Vern Burton
Staff Engineer at Best Buy
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolVern Burton is a Staff Engineer in Minneapolis with a decade of hands-on experience designing and operating enterprise-grade Linux and Windows infrastructure, deployment automation, and cloud architectures across AWS and OpenStack. At Best Buy he modernized legacy integration tooling with HashiCorp Nomad and built developer-friendly tooling including just-in-time secrets for Java, NodeJS, and Ruby, demonstrating a focus on both scalability and developer experience. He contributes to well-known open-source projects—notably adding auditing and platform support features to InSpec and hardening backend stability in Sensu Go—bridging DevOps and backend engineering. Vern’s background spans migrations of large services (Rackspace to internal, Mashery to Apigee) and deep test automation work in Test Kitchen, reflecting an emphasis on reliability and measurable delivery. With an MBA specializing in data analysis and a history of leading cross-functional platform improvements, he combines technical depth with product-minded execution. Colleagues describe him as a pragmatic problem-solver who prefers building small, reusable tooling that removes friction for engineers.
10 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Business Administration and Management, Data Analysis, 4.0, Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Business Administration and Management, Data Analysis, 4.0 at Saint Mary's University of MinnesotaBachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at Minnesota School of Business
Stackoverflow
3,225reputation
338kreached
64answers
4questions
nginx
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gzip
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magento
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Github Skills (38)
monitoring10
test-kitchen10
filesystem10
gzip10
inspec10
back-end-development10
apidoc10
testing10
audit10
magento10
ruby10
go10
api10
mssql10
yaml10
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
test-kitchen/test-kitchen
Jul 2018 - Jun 2021
Test Kitchen is an integration tool for developing and testing infrastructure code and software on isolated target platforms
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Test Automation Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:29 commits, 13 PRs, 14 comments in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Vern primarily contributed to the test-kitchen repository by modifying and improving the testing infrastructure and related configuration. They made several commits focused on fixing issues related to configuration file handling, including error messages and the logic for locating configuration files. The user's work also involved adjustments to the test specifications and the addition of lifecycle hooks to the instance diagnose process. The changes indicate a focus on improving the robustness and usability of the testing framework.
infrastructure-testingruby-gemtest-kitchendevelopingkitchen
sensu/sensu-go
Feb 2020 - Mar 2020
Simple. Scalable. Multi-cloud monitoring.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 7 PRs, 10 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Vern primarily contributed to the backend logic of the Sensu Go project, implementing features and addressing issues related to API authentication, asset fetching, and the Etcd store. They also added a /version endpoint to the agent API and ensured checks and check configurations had valid commands and subscriptions. The user's work focused on improving the stability and functionality of the core backend components.
golangscalablereactdevopsinfrastructure
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