About Jonathan Bouligny

I am a Platform and Infrastructure Engineer based in Austin, Texas, with 6+ years of experience designing, automating, and operating enterprise Linux platforms at Red Hat and Lockheed Martin.

I hold the Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) in Ansible credential and specialize in building deterministic, reproducible systems from the bare hypervisor up using Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes (k3s/OpenShift), and GitOps (Argo CD).

What I’m Building Now: Fleet Platform

My current flagship engineering project is fleet-platform (GitHub Repository)—a fully reproducible, GitOps-managed Kubernetes platform deployed on a self-hosted 3-node Proxmox cluster (40 cores, 157 GB RAM).

  • Infrastructure as Code: VMs provisioned via Terraform (bpg/proxmox) from cloud-init templates; nodes configured and bootstrapped via Ansible.
  • Declarative GitOps: Full cluster state managed via Argo CD (app-of-apps pattern) syncing from a code-provisioned Forgejo instance with remote Terraform state locked in AWS S3.
  • Cattle, Not Pets: The real test of reproducibility is a full teardown. The entire platform—from empty hypervisors to running workloads, ingress, wildcard TLS, and synced apps—is continuously verified by rebuilding from scratch via a single automated script to eliminate configuration drift.
  • The Endgame: Scaling the cluster with a dedicated GPU node to run automated, parallel, deterministic Gazebo robotics simulations via Argo Workflows batch pipelines.

Professional Background

Red Hat — Automation Consultant (2022 – Present)

  • Delivered enterprise infrastructure automation across 7 federal and healthcare engagements, including complex air-gapped, security-hardened environments.
  • Dynamic CMDB Integration: Engineered a custom Python dynamic inventory plugin enabling Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) to consume ~1,300 hosts across two datacenters from an Ivanti CMDB, filtering systems by lifecycle status and team ownership to eliminate mis-targeted automation.
  • Multi-Node Platform Installs: Architected and deployed multi-node AAP clusters (controller, private automation hub, database) on VMware vSphere, converting manual runbooks into fully versioned Ansible code for zero-drift rebuilds.
  • CI/CD Image Optimization: Converted Ansible Execution Environment (EE) image builds into a pipeline-driven IaC workflow, slashing build times from 10 minutes to 2 minutes on disconnected networks.
  • Air-Gapped Source Control: Deployed containerized GitLab on Podman and systemd in an isolated enclave to establish the customer’s first version-control pipeline for enterprise automation.

Lockheed Martin — Software Engineer (2020 – 2022)

  • Resolved mission-critical Red Hat OpenShift deployment blockers by analyzing pod logs, isolating container lifecycle failures, and correcting Kubernetes deployment manifests to restore service.

Technical Competencies

  • Languages: Python, Bash, YAML, Go (learning), C++, JavaScript
  • Cloud & Infrastructure: Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu), Proxmox VE, VMware vSphere, AWS (S3, IAM, VPC), Bare-metal Networking
  • Kubernetes & GitOps: Kubernetes, k3s, Red Hat OpenShift, Argo CD (app-of-apps), Helm, Podman, Docker
  • Automation & IaC: Ansible (RHCA), Terraform, cloud-init, Red Hat Satellite, CI/CD pipelines

Certifications & Education

  • Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) in Ansible
  • Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) — Enterprise Linux & Ansible
  • Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)
  • Red Hat Certified Specialist:
    • Managing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform (EX467)
    • Developing Automation with Ansible (EX374)
    • Ansible Network Automation (EX457)
  • B.S. in Computer Science, Magna Cum Laude — Texas Tech University (2015 – 2019)

Contact & Links