Resume - Microsoft WordJames Fryman
Staff Platform Engineer
Nashville, TN
james@fryman.io · Website · GitHub · LinkedIn
About
Staff-level infrastructure and platform engineer with 20+ years building, scaling, and operating distributed systems. Experienced the emergence of ChatOps at GitHub, collaborated on “ChatOps for Dummies” (Wiley, 2015), and spent a decade evangelizing and commercializing that philosophy. Now builds autonomous AI agent infrastructure running Claude in production daily. Deep expertise in Kubernetes (custom operators, operator-sdk), platform engineering, SRE practices, and developer experience tooling. Career through-line: making computers work for humans in human spaces — from ChatOps to agentic computing. US Citizen.
Skills
- Kubernetes (Custom Operators, operator-sdk, CRDs)
- Platform Engineering
- Distributed Systems
- GoLang
- Python
- Elixir
- Infrastructure Automation (Terraform, Puppet, Salt)
- SRE / Incident Management
- CI/CD Pipeline Design
- AWS / GCP (Multi-Cloud)
- Observability (DataDog, Prometheus)
- ChatOps / Event-Driven Automation
Experience
Principal Member of Technical Staff
Salesforce · May 2021 — Present
Led Salesforce Code Builder from initial planning through GA — a cloud compute platform running VS Code for Salesforce development, now the runtime powering Salesforce Vibes AI. Architected custom Kubernetes Operator in Go to manage compute session lifecycle, scaling to 1,200–1,400 daily concurrent sessions with 10,000–20,000 peaks during Dreamforce. Led 12 engineers across three cross-functional teams. Drove Elixir platform adoption across the organization for an inherited technology choice, securing cross-team uptake and acquisition integration (Spiff). Primary technical liaison for AWS partnership.
Sr. Staff Engineer, Platform Engineering
Ripple · December 2019 — April 2021
Authored the business case that created the Platform Engineering team, then built and led it. Scaled team from 3 to 9 engineers. Architected Platform v2: comprehensive Kubernetes migration across global infrastructure (US, Iceland, India, UK). Developed custom Platform Operator using operator-sdk for automated service lifecycle management. Established Kubernetes training program delivered across four countries.
Technical Operations Engineer
Ripple · November 2018 — December 2019
Pioneered Kubernetes adoption across the organization, reducing customer integration costs by $250K annually. Architected GCP infrastructure for data analytics platform. Managed Salt + Vault automated certificate management across fleet.
DevOps Stormer / Founding Engineer
StackStorm · November 2014 — February 2016
Designed and built the world’s first enterprise ChatOps solution. Took event-driven automation from GitHub’s internal culture to a shipping product with worldwide adoption. Built enterprise ChatOps product from concept to on-premise appliance deployment. Worldwide evangelism: conference keynotes, customer deployments, community building.
Infrastructure Product Owner
Auth0 · March 2016 — January 2017
Implemented SRE practice from scratch, scaling a 2-person operations team into an organized SRE function. Organized into four workstreams: Support/Growth, Stability/Maintenance, Common Tools, CI/CD. Implemented on-call program with rotation, escalation, and postmortem culture.
Sr. Software Engineer / Evangelist
Puppet · March 2017 — October 2017
Built Lumogon Project: serverless SaaS (AWS Lambda, ElasticBeanstalk, DynamoDB). Ported Puppet Discovery from Clojure to Go; deployed via GKE/Kubernetes/Helm.
Lead System Engineer
NationBuilder · November 2017 — October 2018
PostgreSQL infrastructure maturity: zero-downtime schema deploys at scale. Puppet v3→v5 upgrade with full CI/CD pipeline. Rundeck workflow automation and DataDog observability implementation across the platform.
Operations Hacker
GitHub · October 2012 — October 2014
24/7 operations for github.com and gist.github.com during a period of explosive growth. Saw ChatOps invented; became its first external evangelist. Grew server footprint from ~100 cloud nodes to mixed cloud/datacenter infrastructure. Optimized Puppet configuration management integrated with ChatOps (Hubot). Published “Design Patterns in Configuration Management.”
Technology Strategist
Self-Employed · July 2011 — October 2013
Personally owned small business focused on technology delivery in the greater Nashville area. Three core offerings: CTO-as-a-service providing strategy-level advice to early-stage startups and growth-phase companies; DevOps transformations helping companies restructure operations and development teams to move from weekly/monthly deploys to daily or more; technology delivery assisting teams with automated infrastructure (Chef, Puppet), autoscaling cloud (AWS), and application development (Ruby on Rails).
Professional Services Engineer
Puppet Labs · April 2011 — July 2011
Visited client sites and performed on-site classroom training (3-day course) on Puppet usage. Helped clients with initial bootstrap, setup, and optimization of Puppet installations of various sizes (50+ to 5,000+ nodes).
Sr. Network Operations Manager
Asurion · November 2009 — April 2011
Daily operational management of all enterprise systems. Created business plan for strategic offshoring opportunity, reducing overall operating costs by $1.5M over 3 years. Successfully migrated NOC from US to Philippines on-time and under-budget with aggressive 6-month timeline.
Security Manager
Asurion · August 2008 — November 2009
Strategic planning of Asurion’s Security Department including Physical Security, Investigations, Internal Fraud, Technical Security, and Security Administration. Reporting directly to the CSO. Led organization through major ISO 17799 and PCI audits. Executed process optimization focused on lean thinking and cross-training.
Sr. Security Analyst
Asurion · April 2007 — August 2008
Planned and led company-wide PCI-DSS v1.2 compliance implementation. Created management metrics to translate effectiveness of Information Security program. Mentored team in security practices and risk-based approaches.
Security Architect
Asurion · July 2006 — April 2007
Developed security standards for enterprise of 1,500+ servers in mixed Windows/Linux environment for PCI-DSS v1.1 and ISO 17799 compliance. Implemented ground-floor Linux infrastructure with layered security model. Designed Role Based Access Security in Active Directory. Integrated virtualization technologies (VMware ESX).
Information Technology Manager
Credit Control Corporation · January 2005 — July 2006
Full responsibility as Manager and Administrator for Windows 2003 servers, Exchange, Linux RedHat, and AS/400 infrastructure. Reduced operating costs $250K/year by architecting client-server call center design automating payment processing. Saved $60K/year by creating Perl web interface to automate AS/400 report generation. Introduced virtualization (VMware) increasing server utilization by 40%. Managed HIPAA/GLBA and PCI compliance.
Independent Consultant
Desktop Success · July 1997 — August 2003
Provided IT consulting, computer repair, and network services to local businesses, individual users, and U.S. government clients. Maintained numerous small networks. Migrated government clients to current systems and converted single-user Access databases to multi-user SQL. Maintained operations during emergencies including typhoons.
Publications
ChatOps for Dummies
Wiley Publishing · April 2015
Foreword and contributor
Design Patterns in Configuration Management
null · May 2014
Author
DevOps: Day 2 — People and Process
null · October 2014
Speaker
Puppet Cookbook, 3rd Edition
Packt Publishing · February 2015
Technical reviewer
Speaking
ChatOps: Technology and Philosophy
January 2015
DevOps: Day 2 — People and Process
DevOpsDays Berlin · October 2014
Design Patterns in Configuration Management
May 2014
Projects
Agentic Computing Infrastructure
2025 — Present
Building and operating a multi-agent AI system using Claude with persistent memory, tool access, scheduled autonomy, and inter-agent coordination. Multiple autonomous Claude instances with shared memory, tool access, and cron-scheduled work. Production MCP usage with agents coordinating through tool-call routing. Self-hosted infrastructure: Kubernetes, Vault, GitLab, voice interface (Whisper STT + Piper TTS), IRC, home automation.
Volunteer
Nashville Software School
Mentor · July 2014 — July 2017