About

My days are filled with breaking and fixing infrastructure, constantly switching between Terraform, NixOS, and whatever shiny tech caught my ADHD brain's attention this week.

When I'm not knee-deep in configuration files or brute-forcing my way through yet another learning curve, you might find me pointing cameras at the night sky. My astrophotography hobby lets me escape the digital chaos by... creating a different kind of chaos involving expensive equipment, sleep deprivation, and the constant disappointment of cloud cover appearing exactly when a celestial event peaks. Somehow capturing photons from millions of light-years away feels more straightforward than getting Kubernetes to behave consistently.

I've been everything from a Director of Infrastructure to "that guy who fixed the server at 3 AM because he wrote the broken code in the first place." My relationship with Linux is both my longest and most dysfunctional commitment.

What I bring to the table

After two decades in the trenches, I've developed a particular set of skills:

• Technical leadership & architecture — I design systems that scale, mentor engineers who implement them, and still write code because I refuse to become one of those architects who only draws boxes
• Infrastructure modernization — Turning legacy monoliths into cloud-native systems without burning down the business. I've survived enough migrations to know where the bodies are buried
• AI/LLM integration & automation — Building agentic workflows and AI tooling that actually work in production, not just impressive demos. Check out my MCP projects
• Developer experience & platform engineering — Making other engineers' lives easier through better tooling, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure that doesn't require a PhD to operate
• NixOS & reproducible infrastructure — Converting "works on my machine" into "works everywhere, every time." Declarative systems are my happy place

What I'm looking for

I'm interested in Staff or Principal Engineer roles where I can combine hands-on technical work with architectural influence. I thrive in environments that value:

• Solving hard problems over building features nobody asked for
• Sustainable engineering over heroic firefighting
• Autonomy and trust over micromanagement
• Remote-first culture (I've been doing this since before it was cool)

My less-serious superpowers include:

• Making cloud infrastructure bend to my will (mostly)
• Turning caffeine directly into automation scripts
• Creating documentation that future me will completely ignore
• Converting complex systems into slightly less complex systems
• Explaining technical concepts while watching eyes glaze over
• Staying awake for 36 hours straight to photograph that "once in a lifetime" comet that ends up looking like a smudge

If you're looking for polished perfection, you're in the wrong place. But if you want honest insights from someone who's made every infrastructure mistake possible (and invented a few new ones), pull up a terminal and stick around.

---

Want to chat? Reach me at brink.james@gmail.com or connect on LinkedIn .