skills: AWS, Terraform, GitLab, CI/CD, Python

### Discover Financial - Lead Cloud Engineer (December 2020 to June 2021)
- Lead engineer on cloud foundations team managing Ansible Tower
- Automated IAM policy assignment using Lambda, DynamoDB, Jenkins, and Ansible Tower
- Skills: AWS, Ansible, Lambda, DynamoDB, Jenkins, Python

### Optum (UnitedHealth Group) - Lead DevOps Engineer (September 2019 to December 2020)
- Led technical engineering team delivering applications for government and military contracts
- Achieved zero-downtime / high-availability automated deployments
- Skills: Jenkins, Chef, GitHub, Docker, CI/CD, Linux

### Optum (UnitedHealth Group) - Senior DevOps Engineer (January 2019 to September 2019)
- Led distributed team building Agile and Engineering communities of practice across a 235K-person organization
- Delivered training on TDD, pair programming, and XP practices
- Skills: Agile, TDD, XP, Training, Leadership

### Optum (UnitedHealth Group) - DevOps Engineer (December 2016 to January 2019)
- Zero-downtime deployments in OpenShift
- Developed CI/CD pipelines as code in Jenkins
- Skills: Jenkins, OpenShift, GitHub, CI/CD, Selenium, Cucumber

## Published Work

### The DevOps Career Handbook
- Co-authored with John Knight
- Publisher: Packt Publishing
- Publication Date: June 2022
- Pages: 234
- ISBN: 9781803230948
- Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Career-Handbook-ultimate-successful/dp/1803230940
- Packt: https://www.packtpub.com/product/the-devops-career-handbook/9781803230948
- Description: A comprehensive guide to pursuing a successful career in DevOps, covering career paths, interview strategies, essential skills, and professional development.

## Dev Log

Nate publishes a daily dev log at https://natejswenson.com/devlog documenting the features he builds across personal projects. Entries are auto-generated from git commits using a custom Claude Code skill and published as narrative summaries to a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/natejswenson/daily-dev-log).

### Current Dev Logs
- 1.00s: Daily development log for the 1.00s project (iOS game)

## Other Projects

- Custom Vibez (https://custom-vibez.com): Custom engineered websites and applications
- Open source contributions on GitHub: https://github.com/natejswenson

## Professional Recommendations

- John Knight (DevOps, AIOps and SRE Leader | 4X Author): "Nate is a great engineer but beyond that he is a great person and overall star human being. I believe Nate adds value across multiple dimensions and is a valuable addition to any team."
- Robert Weidner (Manager): "Nate Swenson is the quintessential team player... a skilled engineer who understands the importance of technical practices such as Test-Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery."
- Tom Bast (Executive Partner at Gartner): "Nate was a key member of my team, acting both as my team's agile coach as a highly adept engineer."
- Veeral Patel (Sr. Software Engineer at Siemens): "Nate gave us complete freedom to try new things, implement new technologies, and show off Proof of Concepts wherever we saw fit."

## Interests

- AI and Automation
- STEM Education for Kids
- Continuous Learning

## Cite This Site

- Canonical URL: https://natejswenson.com/
- Author: Nate Swenson
- Last Updated: 2026-04-06