Root-cause analysis on release blockers
Release-blocking CI failures were traced to their actual causes and fixed at the shared infrastructure or template layer instead of being repeatedly retried.
Resume
Brandon Donaly, platform engineer.
I work across platform automation, infrastructure, security, networking, and AI-assisted development, with 20+ years of hands-on software, networking, systems, and security experience. Most recently I spent 21 months as a Wireless Engineer III on the AAA/RADIUS authentication platform behind a national carrier's WiFi offload service.
There I converted runbook-driven deployments into 6 versioned Ansible collections, owned a Cassandra operations programme, reverse-engineered undocumented RADIUS accounting logic into a behavioural-parity baseline for a platform rewrite, and built automation and test platforms across infrastructure, release engineering, security, and telecom policy.
Later work included a deployed engineering chat assistant, native application SSO, infrastructure inventory reconciliation, and a Cassandra UDF optimization measured in development benchmarks.
Headline numbers
Scope and output
Selected evidence from the completed Charter engagement. Output counts reflect an early-August 2026 snapshot of the project tracker, GitLab, git history, and internal wiki; later work is described in the experience record.
- 21 months
- Contract engagement
- 5
- Platform areas owned concurrently
- 180
- Tickets delivered
- 248
- Merge requests merged
- 6
- Versioned Ansible collections
- 29
- Tagged releases
Nov 2024 – Aug 2026, start to end of the engagement.
Deployment automation, Cassandra, AAA policy, security remediation, and the lab supply chain.
Shipped and verified across those 5 areas.
Across 31 repositories; sole author in 21 of them.
Replacing hand-run runbook deployment. Sole commit author on all 6.
Shipped across those 6 collections.
Security research
Disclosure-safe research, kept separate.
Independent security work is published separately from employer history, including vulnerability research, authorized assessment work, and reverse engineering.
Find the relevant experience
Choose a role focus
Share a focused résumé with your hiring team, or print a copy for review.
Platform & infrastructure
Infrastructure automation, database operations, release engineering, and reliable developer environments.
View focused résumé →Security & identity
Security controls, identity integration, remediation, and reviewable automation across platform and independent engineering.
View focused résumé →Network & telecom
Subscriber authentication, RADIUS accounting, wireless infrastructure, and repeatable protocol validation.
View focused résumé →Software & test platforms
Production applications, typed libraries, protocol integrations, and automation that removes repetitive engineering work.
View focused résumé →AI & workflow automation
Useful AI integrations built around constrained tools, explicit authorization, testing, and maintained engineering knowledge.
View focused résumé →Integration & interoperability
Making separate systems, devices and vendors work as one: service contracts, identity federation, message transport, and device protocols implemented against the real specification.
View focused résumé →Test & release engineering
Proving a change is safe before it ships: automated test platforms, regression suites, reproducible build and release pipelines, and evidence that the tests actually ran.
View focused résumé →Experience
Experience at a glance
The chapters in brief. Full grouped accomplishments live on the experience page.
Wireless Engineer III — AAA Development & Platform Automation · Charter Communications (Spectrum)
Nov 2024 – Aug 2026
Wireless Engineer III on a national carrier AAA/RADIUS platform supporting subscriber WiFi authentication, roaming, and accounting workflows.
- Ansible
- Cassandra
- Nokia AAA / TAL
- RADIUS / RadSec
- EAP-AKA / EAP-TTLS
- 802.1X
Founder / Principal Engineer · Duvall WiFi
Aug 2022 – Nov 2024
Founded and ran a technology and ISP services company, owning customer discovery through implementation, operations, billing, and support.
- Founder
- Wireless ISP
- FreeRADIUS
- Spring
- Laravel
- VMware vSphere / vSAN
Technology & Growth Consultant · Pacific Northwest Plumbing
Jun 2023 – Nov 2024
Delivered technology and growth consulting for a trades business across software, analytics, customer acquisition, and support.
- Laravel
- Analytics & conversion tracking
- Advertising workflows
- Helpdesk
- IP-camera integrations
Network & Systems Consultant · Wilderness Awareness School
Nov 2022 – Nov 2024
Delivered network and systems consulting for a multi-property school in challenging rural terrain.
- Enterprise networking
- Point-to-point wireless
- Structured cabling
- Monitoring
- End-user support
Technical Consultant · Beyond Grey Skies, LLC
Mar 2016 – Jun 2021
Provided enterprise network, server, and technical operations consulting.
- pfSense
- VyOS
- MikroTik RouterOS
- Cisco IOS
- Intrusion monitoring
- Data-center fabric
Independent projects
All 15 with outcomes →- Identity Platform Engineering 2026
- AI Integration & Security Engineering 2026
- Secure Compute & Network Automation 2026
- Observability as Code 2026
- Private Cloud & Homelab Platform Engineering Ongoing
- Multi-Agent Engineering System Design 2026
- Website Factory & Edge Delivery 2026
- Multi-Vault Documentation Hub 2026
- Operational Tooling & Agent Skills 2026
- Device & Systems Integration 2023
- Product Architecture & Engineering Independent, after-hours
- Infrastructure Configuration & Containment 2020 – 2023
- Embedded, Mobile & Signal Engineering 2021 – 2023
- Game Platform, Identity & Reverse Engineering 2015 – 2018
- Additional Engineering Projects 2002 – present
The detail
Experience and skills
Recruiter brief
A concise introduction, selected evidence, and résumés organized by role focus.
Experience
The public record: scope owned and selected accomplishments grouped by discipline, with internal operational details deliberately generalized.
Skills
The public skills inventory, category by category, with named technologies kept where they demonstrate useful experience without exposing sensitive environment details.
Plain-text resume
A machine-readable mirror of the sanitized public resume for ATS parsers, AI agents, and anyone who prefers grep to scrolling.
Working method
How the work gets done
Patterns the record demonstrates repeatedly, each with a shipped example behind it.
QA findings treated as product defects
Certification findings against backup tooling became validation, autodiscovery, and safer runtime behavior shipped as follow-up releases. The documentation stayed accurate because the product changed.
Rehearsal and failure injection
A database topology change was rehearsed against an isolated replica; deployment tests deliberately injected failures and checked that the previous release remained startable.
Removing operator footguns
Hard-coded defaults became autodiscovery, repetitive operator input was reduced, and fragile maintenance steps were replaced with safer native operations.
Documentation as a deliverable
An 11-page onboarding suite for an undocumented policy language, installation guides that passed formal certification, and CI-published operator documentation kept knowledge aligned with releases.
Testing real integration boundaries
Live chat and SSO tests exposed permission, identity-resolution, and session-isolation defects that isolated tests had missed.
Credentials
Certifications
- CompTIA A+ (2024)
- CompTIA Network+ (2024)
- CompTIA Security+ (2024)
- CompTIA Server+ (2024)
- Microsoft MTA: Mobility and Device Fundamentals (2017)
Contact
Hiring, or have a project in mind?
I'm looking for a senior individual-contributor role with architectural ownership, and I take on independent project work. Tell me what you're building.