I’m Kyle Heller — a platform engineer at Nationwide, building and operating production Kubernetes platforms on AWS EKS.

Before that I spent seven years as a Technical Lead at Veeam Software supporting cloud service provider partners. I’ve seen more production infrastructure failures than most people see in a career, and that experience shapes how I think about building reliable platforms.

Day to day I work with Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Terraform, and observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry). I care about policy enforcement, container security, and making platforms that other teams actually want to use.

My background is unconventional: I studied Social Work at Ohio State before pivoting to tech, then completed an M.S. in Computer Science at CU Boulder with graduate certificates in Data Science and AI. I hold CKA, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Terraform Associate, CCNA, and VMCE certifications.

Outside of work I build things at Nightforge Systems, make industrial electronic music as Ritual Neglect, and try to keep up with a toddler. Based in Columbus, Ohio.