Last updated: Apr 7, 2025

Guthrie McAfee Armstrong

Platform Engineering · DevEx · Infrastructure as Code

Summary

Platform engineer focused on automating infrastructure and refining access and deployment systems on cloud platforms. Built reproducible pipelines with Terraform and GitHub Actions, centralized IAM, and cut alert noise across environments. Strong Python background with experience building ELT flows and unifying inconsistent schemas.

Skills

IaC & Automation: Terraform/OpenTofu, Git, GitHub Actions
Containers & Runtime: Docker, ECS
Cloud Platforms: Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, IAM, VPC, Route53), Google Cloud Platform
Monitoring: CloudWatch, New Relic, PagerDuty
Access Control: IAM Identity Center (AWS SSO), OAuth, SAML
Data & Pipelines: PostgreSQL, Redshift, ELT workflows
Languages: Python, Java, Kotlin, SQL, Bash/shell scripting

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA‑C03)
Mar 2024 (Exp. Mar 2027) — [verification]

Experience

New York Public Radio — Platform Engineer

Remote · Oct 2022 – Feb 2025

Owned GitHub Actions and Terraform Cloud modules for managing dev/staging/prod AWS environments
Automated CI/CD workflows for ECS‑based services, reducing manual deployments and release rollbacks
Centralized identity and access management via IAM Identity Center; integrated with SAML and OAuth‑based identity providers
Refactored observability stack to reduce false‑positive alerts and improve MTTR
Developed Python‑based ELT pipelines for PostgreSQL and Redshift; improved query latency through schema and index optimization

UGA Rural Jails Research Hub — Research Engineer

Remote · Apr 2020 – May 2021

Wrote web scrapers for 43 county jail systems using Python and Selenium; standardized disparate datasets into a unified schema
Developed a containerized pipeline on GCP to ingest, clean, and store scraped data; integrated scheduling and alerting with Pub/Sub
Extracted semi‑structured records from PDF reports using regex and R; implemented parallelized processing to minimize compute costs to $20/mo.
Modeled relational jail data using PostgreSQL and Hibernate; authored schema migrations for evolving record formats

Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, UGA — Undergraduate Research Assistant

Athens, GA · Jan 2020 – May 2020

Linked historical census microdata to anonymized datasets of enslaved individuals using R and Python
Digitized 19th‑century Italian penal archives via OCR (Tesseract) and NLP (spaCy); built named-entity extraction tools to surface structured metadata
Led LaTeX and Pandoc workshops for researchers and faculty

Education

University of Georgia — B.S. Computer Science

Aug 2016 – Aug 2022

Senior coursework: Data Privacy (differential privacy, adversarial ML), Cloud Computing (GCP, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes), Computer Networks
Publication: Boots and Bail on the Ground: Assessing the Implementation of Misdemeanor Bail Reforms in Georgia, Georgia Law Review 54(4), 2020 (with A. Woods et al.)
Presentation: l-Diversity of Felony Charges in k-Anonymous Jail Data, UGA CURO Symposium, 2020 (advised by S. Shannon)
Presentation: Georgia Jail Data: Significance and Inaccessibility of Government Records, Historical Profiles of American Incarceration, 2019 (with A. Potts)

Foundational Experience

Fernbank LINKS Robotics — Lead Programmer & Mentor

2015 – 2016 (high school team)

Developed autonomous movement routines in Java; integrated sensors for field navigation and task execution; taught CAD fundamentals in AutoCAD for mechanical design
Helped organize and run regional FIRST Tech Challenge and BEST Robotics events; handled real‑time logistics and technical triage
Co-led community outreach program teaching LEGO Mindstorms programming to elementary students

Projects

vim-muse – Vim plugin for creative writers that fetches synonyms, rhymes, and semantic matches from an NLP API; unit tested and written for a hackathon
python-datamuse – Python wrapper for the Datamuse API; used in creative NLP tools; unit tested with mocking
letter-boxed – Kotlin solver for the NYT Letter Boxed puzzle
Contributed to Dangerzone PDF sanitizer (Freedom of the Press Foundation)