Hector Castro
Senior DevOps Engineer at Umbra
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHector Castro is a Senior DevOps and platform reliability engineer with 15 years of experience designing observable, secure, and automated delivery systems for teams ranging from startups to large media enterprises. He combines hands-on infrastructure work—Terraform, Chef, AWS serverless and ECS—with organizational change skills, having built platform teams, technical decision frameworks, and apprenticeship hiring pipelines. At NBCUniversal and Umbra he drove measurable reliability and security improvements by introducing Datadog-based observability, CI security gates, and automated dependency remediation that cut MTTR and tightened signal quality. He scaled critical public-health infrastructure at Opentrons and contributed long-standing DevOps tooling in open source, notably improving Chef bootstrapping and Logstash cookbooks. Based in Philadelphia and trained in CS at Temple with product studies at Wharton, he blends technical depth with product-minded process design to make systems both resilient and operable. Colleagues describe him as someone who turns chaotic ops into repeatable organizational capability—occasionally with a dry sense of humor about team culture.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Computer Science at Temple UniversityProduct Design and Development, Product Design and Development at The Wharton School
Spanish
Stackoverflow
423reputation
16kreached
8answers
1question
Github Skills (19)
configuration-management10
ubuntu10
ruby10
chef-client10
automation10
logstash10
chef-solo10
automations10
devops10
python9
linux9
bash9
upstart9
activerecord6
rake6
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
lusis/chef-logstash
Jul 2012 - Oct 2012
Semi-official Logstash cookbook
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:5 commits in 3 months
Contributions summary:Hector primarily focused on infrastructure-as-code and configuration management, as evidenced by the modifications to Chef recipes. They implemented support for Ubuntu 12.04 using Upstart, updated service configurations, and added an index cleaner using Python. The contributions involved setting up and configuring the Logstash service across different platforms, showcasing a focus on automating deployment and maintenance.
cookbooksemilogstashelasticsearchchef-resource
matschaffer/knife-solo
Apr 2012 - Jun 2012
DEPRECATED: Please consider using https://knife-zero.github.io/, ansible, or visit https://www.chef.io/ for other ideas
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:7 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Hector primarily focused on improving the bootstrapping process for Chef in various Linux environments. They implemented the Opscode Omnibus installation method and made it the default for supported Linux operating systems, while also adding an option to specify the Omnibus installer version. Furthermore, the user addressed SSH configuration issues and updated Chef dependency constraints. Their work focused on automation, infrastructure setup, and ensuring the correct Chef version is used.
pythonzerovisitansibleknife
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