About Me

Infrastructure & Cloud Operations Engineer — 13 years enterprise IT, GPU-backed homelab, AWS pivot in progress.

Operations First

I'm Chris Rothmeier. I've spent 13 years building, operating, and improving enterprise infrastructure — from Active Directory forests and Exchange environments to hybrid Azure deployments and GPU-backed container orchestration.

My career started in traditional Microsoft infrastructure (Windows Server, Active Directory, VMware) and has evolved through hybrid cloud (Azure AD Connect, Conditional Access, M365) into container orchestration and AI/ML infrastructure. The constant across all of it: I care about whether systems actually work when it matters most.

I run a serious homelab not as a hobby but as a validation environment — testing technologies against real constraints (storage, networking, GPU scheduling, observability) before recommending them. The blog posts on this site document that process.

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Homelab infrastructure

What I'm Targeting

Full-time W-2 roles where operability matters.

Infrastructure / Systems Engineering

Windows/VMware estates, identity (AD/Entra ID), M365 administration, endpoint security. Day-one ready with 13 years of direct experience.

  • Active Directory & Group Policy
  • Azure AD Connect & Conditional Access
  • VMware vSphere / Proxmox
  • Veeam backup & recovery

Cloud Operations

Hybrid cloud patterns, AWS fundamentals (SAA-C03 in progress), Infrastructure as Code, and automation-first operations.

  • AWS + Azure hybrid
  • Terraform & Ansible
  • Kubernetes (K3s/K8s)
  • Prometheus / Grafana

MSP Systems Engineering

Multi-client infrastructure management, client-facing communication, broad technology stack. Strong fit for Tier 3 MSP roles.

  • Multi-tenant experience
  • Client communication
  • Broad stack coverage
  • Documentation & runbooks

W-2 employment only. Not available for freelance or contract work. Philadelphia area or remote.

Career Arc

From traditional Microsoft infrastructure to hybrid cloud and container orchestration

2011–2016

Windows Server, Active Directory, VMware vSphere, Exchange

2017–2020

Azure, M365, Hybrid Identity, Conditional Access

2021–2023

Kubernetes, Docker, IaC (Terraform/Ansible), Linux

2024–Present

GPU Homelab, K3s, vLLM, Observability, AWS SAA-C03

Current Stack

Proxmox / KVM

Kubernetes (K3s)

NVIDIA GPUs

Prometheus / Grafana

Homelab Notes

Lab work is for learning and validation — not a product or services offering.

GPU Fleet

NVIDIA L4 (24GB), RTX A4000 (16GB), Tesla T4 (16GB), RTX 4070 Ti SUPER (16GB). Used for vLLM inference testing and GPU scheduling validation. Per-GPU scheduling — effective limits are 16–24GB per workload.

Networking

10GbE backbone with 25GbE point-to-point between Proxmox hosts. Multi-VLAN segmentation, QLogic adapters, DAC cabling. Proper network isolation for lab vs. production traffic.

Storage

ZFS-backed storage pools with snapshots, replication, and NVMe caching. Proxmox Backup Server for automated VM/container backups with verified restores.

Observability

Prometheus + Grafana with custom dashboards, alerting rules tied to real failure modes, and DCGM exporter for GPU metrics. If it's not monitored, it doesn't exist.

Let's Connect

Seeking full-time W-2 infrastructure, systems, or cloud operations roles.

Philadelphia, PA or remote. Resume available on request.

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