Jeremy Blackburn
Principal IT Advisor & Enterprise Architect
Who I Am
I'm an enterprise IT consultant and senior engineer with 15+ years of experience leading large-scale technology programs at Fortune 500 organizations. I've spent my career building things from scratch—designing systems that didn't exist, making the case for them to leadership, securing budget, assembling the teams, delivering them, and then owning them in production. Every major engagement in my career was a net-new program.
That combination of technical depth and program leadership means I can engage at the executive level—translating complex infrastructure decisions into business terms for CIOs, CTOs, and CFOs—while also having the hands-on expertise to architect and deliver the solution. I'm equally comfortable in a boardroom presenting a multi-year technology investment case and in the terminal debugging a production incident.
I hold 4 granted US patents in automated infrastructure standards and compliance, reflecting a career-long investment in engineering innovation. Through Initech Advising LLC, I bring Fortune 500 program leadership and technical expertise to organizations that need both.
Full-Lifecycle Program Leadership
Every enterprise IT initiative I've led followed the same pattern: a problem or opportunity identified, a solution architected, a business case made, budget secured, a program built and delivered, and a production system handed to operations. I own all of it.
Architecture
Define the technical vision. Evaluate build vs. buy. Select platforms, design the system, identify dependencies and risks. Produce the blueprint that drives everything downstream.
Business Case & Financing
Translate the technical architecture into a financial argument. Model TCO, ROI, risk cost-of-inaction. Present to executives and finance. Secure CapEx and OpEx budgets for multi-year programs.
Planning & Governance
Structure the program. Define milestones, staffing, vendor contracts, and delivery phases. Establish governance cadences and executive reporting. Manage stakeholder alignment across organizational boundaries.
Build & Deliver
Lead the engineering effort. Hands-on architecture and technical oversight, sprint cadences, integration testing, and production readiness. I build alongside the team—not just direct from the sidelines.
Operationalize
Stand up monitoring, alerting, runbooks, on-call rotations, and SLOs. Train the teams that will own it. Ensure the system can be operated, not just demonstrated. Production readiness is a first-class deliverable.
Maintain & Evolve
Establish the BAU model. Define capacity planning cycles, upgrade cadences, and continuous improvement programs. Ensure the system stays aligned with the business as it grows and changes.
Technical Expertise
Platforms & Cloud
Observability & Data
Automation & IaC
Infrastructure
Security & Compliance
Patents & Innovation
All five patents stem from a unified body of work around automated infrastructure standards enforcement — the ability to define, detect, and remediate configuration drift across large-scale computing environments without human intervention.
Data Stream Auditing, Notification, Compliance Monitoring, and Transformation
Computing Cluster Configuration Standardization
Computing Infrastructure Standards Assay
Interconnection Discovery for Automated Standards Assay
Automated Standards-Based Computing System Reconfiguration
Career Timeline
Sr. Infrastructure Engineer
Arizona Public Service (APS)
- Designed and built the enterprise SIEM platform from the ground up—architecture, platform selection, phased delivery, and production operationalization
- Led the Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) to Elastic Cloud migration program, including technical planning, vendor engagement, and phased cutover strategy
- Drove infrastructure standardization and IaC adoption initiatives across engineering teams, presenting roadmaps and progress to technical leadership
- Developed Ansible automation frameworks that reduced toil and enforced configuration standards at scale
- Designed Kafka streaming pipelines for real-time security data ingestion across multiple source systems
VP, Lead Site Reliability Engineer
Wells Fargo
- Built the core banking observability platform from scratch—45 Elasticsearch clusters across ~2,000 hosts—including architecture, staffing, delivery, and ongoing operations
- Owned the program end-to-end at VP level: executive reporting, budget management, vendor relationships, and cross-functional stakeholder alignment
- Established the SRE function for multiple product verticals: defined SLOs, on-call models, incident response, and reliability engineering practices
- Designed Kafka and Apache Airflow data pipelines for financial analytics; led chaos engineering and load testing programs to validate SLA targets
- Managed a cross-functional SRE team responsible for production health of systems serving millions of banking customers
Senior Systems Engineer
Kryterion
- Led the AWS cloud migration program as SME—defined the strategy, phased the workload migration, and coordinated delivery across engineering and operations
- Built the centralized log management platform (ELK 6.x) as a net-new capability, from architecture through production rollout
- Implemented PCI DSS and SOC 2 compliance programs across infrastructure, working directly with auditors and executive stakeholders
- Introduced Ansible and Terraform automation practices, establishing IaC as the standard for all new infrastructure provisioning
DevOps / Infrastructure Engineer
State Farm
- Led the enterprise cloud enablement program for AWS and GCP—defined adoption frameworks, obtained executive sponsorship, and onboarded development and analytics teams
- Subject matter expert and program lead for the Hadoop ecosystem; designed and delivered large-scale data platforms supporting enterprise analytics
- Managed a VMware environment exceeding 200,000 virtual machines; responsible for capacity planning, architecture governance, and operational stability
- Built Ansible automation reducing infrastructure provisioning from days to hours; developed Python tooling for reporting and configuration management
- Collaborated with enterprise architects and finance teams to plan and justify multi-year infrastructure investment roadmaps
Systems Analyst / IT Manager
Arizona State University
- Managed the full IT environment for a 200+ user research organization—infrastructure, budget, vendor relationships, and strategic planning
- Designed and built a 144-node HPC cluster to support computational research programs, from requirements gathering through delivery and operations
- Oversaw ESX virtualization infrastructure and storage; implemented capacity planning processes aligned with research program growth
Let's work together.
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