James Brundage
Prolific Programmer and Platform Engineer, and Evangelist
Experienced and passionate engineer.
Excellent at reducing costs thru automation.
Current a 2nd year Microsoft Most Valued Professional.
Jack of all trades, master of PowerShell.
Experience
-
Senior DevOps Engineer
LoanDepot (thru Ascendion)
2024-06 - 2025-07
Improved platform and devops practices for LoanDepot's cloud infrastructure
- Created tooling to migrate 400+ service accounts to Group Managed Service Accounts (GMSAs)
- This tooling helped avoid hundreds of hours of work each year as passwords no longer need to be rotated manually
- Increased quality of Kubernetes deployments by implementing rules with Rego
- This helped catch configuration issues before they reached production, and prevent drift in Kubernetes.
- Improved SQL operations by implementing auditing and quality gates in Azure DevOps, improving security, reliability, and release times.
-
Senior DevOps Engineer
Aveva (thru Cognizant)
2023-10 - 2019-09
Improved cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and CI/CD processes
- Developing tooling to migrate TFS workflows to Azure DevOps pipelines
- This reduced the cost of migration of thousands of workflows by several orders of magnitude.
- Implemented new CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps.
- This reduced deployment times and improved consistency across environments.
- Led and trained virtual team of 14 engineers to improve internal monitoring with PowerShell
- This enabled end to end organization awareness thru Grafana and Azure DevOps.
-
Senior Software Developer Engineer
Microsoft (thru MBO Partners)
2019-06 - 2023-06
Developed the Azure Resource Manager Template Toolkit
- Designed and developed a best practices toolkit for Azure Resource Manager templates.
- This reduced the time and cost for Azure Marketplace publishers to validate their templates.
- Worked closely with the Azure team to help codify best practices for Azure Resource Manager templates.
- This helped improve the Azure ecosystem by codifying guidance and providing compliance tooling.
- Developed a PowerShell module and custom testing framework to validate Azure Resource Manager templates.
- This provided a consistent and automated way to validate templates against best practices.
- Implemented over 50 complex best practices enforcement rules.
- This helped reduce error rates throughout the industry.
-
Senior Security Development Engineer
Microsoft (thru Start-Automating)
2018-04 - 2019-04
Developed security automation for the Azure Security Center
- Developed a PowerShell module to help investigate security incidents in Azure
- Created internal web infrastructure to organize and visualize incident investigations.
- This helped reduce investigation times for security incidents by ~20%
- Created automation for internal security tooling to enable cross-referencing of security data.
- This helped improve the accuracy and speed of security investigations.
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Senior Software Developer
Reliance Networks (thru Start-Automating)
2018-03 - 2019-03
Overhauled the data aggregation of every real estate listing in the US.
- Overhauled the data aggregation of every real estate listing in the US, reducing total intake time from ~6 days to ~15 minutes
- Created efficient PowerShell and SQL ETL architecture to process millions of listings.
- Rapidly implemented direct RETS and IDX integration
- Reduced infrastructure costs by 98% (from $20,000 per month to $250 per month).
-
Senior Software Developer Engineer
Microsoft (thru Wipro)
2016-07 - 2018-01
Migrated Intune Deployment from Jenkins to Azure DevOps and and Intune automation
- Migrated Microsoft Intune's Deployments from Jenkins to Azure DevOps, decreasing cost and improving alignment.
- Overhauled internal automation for the deployment and management of the Intune service.
- Set up Just Enough Automation (JEA) to allow for secure, delegated administration of the Intune service.
- Developed a PowerShell module to automate the deployment of Intune service components.
- Established secure KeyVault use practices for storing sensitive information, reducing human error and surface area.
-
Senior DevOps Engineer
National Life Insurance (thru NTT Data)
2014-09 - 2015-06
Improved internal automation and DevOps practices, and trained offshore support teams.
- Developed PowerShell tooling to deploy and automate the management of the National Life Insurance infrastructure.
- Trained offshore support teams from junior to associate level in PowerShell and DevOps practices.
- This led to improved IT readiness and reduced personnel costs.
- Assisted in the parallelization of hedging automation, to improve the bottom line.
- Migrated scheduling from Control-M to Task Scheduler, improving security, reliability, and compliance.
-
Senior Operations Engineer
JPMorgan Chase (thru HP)
2014-07 - 2014-12
Rolled out the deployment of secure printing systems for JPMorgan Chase
- Developed automation to deploy mass rollout of Phraos secure printing systems across the company
- Created tools to audit and report on the utilization of secure printing systems.
- This helped reduce exposure of sensitive documents and PII.
- Worked with the JPMorgan Chase team to ensure compliance with security policies.
-
Senior Software Developer Engineer
Microsoft (thru Start-Automating)
2012-10 - 2013-10
Developed internal monitoring for Office365
- Developed a framework for monitoring the health of Office365 servers and services.
- Collected thousands of data points per hour from tens of thousands of servers.
- This provided increased visibility into the health of Office365 for management and engineering teams.
- Developed new techniques for parallel data collection and analysis.
- Created a PowerShell module to automate the collection and analysis of monitoring data.
- Created web dashboards to visualize the health of Office365 services.
- This helped improve the reliability and performance of Office365.
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Senior Software Developer Engineer
Microsoft (thru Start-Automating)
2011-06 - 2012-05
Automated the deployment of BPOS, the predecessor to Office 365
- Worked with management to identify key pain points in the BPOS deployment process.
- Automated the deployment of Sharepoint Online and Exchange using PowerShell.
- Reduced new customer deployment time from ~7 days to under an hour
- Automated the work of multiple manual teams, resulting in cost savings of approximately $250,000 per month, or $2.5 million dollars per year.
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Senior Software Developer Engineer
Microsoft (thru Start-Automating)
2010-10 - 2012-01
Developed a compact virtualization toolkit for the Zero Day Attack Lab
- Created a rapidly deployable toolkit of endless variations of Windows VMs and additional software.
- Developed significant expertise in Hyper-V and application virtualization.
- Created a series of Hyper-V differential disks containing patches until a point in time.
- This toolkit could be deployed by security researchers across the world in minutes.
- The toolkit was used to rapidly identify the impact of zero-day attacks on Windows systems.
- This work helped secure the windows ecosystem against emerging threats.
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Senior Software Developer Engineer in Test
Microsoft
2006-01 - 2010-05
Tested and evangelized the PowerShell language.
- Helped develop the PowerShell language and its features.
- Created and maintained test suites for PowerShell.
- Pioneered the use of PowerShell in Client UI, proving the versatility of the language.
- Pioneered web development with PowerShell and ASP.net, creating the server side PowerShell ecosystem
- Improved engagement with public by producing videos with Channel9, writing posts and articles.
- Performed STRIDE threat modeling of PowerShell and improved language forensics
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Software Developer Engineer in Test
Microsoft (thru Volt Technical Services)
2005-01 - 2006-01
Overhauled security testing for WMI and sheparded IPV6 support within Management Division components (WMI, TaskScheduler, Event Log)
- Overhauled security testing for Windows Management Infrastructure to use automated testing.
- Improved guidance on DCOM security settings for WMI, resulting in improved security for the windows ecosystem.
- Drove IPv6 support within the Management Division of Microsoft prior to Vista RC1, to meet DOD requirements.
- Assisted partner teams in implementing WMI providers, enabling remote management of virtualization.
- Performance tested WMI and Event Log to ensure stability and reliability under heavy load.
- This helped improve the long term security of the windows ecosystem.
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Graphics Developer / VJ
Synesthetic
2000-10 - 2005-06
- Developed realtime video mixing (VJ) software suite for live performances.
- Created visual effects and animations for live shows.
- Worked with various artists to create unique visual experiences.
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Staff Writer and secondary webmaster
Filmcritic.com
1997-06 - 2008-05
- Wrote hundreds of movie reviews for Filmcritic.com from 1996 to 2001.
- Created and maintained web infrastructure for ~4,000,000 monthly users.
- Helped found the Online Film Critics Society
- Built initial critical aggregation score algorithms api, used by partner website Rotten Tomatoes
Skills
| Skill | Level |
|---|---|
| PowerShell | Master (18+ years) |
| DevOps | Master (16+ years) |
| Platform Engineering | Master (10+ years) |
| Software Architecture | Master (20+ years) |
| Software Engineering | Master (20+ years) |
| HTML | Master (30+ years) |
| JavaScript | Expert (30+ years) |
| CSS | Expert (30+ years) |
| C# / .Net Framework | Expert (~20 years) |
| C++ | Expert (~25 years) |
| P/Invoke | Expert (~15 years) |
| XML | Expert (~25 years) |
| xPath | Expert (~20 years) |
| SQL | Expert (~20 years) |
| NoSQL | Expert (~15 years) |
| Azure | Expert (~15 years) |
| Azure DevOps | Expert (~10 years) |
| Azure Resource Manager | Expert (~6 years) |
| Git | Expert (~15 years) |
| GitHub Workflows | Expert (~10 years) |
| GitHub Actions | Expert (~10 years) |
| Regular Expressions | Expert (~10 years) |
| Docker | Intermediate (~5 years) |
| Kubernetes | Intermediate (~3 years) |
| At Protocol | Intermediate (~2 years) |
| Python | Intermediate (~5 years) |
| Prompt Engineering | Intermediate (~3 years) |
| Artifical Intelligence | Intermediate (~5 years) |
Languages
| Language | Fluency |
|---|---|
| PowerShell | Mastery |
| C# | Expert |
| HTML | Expert |
| JavaScript | Expert |
| CSS | Expert |
| C++ | Expert |
| Python | Intermediate |
| SQL | Expert |
| TypeScript | Intermediate |
| Go | Intermediate |
| Rust | Basic |
| Basic (and variants) | Expert |
| Logo | Intermediate |