Jesse Butryn

jesse@portfolio

$ whoami

About

Platform engineer with a decade of experience automating bare metal server lifecycles at scale — BMC/Redfish/IPMI, firmware, and provisioning pipelines for fleets spanning thousands of physical servers across multiple vendors and regions. I build the tooling that turns manual, error-prone hardware operations (firmware updates, BIOS configuration, boot order, enrollment) into unattended, vendor-agnostic automation. Comfortable owning a problem from first principles through production rollout, and equally comfortable being the final escalation point when hardware misbehaves.

Experience

Latitude.sh Senior Platform Engineer

  • Author and maintain bmctools, a vendor-agnostic BMC automation library (Redfish/IPMI) that replaced spaghetti, per-vendor logic previously duplicated across multiple NetBox plugins and the API backend for Dell, Supermicro, and ASUS — with growing support for Aivres, Cisco, Gigabyte, and HPE.

  • Deploy bmctools as a short-lived Kubernetes job, invoked on demand across 29 regions, integrating it directly into the enrollment and provisioning stack to drive power control, BIOS configuration, one-time boot, and firmware updates as part of automated server bringup.

  • Own and maintain a highly customized NetBox deployment serving as the system of record for bare metal infrastructure, and build pre-deployment validation tooling for boot order, MAC address correctness, and hardware inventory integrity to catch misconfigurations before they cause provisioning failures.

  • Partner with platform and provisioning teams to improve reliability and repeatability of physical server lifecycles from enrollment through production.

Latitude has an excellent culture and an engineering team I'm proud to be part of. The mission here feels a lot like "build cool shit," and I mean that as a genuine compliment. There's real appetite for solving hard problems properly instead of papering over them, which is exactly why bmctools exists: instead of another one-off script bolted onto NetBox, it's a real answer to the mess of vendor-specific code we'd accumulated.

Equinix Senior Platform Operations Engineer

  • Built a StackStorm-orchestrated firmware automation pipeline that detects firmware drift across the fleet, automatically reserves affected hardware, applies updates, runs validation, and releases servers back to the available pool — replacing an entirely manual process and eliminating a major source of human error.

  • Built switch enrollment automation that cut new switch onboarding from roughly an hour of manual work to seconds.

  • Designed a modular hardware troubleshooting framework of composable Python test cases, runnable ad hoc or automatically per device type, giving on-call engineers a consistent way to triage hardware faults down to a specific component — built on a core Python package I authored and maintained as the team's interface to internal tooling and REST APIs.

  • Oversaw onboarding and lifecycle management of roughly 20,000 physical servers across the fleet.

  • Served as final tier of escalation for troubleshooting Equinix bare metal cloud services and infrastructure; mentored team members on automation practices and troubleshooting methodology.

Packet, and later Equinix Metal, taught me that it's possible to develop world class software and maintain real engineering excellence inside a much larger corporate environment. There was more red tape and things were more siloed, but as a startup recently acquired by a mega corp, there were still plenty of vacuums to spread out into and take ownership of.

Our deployment at Equinix Metal may not have been hyperscale by most definitions, but it sure felt like it. We were delivering thousands of servers in a week at points, and that was only possible because everyone involved was at the top of their game.

Joyent Cloud Operations Engineer

  • Managed and maintained over 7,000 physical UNIX servers across 5 regions as remote hands/data center operations support, ensuring highly available, resilient infrastructure.

  • Developed custom automation tooling to streamline repetitive day-to-day operational tasks.

  • Instrumental in establishing the cloud operations center, authoring SOPs and knowledge base articles, and building a structured new-hire training roadmap to accelerate onboarding.

Joyent holds a special place in my heart as the first real technology company I worked for. Before Joyent, my work had always been a secondary, administrative function supporting a company's actual mission. At Joyent, I got to experience the stark contrast of a role that directly contributes to the mission itself.

Beyond that, Joyent was as close as I'll ever get to Bell Labs in 1969. Following Bryan Cantrill's leadership and working alongside an all-star cast of engineers was the experience of a lifetime. What surprised me most wasn't just the utter adherence to excellence in engineering, but how casually it was accomplished. The products Joyent built were ahead of their time, and I will always be a little salty about how things turned out for them.

Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank Network Administrator

  • Racked, cabled, and maintained EMC SAN and Dell NAS storage systems and Cisco routing/switching infrastructure hands-on in the data center.

  • Led security patch management for thousands of Linux and Windows servers via automated workflows, ensuring compliance and minimal downtime.

  • Planned and executed a Cisco PIX-to-ASA firewall migration with a seamless cutover, and conducted firewall ACL reviews that eliminated redundant policies.

  • Deployed and configured Solarwinds NCM to automate network device backups and provide real-time alerts for configuration changes.

I can only be thankful for the opportunity Sumitomo gave a wet-behind-the-ears IT admin. I learned a great deal about corporate culture, civilian management, IT security, compliance, and regulation here. I was also fortunate that being on a small team let me take ownership of so many different pieces of the infrastructure at once: storage, networking, Active Directory, security patching and auditing, and firewall management.

United States Marine Corps Network Systems Specialist

  • Led IT operations for numerous exercises, overseeing infrastructure planning, maintenance, and the coordination of multiple teams, with daily reporting to senior leadership.

  • Served as platoon sergeant, managing and mentoring 20-35 Marines, ensuring operational readiness and fostering leadership development.

  • Physically built and tore down complex network infrastructure — BGP/OSPF WAN links, EIGRP LAN topologies, Fortigate firewalls, Cisco VoIP — across numerous large-scale field exercises, often under time pressure and austere conditions.

  • Designed and implemented custom hardware solutions to enhance unit mobility and readiness, optimizing mission-critical capabilities.

  • Conducted regular technology training sessions for both my unit and other units within the division, enhancing technical proficiency and cross-unit collaboration.

I will forever be grateful for my time in the Marine Corps. No single decision has altered the course of my life more than joining. Beyond the esprit de corps, the unforgettable people and places, and the lifelong instillment of discipline and hard work, I also came away with a tremendous amount of professional experience.

I was incredibly fortunate in the unit I served with on Okinawa: 3rd Marine Division, Headquarters Battalion, Communications Company. We were the communications element for the 3rd Marine Division general and staff, which meant we trained constantly. Sometimes that meant traveling to support multi-unit or multinational exercises; sometimes it meant pitching tents in an empty field on base. Either way, we did our jobs arguably more than any other comm unit in the Marine Corps, and some of the most talented people I've ever met came out of that unit.

The Marine Corps threw me into the fire with a complete lack of experience and started a habit of drinking from the fire hose that followed me through my whole career. It taught me that it's possible to bite off more than you can chew, and then chew it.

Education

New Horizons 2015

Completed classes in Windows Server 2012 MCSA, CompTIA Net+, and Cisco ICND

Toms River High School East 2004

Additionally took vocational classes in computer science and CompTIA A+

Projects

Holly's Kitchen

Holly's Kitchen is a full-stack recipe web app I built for my wife, with a Python Flask backend, React frontend, MongoDB, and Nginx, plus a companion Android app. It features "My Cookbook," letting users create and store private recipes or import them from popular recipe sites into an easy-to-use personal catalog, all backed by automatic nutrition info lookup, a serving size adjuster, and a weight/volume unit converter. Every aspect of the application was custom-built from the ground up.

Holly's Kitchen

Intellistonks

Intellistonks is a full-featured market and securities analysis platform. Originally a CLI tool, it has evolved into a comprehensive system featuring custom scoring and ranking algorithms, tailored dashboards and watchlists, alerting, and additional analytics to help surface actionable investment insights.

Intellistonks

Asset Portal

Asset Portal is a file-share tool I built to streamline client file transfers for freelance website projects. Clients receive a securely generated invite link tied to a project directory where they can upload photos, videos, and other assets. Uploaded files are immediately accessible for development work, and I also built an Android app to simplify mobile uploads.

Asset Portal
GitHub

bmctools

bmctools is a vendor-agnostic Python toolkit for interacting with server Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) — think "napalm for BMCs". It provides a unified API to query and manage diverse BMC implementations (Dell, Supermicro, ASUS, and more) for things like power control, boot order, PXE, and firmware updates, and is available on PyPI. In production, it runs as a short-lived Kubernetes job integrated into bare metal enrollment and provisioning pipelines.

PyPI  ·  GitHub

bmcdocs

bmcdocs is an MkDocs-based documentation site that consolidates vendor BMC documentation into a searchable, modern, and consistent site for easier reference and troubleshooting.

bmcdocs

Skills

Bare Metal / Hardware

  • BMC
  • IPMI
  • Redfish
  • BIOS/Firmware Management
  • Boot Order/PXE Automation
  • Hardware Fault Triage/RMA
  • NetBox
  • Tinkerbell

Programming Languages

  • Python
  • Bash
  • Ruby
  • Javascript
  • Perl
  • Go
  • PowerShell
  • HTML/CSS

Containers

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • Argo
  • Rancher

Cloud Technologies

  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Cloudflare
  • Heroku
  • Namecheap

CI/CD

  • Buildkite
  • Github Actions

Virtualization

  • KVM/QEMU
  • VMware
  • Hyper-V
  • Triton

Monitoring/Logging

  • Grafana
  • Prometheus
  • Zabbix
  • Splunk
  • Datadog

Config Management/IaC

  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • Terraform
  • Stackstorm
  • Zapier
  • Temporal

Database

  • SQL/Postgres
  • MongoDB

Networking

  • BGP
  • VLANs
  • DHCP
  • DNS

Version Control

  • Git
  • GitHub

Operating Systems

  • UNIX
  • Linux
  • Windows
  • MacOS

Security/Identity

  • LDAP
  • Active Directory
  • SSO
  • RBAC

Contact Me

jesse@jesseb.org