Hi, I'm Tam Nguyen, a platform and infrastructure engineer with a focus on building systems that scale.
I've spent the last 15+ years designing, automating, and securing cloud and on-premise infrastructure at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and high-growth startups.
I specialize in solving technical problems hands-on, whether it’s reducing cloud spend, improving reliability, or automating infrastructure at scale. Along the way, I’ve also guided teams and mentored engineers, ensuring that the work we do makes a meaningful impact.
Experience
Associate Director, Network Engineering
Vitech Systems Group, 2023 - 2025
Led network engineering teams in developing and maintaining network roadmaps, designing solutions, managing projects, directing operations, and analyzing key infrastructure metrics
Owned PagerDuty onboarding, escalation workflows, and alert tuning for global network security team
Conducted technical reviews of firewall, VPN, and routing configurations to close security gaps and align with HIPAA and SOC-2 requirements
Redesigned and implemented a new AWS VPC endpoint strategy, resulting in a $300K annual reduction in data transfer and NAT Gateway costs
Partner with the Finance team to handle network expense allocation, forecasting, cost analysis, and reporting, and reduce department’s spend forecast by 30% in 2025
Platform Technical Lead Manager
Microsoft, 2019 - 2023
Led Platform team that consisted of 3 pods: infrastructure (Ansible, Terraform, etc.), developer experience (CI/CD, graphs/alerts, etc.), and cloud operations (SOC-2, pen test, etc.)
Partnered with cross-functional product managers, client managers, and engineering teams to create a comprehensive process checklist for client onboarding
Conducted 1-1 meetings with team members to manage deadlines, provided mentoring, while maintaining deep technical involvement
Migrated a high-volume, low-latency Java application from virtual machines to Azure Kubernetes Service for more than 30 customers in retail
Built and rolled out an AtlantisCI CI/CD pipeline for Terraform repositories, enabling team-wide self-service infrastructure deployments and reducing bottlenecks
Senior Infrastructure Engineer
PromoteIQ, 2017 - 2019
Built and led a 10-person Platform/Infrastructure team from a Series A ad-tech startup to Microsoft acquisition
Participated in managing engineering teams with tasks such as planning, scheduling, and interviewing/hiring
Developed and launched various client-saving features for a high-volume, low-latency API that generates over $300MM/year in revenue
Automated the build process, supported and managed a distributed data pipeline that provided up to over 100,000 events/sec with self-hosted RabbitMQ and Elasticsearch clusters
Utilized Ansible to develop a cloud-agnostic tool that provisioned and configured Adserver VM infrastructure that collocated with retailers’ global data centers.
Earlier Roles
Amazon/Quidsi, eChalk, TRC Healthcare, etc.
Migrated on-prem workloads to AWS.
Designed CI/CD pipelines for 500+ servers.
Built dashboards and monitoring systems to improve visibility and reliability
Notable Skills & Projects
Core Expertise:
Cloud: AWS (expert), Azure, GCP (basic), VPCs, Transit Gateway, VPN, IAM, RBAC
Infra-as-Code: Terraform, Ansible, GitOps, Atlantis CI, CloudFormation (basic)
Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (AKS), Helm
Monitoring/Logging: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, CloudWatch, Zabbix, PagerDuty
Languages: Python, Bash, YAML, HCL
Other: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redshift, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Hadoop, Jenkins, Airflow, Jira, Agile, SLO/SLI design
Notable Projects:
Cut $300K/year in AWS costs by redesigning VPC strategy.
Automated infrastructure for high-volume APIs generating $300M+ revenue annually.
Rolled out an AtlantisCI CI/CD pipeline for Terraform repositories, enabling team-wide self-service infrastructure deployments.
Education
University of California, Davis
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science