Tad Merchant
Sr DevOps Engineer at DroneDeploy
City of Ithaca, New York, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTad Merchant is a Sr DevOps Engineer with 12 years of experience building and operating cloud-native infrastructure and full stack web applications, currently driving platform reliability at DroneDeploy. He brings deep Linux, AWS, GCP and Kubernetes expertise, having spent significant time shaping Kubernetes-based deployments at Cornell and contributing concrete improvements to Ansible’s AWS ECS module. A longtime full-time Linux user and dotfiles tinkerer, Tad moves quickly between development and operations—“putting the Dev in DevOps”—and prefers pragmatic automation, observability, and security-minded design. He’s comfortable picking up new languages and tools, and has a track record of designing pipelines, scaling high-traffic academic systems, and shipping infrastructure changes that interoperate cleanly with cloud SDKs.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (BS), Computer Science at Mississippi State University
Stackoverflow
3,288reputation
707kreached
9answers
0questions
bash
top-5%
ssh
top-1%
curl
top-5%
rsa
top-1%
macos
top-1%
Github Skills (29)
boto10
amazon-ecs10
python10
rsa10
aws10
ansible10
aws-ecs10
ansible-galaxy10
macos10
devops10
ssh10
bash9
automation9
curl9
automations9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
ansible/ansible
Nov 2018 - Dec 2019
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.
Role in this project:
Backend & DevOps Engineer
Backend & DevOps EngineerContributions:6 commits, 46 PRs, 31 comments in 1 year
Contributions summary:Tad primarily contributed to the AWS ECS service module, adding features like `force_new_deployment`, `service_registries`, `scheduling_strategy` and task tagging. Their contributions include modifying code to support these features, adding tests, and fixing related bugs. They also worked on improving the module's interaction with boto3 and addressed issues related to version compatibility.
everythingpythonit-automationdevopsdeployment
ezmac/ansible
Nov 2018 - Dec 2019
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. Avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications — automate in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/
Contributions:70 pushes, 15 branches in 1 year 1 month
pythonit-automationdevopsansibleplain-english
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