Ricky Grassmuck
DevOps Engineer
DevOps engineer with 9+ years of Linux experience, from Tier 2 support on live production servers to designing and operating highly available HashiCorp Vault, Consul, and Nomad platforms. Focused on infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and Go tooling for developers.
Skills
Infrastructure as Code
Advanced
- Terraform
- Packer
- Ansible
HashiCorp Platform
Advanced
- Vault
- Consul
- Nomad
CI/CD
Advanced
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI/CD
Cloud & Containers
Advanced
- OpenStack
- DigitalOcean
- Docker
- Podman
Backend Development
Intermediate
- Go
- Python
Work Experience (3)
Sep 2019 - Jan 2026
DevOps Engineer II (promoted from DevOps Engineer, 2022)
cPanel
Built, deployed, and operated internal developer tooling and the platforms it ran on for cPanel's Product Development organization. Ran highly available HashiCorp Vault, Consul, and Nomad clusters on an on-prem OpenStack cloud, provisioned entirely as code with custom Terraform modules, Packer, and Ansible.
- Designed, deployed, and operated highly available Vault, Consul, and Nomad clusters on on-prem OpenStack, hosting 50+ internal production services
- Core engineer on the team that planned and executed the migration of 1,000+ Product Development repositories from Bitbucket to self-hosted GitLab, and later to GitHub Enterprise
- Re-architected GitLab CI pipelines as GitHub Actions workflows during the GitHub Enterprise migration
- Built and maintained an automated, CI-driven VM image pipeline (Packer, Ansible, OpenStack) that produced cPanel-installed images for QA testing and Technical Support
- Designed and built a Go image-build API that gave client applications a single interface for requesting builds and routed webhook integrations with other internal services. This decoupled clients from the build backend, so new backends could be developed and tested alongside production without client changes
- Developed Go CLIs, service APIs, and CI/CD tooling used by product developers, with integrations into Vault, Consul, Nomad, and OpenStack
- Served as the company-wide subject-matter expert for GitLab CI and GitHub Actions, supporting developers and leading workshops on pipeline design
Jul 2016 - Sep 2019
Linux Technical Analyst
cPanel
Provided Tier 2 technical support to cPanel & WHM customers, diagnosing and resolving issues directly on live production Linux servers.
- Troubleshot live customer servers across the full hosting stack: Apache/LiteSpeed/Nginx and PHP, Exim/Dovecot mail, MySQL/MariaDB, and BIND/PowerDNS
- Diagnosed OS-level performance, filesystem, and security issues, including investigating and remediating compromised servers
- Wrote scripts to automate common diagnostics and fixes, reducing time spent on repetitive tickets
- Reproduced product defects and escalated them to development with detailed bug reports
- Mentored new analysts and wrote internal knowledge-base articles
Mar 2015 - Jul 2016
IS Support Technician
UTMB
Provided on-site and remote IT support for faculty, staff, clinical, and research users across UTMB's Galveston campus.
- Provided first-line support for Epic EHR issues affecting clinical and hospital staff
- Imaged, deployed, and repaired university-managed Windows, macOS, and Linux desktops and laptops
- Diagnosed and resolved network and VPN connectivity issues for on-site and remote users
- Configured and supported virtual machines (VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware) for faculty and research users
Certificates
2021-01-05
HashiCorp Certified: Vault Associate
HashiCorp
2021-01-05
HashiCorp Certified: Consul Associate
HashiCorp
Languages
English
Native Speaker