Hi, I’m Carlos.
Senior Cloud Engineer. Remote, based in Dallas. Most days I’m working in multi-account AWS, Terraform modules, or the CloudFront/WAF edge in front of it. The part I actually care about is where platform reliability meets developer experience — the stuff that ends up as someone else’s slow deploy or 2am page.
How I think about infra.
A few things I keep coming back to:
- Make the platform the easy path. If the secure, observable, reviewable way to ship is also the fastest, nobody has to be reminded to use it. Most of the leverage on a platform team comes from removing the reasons people work around you.
- Write down the procedure, not just the policy. A policy says what’s allowed. The procedure — written down, in the repo, runnable by the next on-call or by an agent — is what actually scales. The WAF change-tier doc and the IaC migration protocol I wrote at Redfin both started as “I’m tired of explaining this twice.”
- Design for two readers. Increasingly that means humans
and coding agents. I’ve been treating
docs/ai/as a first-class part of every repo for the last year — schema files, template metadata, validation rules. It changes what “good documentation” means. - Prefer reversible over clever. Cheap rollback beats a clever design every time, especially at the edge.
How I got here.
Started in high school on Cisco gear and picked up the CCENT before I graduated. The first few jobs after that were network-shaped — wiring closets, switch and router configs, VLAN cleanup, the unglamorous side of keeping a network running. Weekends and evenings were side projects: home labs, a Pi-hole sinkhole running the apartment’s DNS, a Tailscale tailnet stitching my machines together. That habit never stopped.
Cloud crept in by way of the side projects first, then the day job. UT Dallas (Information Technology & Systems, 2018–2021) lined up with a pivot into cloud consulting at Crayon — hundreds of small AWS and Azure customers, which was the fastest possible education in what not to do at scale. From there to CLEAResult to build out a Terraform module library and the first real Entra/AWS SSO integration I’d owned end-to-end.
Joined Redfin in 2023 on the cloud governance team, promoted to Senior the following year. Most of what’s on /projects is from that stretch. Currently also building Eden, a macOS terminal for AI agent orchestration — same instincts (platforms, automation, leverage) pointed at my own toolchain.
Work.
- Senior Cloud Operations Engineer Redfin
- Cloud Operations Engineer II Redfin
- Cloud Engineer II CLEAResult
- Cloud Operations Engineer Crayon
Where I am.
Based in Dallas. Most of my career has been remote-first and my current role is remote — happy to keep it that way.
Structured version: /experience. What I’ve built: /projects. Talk: /contact.