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Hi, I'm Brian

I do reliability engineering, local AI, and community infrastructure

Brian Rogers

Senior Cloud Software Reliability Engineer at Aerospike

I’m a senior site reliability engineer with 13+ years in infrastructure, reliability, and platform engineering. At Aerospike, I work with product teams to improve cloud reliability, make alerts more useful, automate operations, and lead incident response.

Outside work, I’m building u-forge.ai, a Rust desktop application for tabletop RPG worldbuilding. It connects campaign notes through a knowledge graph and uses local AI to help game masters search and develop their settings.

I also founded and run Tucson.social, a collection of community services for discussion, messaging, and events. I manage the infrastructure and am working on community governance and sustainable funding as part of a planned nonprofit transition. Explore my projects.

Skills

Cloud & Infrastructure
Cloud & Infrastructure

I build and operate infrastructure across AWS, Azure, OCI, and GCP using Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, and Packer.
Observability & Reliability
Observability & Reliability

I use Prometheus and Grafana to monitor service reliability against SLOs and SLAs. I lead incident response and use post-incident reviews to improve alerts, runbooks, and operational safeguards.
Networking & Security
Networking & Security

I work with TCP/IP, DNS, TLS, Tailscale/WireGuard, HashiCorp Vault, and Consul to secure services and keep them connected. My work includes certificate and secret lifecycle automation.
CI/CD & Automation
CI/CD & Automation

I automate builds, deployments, and infrastructure with Git, GitHub Actions, Bamboo, TeamCity, Octopus Deploy, and AWS CodeBuild/CodePipeline. I use shell scripts, Python, and infrastructure as code to reduce manual work.
Languages & Frameworks
Languages & Frameworks

I write tools and automation in Python, JavaScript/Node.js, SQL, and shell, and build native desktop software in Rust. I also have experience with Perl and Java.
Databases & Search
Databases & Search

My database experience includes Aerospike, SQL Server, RavenDB, and SQLite. In u-forge.ai, I combine FTS5 keyword search and sqlite-vec semantic search using reciprocal rank fusion to merge the results.
Rust & Local AI
Rust & Local AI

I’m building u-forge.ai in Rust, using a knowledge graph to retrieve context for an AI assistant and Lemonade for local inference. My work includes job cancellation and inference queues that schedule work across available NPU, CPU, and GPU resources.
Linux & Platform Operations
Linux & Platform Operations

I administer Linux systems, containers, physical servers, and virtual machines. I work with Nginx and Traefik, storage and RAID, and IOMMU device passthrough.
Engineering Collaboration
Engineering Collaboration

I coordinate reliability work across teams, mentor engineers on infrastructure and delivery practices, and write operational documentation. I have experience with Agile/Scrum teams and Jira.

Experience

1
Aerospike

May 2022 - Present

Mountain View, CA (Remote)

Distributed database software for real-time applications.

Senior Cloud Software Reliability Engineer (Cloud SRE)

May 2022 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Work with product development teams to improve cloud reliability and SLO-based alerting. Monitor approximately 30 production customer environments with Grafana and Prometheus to maintain SLA compliance.
  • Lead high-availability improvements and automate operational safeguards.
  • Serve as incident commander during on-call rotations, leading triage, investigation, and resolution. Support escalations for complex incidents and use post-incident reviews to improve runbooks and monitoring.
  • Provision and maintain customer infrastructure with Packer, Terraform, and Ansible, including modules for cloud agents that improve I/O performance.
  • Reduced false-positive alerts from dozens per week to 1–2 through threshold recalibration and configuration-aware monitoring.
  • Automated DNS and certificate lifecycle management for a Kubernetes-based managed cloud offering, eliminating manual customer IP notifications and certificate rotation.
  • Designed the migration from OpenVPN to Tailscale (WireGuard) to improve network reliability and simplify operations across environments.
  • Coordinated the transfer of shared HashiCorp Vault infrastructure to the SRE team, including plans for provisioning and helping teams use the service.
  • Evaluated options across cloud providers to address capacity constraints for specialized instance types.
Propstream

Apr 2021 - Apr 2022

Lake Forest, CA (Remote)

Real estate data and analysis tools for investors.

Lead DevSecOps Engineer

Apr 2021 - Apr 2022

Responsibilities:
  • Led infrastructure modernization, improved branching strategies, and automated CI/CD, increasing the team’s delivery rate by 20%.
  • Guided contract engineers in building reusable CI/CD pipelines and mentored the team on infrastructure as code.
  • Reduced time to resolution by 50% by improving AWS tooling and operational processes.
  • Redesigned credential management, managed penetration testing, and wrote security policies.
  • Maintained and migrated legacy infrastructure while designing replacement systems. Automated QA and development environment tasks to make issues easier to reproduce.
2
3
Navex Global

Jun 2019 - Apr 2021

Lake Oswego, OR

Software for compliance, risk management, and environmental, social, and governance programs.

DevOps Engineer

Jun 2019 - Apr 2021

Responsibilities:
  • Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines across TeamCity, Octopus Deploy, AWS CodeBuild, and CodePipeline.
  • Migrated local build infrastructure to the cloud and improved branching strategies across multiple teams.
  • Built specialized Windows Docker containers for cloud-based compilation of legacy .NET codebases.
  • Partnered with engineering leads to improve deployment processes and automate environment provisioning and pipeline creation.
  • Led an Envoy front-proxy project designed to support future service-mesh adoption.
InComm Digital Solutions

Nov 2015 - Jun 2019

Portland, OR

Formerly Giftango, InComm Digital Solutions delivered API-based stored-value products for financial services.

Systems Engineer

Jul 2017 - Jun 2019

Responsibilities:
  • Supported production financial services systems and continuous delivery with Consul, Vault, and Ansible-based automation.
  • Led data pipeline and database migrations involving SQL Server, RavenDB, and .NET Core.
  • Reduced false-positive production alerts from 1–2 per day to 1–2 per week through signal analysis and threshold tuning.
  • Implemented Consul for service discovery and Vault for automated secret rotation and an internal certificate authority supporting mTLS.
  • Partnered with product and development teams to prepare environments for new services and releases.
Application Support Specialist

Nov 2015 - Jul 2017

Responsibilities:
  • Kept production systems stable through monitoring, alerting, and change control.
  • Supported continuous delivery and deployment.
  • Developed SQL and PowerShell scripts to resolve common customer data issues.
  • Supplied operations teams with the data they needed for their work.
  • Trained and supported team members.
4
5
NTT America

May 2014 - Nov 2015

Boca Raton, FL

Hosting and infrastructure services provider.

SCM/Release Engineer

May 2014 - Nov 2015

Responsibilities:
  • Automated software releases and Windows/Linux packaging with Bash, PowerShell, Bamboo, Jenkins, and InstallShield.
Compucom

Nov 2013 - May 2014

Bentonville, AR

IT services provider; supported Wal-Mart systems on assignment.

Unix/Linux Administrator

Nov 2013 - May 2014

Responsibilities:
  • Administered Unix/Linux systems, storage, backups, and virtualization for Wal-Mart home office and store environments.
6
7
L. J. Smith and Associates

Sep 2013 - Nov 2013

Bentonville, AR

Technical staffing firm later rebranded as Kitestring; supported Wal-Mart point-of-sale systems on assignment.

Release Manager/Engineer

Sep 2013 - Nov 2013

Responsibilities:
  • Coordinated and automated software releases for Wal-Mart point-of-sale systems running SCO and 4690 OS.
IPRO Tech

Jan 2012 - Sep 2013

Scottsdale, AZ

eDiscovery and document review software provider.

Junior Release Engineer

Feb 2013 - Sep 2013

Responsibilities:
  • Built and maintained InstallShield and C# installation packages in collaboration with developers and product managers.
Software QA Analyst and Support Liaison

Jul 2012 - Feb 2013

Responsibilities:
  • Performed functional and regression testing for eCapture and helped developers validate and diagnose bugs.
Client Services Representative

Jan 2012 - Jul 2012

Responsibilities:
  • Supported IPRO Tech clients, performed user acceptance testing, and documented and reproduced software bugs.
8

Projects

u-forge.ai (Universe Forge)
u-forge.ai (Universe Forge)
Creator & Developer 2026 - Present

I’m building a Rust desktop application that connects tabletop RPG notes in a knowledge graph. It combines keyword and semantic search with an optional AI assistant that can search and update world data. Local inference queues schedule work across available NPU, CPU, and GPU backends.

The application is in alpha for Linux x86_64, and I’m refining search relevance and retrieval precision. Read about the design and development.

ai hobby education Rust GraphRAG local-first
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Tucson.social
Tucson.social
Founder & Operator June 2023 - Present

I founded and run community services for Tucson: Lemmy discussion, Matrix messaging, and Mobilizon events. I designed the infrastructure on Oracle Cloud (OCI) and manage its containers, DNS, TLS, and monitoring. Geographic access controls keep the services focused on the Tucson area and reduce abuse and moderation work, while federation connects the community to the wider network.

I’m also working with community members on governance and sustainable funding for a nonprofit transition, including evaluating fiscal sponsorship.

community OCI federation self-hosting
Details
Homelab
Hobbyist January 2018 - Present

I use my homelab to learn by building and running systems. Projects have included storage servers and NFS, media transcoding, cryptocurrency mining, web hosting, virtual machines, and containers.

hobby education
Details
Portfolio Site
January 2018 - Present

I built and maintain this site with Hugo and the Toha theme, with deployment through Cloudflare Pages.

hobby education
Star
VFIO Gaming Project
January 2018 - 2020

I used a virtual machine as my daily gaming system, experimenting with VFIO and IOMMU device passthrough. The project gave me hands-on experience tuning virtual machines for graphics performance and everyday use.

hobby education

Achievements

High School Diploma