DevOps Engineer with Automation & IaC Leadership
Resume:
Clarence Mills
Driving Resiliency Through Automation, Identity, Operational Transformation, and Continuous Modernization
Toronto, Canada 1-416-***-**** ********.*****@*****.*** http://clarencemills.com Profiles Clarence Mills
cmmills
Summary DevOps Engineer with over 10 years of experience designing and automating infrastructure, orchestrating large-scale deployments, and building and optimizing CI/CD pipelines for high- availability systems. Demonstrated success in reducing deployment times by 80% through automation with Bash scripting, Python, Ansible, and Terraform. Proven track record of managing bare-metal, VMware, and cloud environments, implementing best practices for security, scalability, and reliability, and improving monitoring and security for critical applications. Experienced with Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Experience Illumin (EU & LATAM)
DevOps Engineer
Dec 2019 – Jun 2025
Toronto, Canada
Designed and built a CI/CD-driven provisioning pipeline with source control in Bitbucket, using Python, MAAS, NetBox, Ansible, and Cloud-Init to deploy RHEL and Ubuntu servers, reducing configuration drift and improving deployment reliability across 500+ servers. Reduced provisioning time from 5+ hours to under 1 hour, including automated Kubernetes deployment with Ansible and Rancher.
Established NetBox as the source of truth for the internal development environment’s IPAM and inventory, improving asset tracking and eliminating device misconfigurations. Enabled dynamic inventory generation for Ansible and other configuration management and deployment tools.
Automated central DNS configuration for an IDP environment by using Bash/Python to deploy and configure CoreDNS as the authoritative DNS server for a developer-selected domain, and PowerShell to create and manage the required subdomain records in Windows Active Directory DNS.
Deployed bare-metal observability with Dell OpenManage to provide proactive hardware health alerts (disk, memory, etc.) and firmware compliance reporting, reducing unplanned outages and maintenance-related restarts.
Used Grafana, Prometheus, Netdata, and the ELK stack for real-time application monitoring and log analysis, enabling proactive and rapid break-fix resolution before issues impact end- users.
Scotiabank
Automation Framework Specialist / Technical Specialist, Automation Jun 2016 – Dec 2019
Toronto, Canada
Created a user management shell script leveraging SSH and RSA keys for managing user access to banking systems.
Built a highly available automation platform leveraging Ansible Tower, Centrify, and Active Directory integration.
Designed and implemented a centralized authentication and authorization system leveraging Xceedium and Active Directory for Ansible Tower.
Created Ansible roles and playbooks for provisioning, configuring, and patching virtual servers in collaboration with system operators and the VMware team. Worked with engineers and support teams to replace manual Linux commands with Ansible ad hoc commands, playbooks, and roles, improving operational efficiency and reducing errors.
Implemented a training program for Ansible across the support and development teams within the bank.
1Password
Systems Engineer
Sept 2017 – May 2018
Toronto, Canada
Designed a self-provisioning server system leveraging Terraform, Packer, Cloud-Init, and Ansible Core.
Reduced manual server deployment time from hours to minutes through IaC automation. CDW - Formerly Scalar Decisions
Technical Account Manager
Sept 2011 - Feb 2016
Toronto, Ontario
Administered and maintained customer VMware environments, ensuring high availability, performance, and scalability for production workloads. Performed daily configuration, monitoring, and change management for physical and virtual RHEL and Windows-based systems, leveraging SSH, Nagios, and PowerCLI for proactive monitoring of VMware configuration, patching, and updates. Implemented and optimized patch management and security hardening processes, reducing vulnerabilities and improving compliance with organizational standards. Automated recurring administrative tasks such as provisioning, reporting, and backups using SSH, PowerCLI, and shell scripting, reducing manual work by 60% and minimizing human error.
Advised customers on capacity planning, optimizing resource allocation, and enhancing overall system reliability across a multi-tenant VMware cluster. Documented and standardized operational procedures, improving onboarding efficiency and reducing incident resolution time (MTTR) by 30%.
Symantec
Senior Infrastructure Administrator
Sept 2010 - Mar 2011
Newmarket, Ontario
Managed and configured VMware environments for the Quality Assurance department, provisioning and maintaining virtual servers to support large-scale software testing and validation.
Administered and monitored a hybrid infrastructure consisting of NetApp storage, Cisco switches, ASA firewalls, and HP servers, ensuring high availability and performance for mission-critical QA workloads.
Performed capacity planning, resource allocation, and system optimization to support multiple concurrent QA projects, improving efficiency and reducing infrastructure bottlenecks. Implemented proactive monitoring and alerting, reducing downtime and improving system reliability across QA infrastructure.
Provided troubleshooting, maintenance, and root cause analysis for infrastructure incidents, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and ensuring consistent test environment availability.
Collaborated with QA and development teams to align infrastructure capabilities with testing requirements, improving release quality and speed of delivery. Symantec - Formerly MessageLabs
Senior Security Infrastructure Administrator
Sept 2008 - Mar 2010
Toronto
Advised enterprise customers on implementing PKI-based encryption solutions, enabling secure communication for large-scale corporate environments. Designed and deployed shell scripts to automate PKI provisioning, reducing onboarding time for new customers and minimizing manual configuration errors. Provided tier 3 escalation support for complex PKI-related issues, performing deep analysis and resolution for problems that could not be handled at lower tiers. Created and maintained a knowledge base within the corporate wiki documenting common problems, which enabled faster resolution times and reduced recurring encryption issues and helped reduce support load.
Worked with security, engineering, and operations teams to ensure encryption standards aligned with compliance and customer requirements. Open Site Solutions
Systems Engineer
Mar 2008 - Present
Toronto
Advised companies and individuals on technology choices to replace or complement proprietary software, focusing on cost, maintainability, security, and long-term flexibility. Built a Proxmox VE cluster for lab and validation work, including node onboarding, shared storage planning, and HA-ready design.
Created and maintained VM templates and automated VM provisioning (Cloud-Init, cloning, resource sizing), enabling fast, consistent deployments. Created a collection of online tools used for troubleshooting DNS (whois, root server, reverse lookup, dig), SSH, RBL, certificate validation, and IP address management. Mail server setup and configuration with client deployments: Postfix, SquirrelMail, and Roundcube.
Observability stack deployment:
Prometheus / Node Exporter / Process Exporter
Loki / Promtail
Grafana / dashboard creation
InfluxDB
Zero-trust and identity management deployment and configuration. Keycloak
Teleport
Borderware Technologies Inc
System Support - Webmaster - Network Administrator Jan 2000 - Sept 2008
Mississauga
Standardized workstations, laptops, and production servers on the Dell platform. Created and managed a resilient DNS service for Borderware using three geographically distributed authoritative DNS servers, Hurricane Electric, London, and Sweden—providing uninterrupted resolution and supporting DNS lookups for all Borderware systems and services. Maintained consistency across sites by performing DNS zone transfers from the Toronto office master to Hurricane Electric, London, and Sweden, which act as secondaries. Created an Identity Management System using OpenLDAP and Active Directory, enabling QA engineers and developers to log into BSD systems for deploying and testing code. Designed and implemented a worldwide email platform consisting of Active Directory for user management (with redundant domain controllers), BlackBerry Enterprise Servers for mobile mail delivery to BlackBerry devices, and Exchange servers supporting corporate offices in Toronto, London, Belgium, Germany, and Sweden.
Implemented a network monitoring system for internal and external devices, increasing reliability and improving customer and employee satisfaction. Replaced IPsec VPN technology with redundant F5 SSL devices resulting in better performance and employee satisfaction.
Implemented a network backup system consisting of a tape jukebox, a shell script, and off- site tape storage at Iron Mountain.
Created a backup shell script that compressed and encrypted the CVS repository, enabling safe remote storage.
Researched and implemented an Uninterruptible Power Supply providing daily power to essential systems during yearly building maintenance and building brownouts. Education Sheridan College
Computer Systems Analyst
Sept 1996 – Dec 1999
Systems Analyst
Skills Automation & Orchestration
Ansible, Terraform, Packer, Octopus, N8N, Shell scripting, Python, Cloud-Init Infrastructure & Containers
Docker, VMware, Kubernetes, Rancher
Monitoring and Observability
ELK, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, Nagios, CheckMK, Netdata, InfluxDB Version Control & CI/CD
Bamboo, JIRA, Git
Certifications DevOps Foundations: Site Reliability Engineering LinkedIn
Aug 2025
LinkedIn Learning.
Docker Foundations Professional Certificate
Aug 2025
LinkedIn Learning.
Version control with Git
Dec 2020
LinkedIn Learning.
Kubernetes Microservices
July 2024
LinkedIn Learning.
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