Hi, my name is Steven Schmidt

About Me

I'm a DevOps / Release Engineer with 6+ years experience in MT cloud SaaS. I'm driven by improving release stability, removing bottlenecks for developer testing and CI/CD, and automating as much as possible.

While I'm not spending my time working on AWS automation and deployments at work, I enjoy playing around with docker on my homelab, playing pickleball at various venues across Sydney, and spending time with my friends.

I moved from Atlanta, Georgia, USA to Sydney, Australia in 2023 and maintain full working rights here.

Work Experience

Software Engineer | Jan 2022 - May 2025 | Sydney, Australia

• Assumed a DevOps role within a new product team to deliver the necessary infrastructure for its services from scratch.
• Fully automated deployment using GitLab CI/CD and a Terraform wrapper.
• Fully automated the QA smoke-test process using Newman CLI for Postman, including notifications to the team with the results.
• Implemented automated alerting based on certain utilisation thresholds or logging events. CloudWatch alerts via Grafana - pushed to MS Teams.
• Mentor and train teammates on our automation stack, deployment methods, best practices, MR etiquette, etc.
• Created architecture diagrams for service flow and cloud infrastructure.

Software Engineer, Associate | Dec 2018 - Jan 2022 | Atlanta, United States

• Manage and support AWS Multi-Tenant (MT) cloud releases in development (Dev), quality assurance (QA), and production (Prod) environments for InforOS consisting of ~100 microservices.
• Collaborate with software engineers and DevOps engineers to build and deploy the latest release code to our MT environments including Dev, QA, Staging, and Prod.
• Document releases and work on process improvement to streamline product updates - helped reduce update time from ~4 hours to ~2 hours.
• Mentor and train junior team members on the release process and best practices.
• Address JIRA tickets from QA testing of upcoming release versions and other environment issues.

Skills

• AWS - CloudFormation, ECS, ECR, Lambda, SQS, RDS, Kinesis, IAM, KMS, EC2, S3, & R53
• Build & Deploy - GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, Phobos, & GitHub Actions
• Utilising - Docker, Grafana, SQL, Git, Jira, & SumoLogicL
• Code - Python, Boto3, CloudFormation Templates, YML, & HCL

Education

Bachelor of Science, Information Technology - Networking and Datacenter Administration | 2013-2018

Personal Projects

• Discord Container Controller
  • A docker-based discord bot to control other docker containers on the host. Built with DiscordPy
  •    GitHub Repository
  •   Docker Hub Image

Hobbies & Interests

• Home Server
  • Headless Ubuntu 24.04 server running 20+ docker containers for home automation, photo sync, media management, and game servers. This can be remotely managed fully by an IP KVM (PiKVM). One of the containers is also a Discord bot (self-written) to manage all other containers on the server, with permissions based access for friends/family.