Saad Yaldram

DevOps Engineer

2021 - Present

Booz Allen Hamilton, Richmond, VA

• Reduced infrastructure costs by $26,700 per year for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by designing and deploying a custom self-hosted ephemeral GitHub Actions runner on AWS that improved developer and data scientist experience.
• Developed and deployed an automatic tagging solution for AWS resources using a custom AWS Config rule backed by AWS Lambda. This enforced compliance with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) policy across 50 AWS accounts and, for the first time, provided accurate billing information across program and contractor categories.
• Built Grafana dashboards powered by Loki, Prometheus, Fluent Bit, and OpenTelemetry to provide real-time visibility into the custom GitHub Actions runner, enabling tracking of team adoption, monitoring resource utilization, and uncovering insights to optimize job execution time and accelerate pipelines.
• Implemented auto-optimization logic to monitor CPU, memory, and storage utilization, automatically selecting optimal instance types for subsequent GitHub Actions jobs to balance cost and performance using the custom GitHub Actions runner.
• Enhanced developer and data scientist productivity by pre-configuring software runtimes and essential CLI tools, reducing pipeline setup time and ensuring consistency across environments using the custom GitHub Actions runner.
• Developed a cloud resource inventory collector application for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to track provisioned government resources. Leveraged AWS Glue and Athena to provide stakeholders with query insights into deployed assets such as S3 bucket sizes, EC2 instance types, and other resource metadata.
• Engineered a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that integrated large language models with AWS logs, metrics, and the GitHub API, streamlining the analysis and debugging of failed GitHub Actions jobs on the custom ephemeral runner and improving incident resolution efficiency.
• Updated GitHub Actions Runner Controller (ARC) software versions within Kubernetes clusters using Helm charts, effectively deploying and managing Custom Resource Definitions to enhance CI/CD capabilities.

DevOps Engineer

2020 - 2021

Pearl Business Solutions LLC, Richmond, VA

• Led a financial optimization project, leveraging technical expertise to drive cost reduction initiatives, resulting in optimized resource allocation and enhanced fiscal management. Conducted comprehensive performance and cost analysis of ARM-based chips, identifying ARM as the most cost-effective solution.
• Designed and documented AWS Network Firewall architectures, evaluating multiple deployment models—including contractor-owned accounts with a single NFW for egress traffic and organization-wide NFW accounts—and presented pros and cons for each approach to guide stakeholder decision-making.
• Created a CI/CD pipeline to scan AWS accounts for EC2 instances using IMDSv1 and documented security vulnerabilities. Utilized AWS Step Functions, Lambda functions, and Terraform IaC to generate summary reports for leadership.
• Automated the launch of compliant EC2 instances using a Terraform template stored in SCM, enforcing the use of the latest RHEL AWS AMI (Gold Images), compliant subnets and VPCs, IAM policies, and tags.
• Mentored 5+ junior developers in Python and Jenkins, enabling them to independently maintain CI/CD pipelines and automate workflows.

Senior Analyst

2020 - 2021

Owens & Minor, Mechanicsville, VA

• Developed and maintained automated capital expenditure reports using SQL and Python, ensuring timely identification of discrepancies and mitigating financial risks, resulting in a 15% reduction in compliance-related issues.
• Created Python scripts to extract financial data from MySQL and populate Excel reports, reducing manual data entry by 50% and minimizing errors in financial statements.
• Created SQL queries to extract financial data, then utilized Python DataFrames to transform the data into presentable reports for management, delivering accurate monthly reports.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to optimize financial reporting processes and reduce reporting cycle times while maintaining data accuracy and integrity.

Bachelor of Science, Accounting

2008 - 2012

University of Maryland, College Park

Cyber Security Bootcamp

2020 - 2021

University of Richmond