Engineering Leadership
Minneapolis, MN

Levi McCormick

Director of Cloud Engineering & Architecture
Cloud Architecture • FinOps ($50M+ ARR) • DevSecOps • Platform Engineering
levi@levimccormick.com linkedin.com/in/levimccormick
Executive Summary

Experienced director, cloud architect, and devops engineer; I have implemented multiple cross-cutting initiatives with a focus on developer productivity and operational integrity, resulting in over 500% more deployments per week, 41.2% cheaper hosting, and on average 10% more reliability. Even though I work on internally facing teams, I still take a product mindset to the services I provide, constantly asking myself “If the teams could use a different provider, would they?” I enjoy mentoring and guiding other teams to solutions.

Guiding Principle: “You build it, you run it”

Professional Experience

Chronological record of leadership, architecture, and engineering impact

Director of Cloud Engineering

Jamf • Minneapolis, MN
Present July 2023 – Present
AWS (500+ Accounts) FinOps ($50M+ ARR) AI Cost Controls Global Networking (26 Regions) FedRAMP NIST Baselines Team Leadership

Director of Engineering, FedRAMP

Jamf • Minneapolis, MN
July 2022 – June 2023
FedRAMP StateRAMP NIST Guidelines Cross-Team Leadership (26 Teams) Compliance Delivery

Cloud Architect

Jamf • Minneapolis, MN
February 2021 – June 2022
  • Established Cloud Cost reporting architecture, process, guidelines, and team to manage eight figures of cloud spend per year. Held meetings with stakeholders and team members to drive consensus around reporting structures and cost savings initiatives.
  • Developed reference architecture for multi-region applications and network topologies. Lead the implementation of network architectures to simplify connectivity in a mixed serverless, kubernetes, and VM-based environment.
  • Wrote company-wide strategies involving cloud-based product/application encapsulation using combinations of AWS accounts, network policies, and IAM trust relationships to provide strong security boundaries.
  • Developed platform initiatives to accelerate application delivery timelines, meeting compliance requirements, including SOC2, FedRAMP, PCI, and GDPR frameworks.
  • Acted as subject matter expert when leveraging cloud platforms and capabilities to maximize our investment in the cloud.
Multi-Region Architecture Kubernetes Serverless IAM Trust Boundaries SOC2 / PCI / GDPR 8-Figure Spend Governance

Principal DevSecOps Engineer

Federal Reserve Bank • Minneapolis, MN
November 2019 – January 2021
  • Architected modular deployment pipelines on Gitlab for container and serverless applications in a highly regulated environment, deploying to AWS ECS and AWS Lambda.
  • Built baseline infrastructure and operational patterns for the first cloud-native application in the Federal Reserve System.
  • Developed automated compliance-as-code reporting to meet over 1,800 controls from FedRAMP and FRS framework through pipeline events.
  • Established inner-source initiatives for technology sharing between bank districts to enable and accelerate cloud adoption across the Federal Reserve System.
GitLab CI/CD AWS ECS AWS Lambda 1,800+ Compliance Controls Cloud-Native Pioneer Inner-Source Strategy

Lead Cloud Engineer

SPS Commerce • Minneapolis, MN
September 2016 – November 2019
  • Implemented a container platform built on AWS ECS and Spot instances, driving app hosting costs down by 41.2%. Reliability improved due to platform initiatives and strong contracts between the platform and applications.
  • Developed and adopted deployment pipelines for serverless and container platforms across multiple delivery teams. Tight integration between the platform and the pipelines drove application releases from 300 per week to over 1,500 per week across four environments and four dozen services.
  • Lead and managed cloud operations focused on baseline cloud infrastructure, IAM policies, account structures, cost management and reporting, and vendor management.
  • Architected account and project structures, along with IAM and cloud network topologies to enforce application isolation while maximizing developer productivity.
  • Mentored, trained, and managed engineers from interns to principal engineering peers through individual meetings, classroom settings, open-sharing sessions, and scheduled adoption initiatives.
AWS ECS & Spot (-41.2% Cost) 1,500+ Releases/Wk Platform Contracts IAM Isolation Engineering Mentorship

Lead DevOps Engineer

Arkiom • Minneapolis, MN
July 2012 – September 2016
  • Single-handedly engineered, launched, supported a net-new application system to automate charitable organizations applying to be part of a $170 million yearly fundraising campaign.
  • Migrated our 14 donation systems from managed hosting to AWS, developing the architecture, automation, monitoring, and CI/CD processes to modernize a 10 year old architecture.
  • Developed a migration plan for consolidating our single-tenant donation systems to a scalable, multi-tenant system in the cloud.
AWS Migration (14 Systems) $170M Fundraising Platform Multi-Tenant Architecture CI/CD & Automation
Earlier Career & Operations Leadership (2003 – 2012)
View Details
Systems Administrator
Dayton Rogers Mfg 2008 – 2012
  • Serviced desktops, file servers, and networking equipment for 6 locations.
  • Ensured business continuity through hardware and software availability and data durability.
  • Managed month-end business operations processing and reporting.
Production Manager
Pixelwerx 2006 – 2007
  • Managed production schedules and ordering supplies.
  • Hired and trained new employees.
  • Produced print work for customers.
Assistant Manager, Production
Fedex Kinkos 2003 – 2006
  • Lead the production business unit, managing production schedules, supply levels, equipment maintenance, and employee training.
  • Completed necessary managerial training to take over general manager position, including budgeting, market strategy, lead generation.

AI Disclosure & Ethics

Transparency statement on generative AI usage, ethical principles, and craft
💡
In short: I am a cloud architect, not a web designer. I use generative AI as an adaptability tool and velocity accelerator, but with deep ethical intentionality around labor, training data, and human authenticity.
01

Cloud Architect, Not a Web Designer

I am a Director of Cloud Engineering and Enterprise Architect, not a professional frontend designer. To create an interactive portfolio that is polished, accessible, and fast, I lean heavily on generative AI (specifically agentic workflows like Claude Code and Google Antigravity).

AI assists with CSS architecture, responsive layout tuning, and boilerplate generation—allowing me to present my technical journey with high craftsmanship without having to masquerade as a career UI/UX designer.

02

Ethical Dissonance & Unlicensed Training Data

I recognize and openly acknowledge that frontier generative AI models were trained on vast amounts of unlicensed intellectual property, copyrighted works, and open-source contributions created by humans who were neither asked nor compensated.

This reality leaves me in a genuine state of ethical dissonance regarding AI’s widespread adoption. I do not take that underlying human labor for granted, nor do I believe the technology’s utility absolves the industry of how it was built.

03

An Adaptability Tool for ADHD

In many areas of my workflow, AI agents serve as an essential cognitive accessibility and adaptability tool for my ADHD.

My mind operates in high-dimensional architectural systems, which can sometimes come with executive functioning friction when translating complex thoughts into structured, linear documentation. An AI agent serves as an interactive cognitive sounding board—helping structure thoughts, maintain momentum, overcome task initiation barriers, and keep focus locked on high-value outcomes.

04

Labor Ethics: Never Displacing Paid Work

My guiding principle is simple: Wherever possible, I try not to take work away from people.

I do not have an issue using AI when something was never going to be a paying job for someone—such as this personal website, personal experiments, or rapid proof-of-concepts where hiring a design agency or web contractor was never on the table.

However, when commercial projects, real budgets, and team livelihoods are at stake, human expertise, creative ownership, and fair compensation must always take precedence over convenience.

05

100% Genuine Metrics & Experience

While AI helped code and format this site, every achievement, metric, and architectural philosophy presented here is 100% my authentic, lived track record:

  • The $32M+ in cumulative FinOps cost savings across SPS Commerce and Jamf.
  • The 500+ AWS accounts across 26 regions orchestrated with self-service platform automation.
  • The enterprise Claude Code rollout scaling to 420+ DAU across 600+ engineers with automated cost guardrails.
  • The FedRAMP distillation and compliance-as-code automation across 1,800+ controls.

AI is my synthesizer and co-pilot; the architecture, leadership, and results are entirely mine.