Mark Mercado

Senior Platform Engineer | Cloud Automation | Compound Engineering

GitHub | LinkedIn | Portfolio | Resume | CloudMason

Summary

Senior engineer with 20+ years of experience building the systems behind reliable software: cloud infrastructure, automation platforms, CI/CD workflows, observability, and developer tooling. Currently focused on platform engineering at DigitalOcean, with a steady bias toward infrastructure as code, public technical writing, and agent-assisted workflows that turn operational knowledge into repeatable systems.

Comfortable across the stack, with a particular strength in compound engineering: combining software development, infrastructure operations, documentation, automation, and AI-assisted workflows so teams can move faster without losing operational rigor.

Selected Impact

Designed and operated automation platforms around Ansible AWX, StackStorm, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, and internal APIs for cloud infrastructure workflows.
Modernized infrastructure code by moving bespoke automation toward supported upstream collections and staging-first validation.
Built test-driven infrastructure readiness workflows for data center and region configuration, using canonical source data and local validation before rollout.
Created monitoring and observability systems with Prometheus, Grafana, StatsD-style metrics, custom exporters, and actionable operational dashboards.
Built agent workflow knowledge systems around MCP, Obsidian, reusable prompts, session memory, and human-in-the-loop review.
Maintained a public technical writing practice covering cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, secrets, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, networking, and home lab operations.

Technical Strengths

Languages

Platform & Cloud

Reliability & Operations

Developer & Agent Workflows

Product & Web

Experience

DigitalOcean - Platform Engineering

Systems / Platform Engineer, 2020 - Present

Build and improve internal automation workflows for cloud infrastructure operations.
Work across platform services, orchestration, configuration management, CI/CD, and operational tooling.
Develop structured approaches for safe infrastructure changes: staging validation, reusable runbooks, source-controlled configuration, and reviewable automation.
Contribute to durable engineering knowledge systems that capture operational context and make future changes easier to reason about.

Barracuda Networks - Cloud / Infrastructure Operations

Lead Site Reliability Engineer, 2018 - 2020

Operated hybrid cloud infrastructure across on-premises data centers and public cloud environments.
Implemented and maintained systems for bare-metal provisioning, private cloud, image pipelines, DNS automation, package delivery, observability, and service discovery.
Built Terraform, Terragrunt, Packer, Puppet, Ansible, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Helm, and Docker workflows for infrastructure delivery.
Created Prometheus exporters, Grafana dashboards, operational runbooks, and deployment patterns for internal platform teams.

TotalCAE - High Performance Computing

Senior HPC Consultant, 2016 - 2018

Administered a 1,200+ node HPC environment supporting engineering simulation workloads.
Worked with RHEL, Lustre, Infiniband, PBS Pro, Ansible, Zabbix, Elastic Stack, InfluxDB, Grafana, and custom operational integrations.
Built automation and dashboards for cluster operations, troubleshooting, reporting, and SLA-oriented support.

University of Michigan-Flint

UNIX Systems Administrator / Lecturer / Business Systems Analyst, 2005 - 2017

Administered UNIX/Linux, Solaris, virtualization, storage, Oracle-backed ERP systems, LMS platforms, SSO, disaster recovery, monitoring, and CI/CD services.
Built custom integrations in PL/SQL, Perl, PHP, Bash, and Python for campus systems and operational workflows.
Taught computer science courses including Python, C++, operating systems, and programming fundamentals.

Early Web & Systems Work

Founding Partner / Systems Administrator / Web Developer, 1996 - 2003

Built web applications, publishing systems, billing tools, search systems, secure client portals, and small-business infrastructure.
Worked across FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows, PHP, Perl, JavaScript, MySQL, networking, firewalls, and backups.

Selected Projects

CloudMason

Personal infrastructure and engineering hub for home lab systems, GitOps-style network management, DNS, Cloudflare, UniFi, NextDNS, runbooks, and operational experiments.

AgentBrain / OpenPaw / envx

Personal agent workflow ecosystem exploring MCP, Obsidian-backed memory, machine convergence, reusable context, tool gateways, and repeatable AI-assisted engineering loops.

Public Technical Writing

Maintains technical notes on CI/CD, SSH, secrets, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Patroni, Prometheus exporters, UniFi, Let's Encrypt, and home lab operations.

Education

Master of Science, Computer Science

University of Michigan-Flint

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science and Bachelor of Mathematics, Computer Science

University of Michigan-Flint

Publication

Cybersecurity in Banking and Financial Sector: Security Analysis of a Mobile Banking Application 2013 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems

Working Style

Automation first, with enough documentation for future operators to understand the system.
Comfortable moving from low-level infrastructure detail to product-facing developer experience.
Strong preference for source-controlled workflows, explicit review, safe rollout, and observability.
Interested in roles involving platform engineering, cloud automation, developer experience, reliability, and AI-assisted engineering systems.