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.

+500%

Deployments / Week

Scaled releases from 300 to 1,500+/week across 4 environments

41.2%

Hosting Cost Cut

Spot instances, ECS architecture, and FinOps practices

99.94%

Availability SLA

Improved from 98.2% via multi-region distributed architecture

$50M+

ARR Commitments

Multi-year cloud vendor negotiation & $2.4M+ monthly savings

600+

AI-Enabled Devs

Cloud-native AI cost controls for Claude Code in 4 days

Professional Experience

Chronological record of leadership, architecture, and engineering impact

Director of Cloud Engineering

Jamf • Minneapolis, MN

Present July 2023 – Present

Implemented and managed the rollout of cloud-native AI cost controls to bring Claude Code access to 600+ engineers in 4 days.

Architected centralized API rate limiting, cost governance pipelines, and granular token usage quotas across all engineering business units. Integrated real-time alerts and automated throttle mechanisms to safeguard against anomalous runaway costs while maintaining unhindered developer velocity.

Impact: 600+ engineers enabled in 4 days with zero budget overruns
Established a new team, centralizing fundamental cloud infrastructure; including accounts/subscriptions, networking, and team IAM.

Formed and scaled the core Cloud Platform Engineering team. Standardized account vending and tenant management using Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform / AWS Control Tower & Organizations), implementing unified SSO federation, role-based access control, and least-privilege guardrails.

Impact: Reduced account vending from weeks to <30 minutes
Designed and implemented a global cloud network serving 500+ AWS accounts and 26 regions, centralizing connectivity and accelerating delivery, while also increasing network level observability and security.

Engineered a hub-and-spoke transit network using AWS Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, and cross-region peering topologies. Implemented centralized egress inspection with automated firewall policy distribution, VPC Flow Log analytics, and end-to-end packet observability.

Impact: 500+ AWS accounts connected across 26 global regions
Worked closely with security teams to establish security baselines across all cloud properties, turning security frameworks (NIST, FedRAMP, CyberEssentials) into baseline config enforcement.

Codified complex compliance controls into automated AWS Config rules, SCP guardrails, and CI/CD policy evaluation using Open Policy Agent. Established automated remediation playbooks to ensure continuous posture compliance across all accounts.

Impact: Automated continuous compliance across NIST, FedRAMP & CyberEssentials
Developed centralized deployment patterns for security and compliance teams to implement solutions, pushing events to Splunk for triage.

Engineered scalable event-driven streaming pipelines with Amazon EventBridge, Kinesis Firehose, and serverless forwarders to aggregate CloudTrail, GuardDuty, and network flow logs directly into Splunk Enterprise for real-time security operations.

Impact: Sub-second event aggregation for real-time SOC triage
Formalized FinOps team and practices, classifying and codifying spending reports in the organization. Championed multiple cost-saving initiatives, including adoption of spot instances ($600k monthly), ARM-based instances ($440k monthly), and centralized reservations ($1.4m monthly).

Established an enterprise FinOps operational framework with unit economics, automated anomaly detection, and departmental chargeback reporting. Led engineering adoption of AWS Graviton processors, Spot fleets in container clusters, and unified Savings Plans.

Impact: $2.44M+ recurring monthly savings ($29M+ annualized)
Pushed multiple re-architecture projects, resulting in $1.4m in yearly savings. One project also saw availability improve from 98.2% to 99.94%.

Spearheaded distributed system redesigns decomposing monolithic single-point-of-failure services into stateless containerized microservices, multi-region database replication, and automated canary routing via Route 53.

Impact: Availability elevated to 99.94% and $1.4M annual cost savings
Negotiated multi-year $50M+ ARR cloud commitments with multiple cloud vendors.

Collaborated with executive leadership and procurement to model future capacity demands, enterprise discount structures (EDP), and private pricing agreements with major cloud and SaaS providers, maximizing contractual leverage and support tiers.

Impact: Secured enterprise discounts and SLA terms across $50M+ ARR commitments

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

Lead 26 engineering/product/security teams through the initial engineering tasks related to meeting FedRAMP/StateRAMP compliance.

Orchestrated cross-functional governance across 26 distributed product and platform squads. Established standardized architectural patterns, cryptographic boundaries, and compliance milestones that enabled disparate teams to align on FedRAMP Moderate / High authorization targets.

Impact: Unified 26 multi-disciplinary teams toward initial authorization readiness
Distilled NIST-defined guidelines down into engineering actions at multiple layers of the stack.

Translated complex NIST SP 800-53 security control families (Access Control, Audit & Accountability, Incident Response) into actionable technical backlog epics, automated validation tests, and pre-configured Terraform modules for software engineers.

Impact: Codified 325+ NIST controls into automated engineering guardrails
Owned initiatives across multiple engineering teams to deliver compliant solutions on a tight timeline.

Directly led sprint execution, risk mitigation, and technical trade-off decisions across security and platform domains to meet strict government customer contractual deadlines without compromising developer velocity.

Impact: Delivered compliant architecture milestones on schedule for federal and state markets

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.