I’m excited to share that I’ve joined Jasper.ai as a Mid-Level DevOps Engineer! After leaving Mozilla in October and spending time building my homelab, learning, and reflecting on my career path, I’m thrilled to be back in a role where I can make an immediate impact.

The Opportunity

Jasper.ai is at an interesting stage—they’ve grown rapidly and now need to invest in the foundational infrastructure that will support their continued scale. My role focuses on two critical areas:

  1. Cleaning up technical debt - Addressing infrastructure decisions made during rapid growth
  2. Improving observability practices - Building better visibility into systems and services

These are exactly the kinds of challenges I’m passionate about. Technical debt isn’t just about “old code”—it’s about infrastructure patterns, deployment processes, monitoring gaps, and operational practices that need modernization to support growth.

Why This Role Matters

Coming from Mozilla, where I worked on infrastructure supporting 50M+ users, I understand the importance of solid foundations. Technical debt compounds over time, and the best time to address it is before it becomes a crisis. At Jasper, I’ll be working proactively to:

  • Modernize deployment pipelines and infrastructure patterns
  • Implement comprehensive observability (metrics, logging, tracing)
  • Establish best practices for reliability and incident response
  • Build tooling and automation that scales with the team

The Journey Here

My last blog post was about leaving Mozilla and feeling uncertain about my path forward. I wrote about the gap in my development skills and the challenge of transitioning from infrastructure operations to a more development-focused role.

What I didn’t fully appreciate then was how valuable my infrastructure experience would be. The market is tough, but there’s real demand for engineers who can:

  • Understand systems at scale
  • Balance rapid delivery with long-term reliability
  • Build observability into systems from the ground up
  • Clean up technical debt while maintaining velocity

My time building the homelab, learning GitOps patterns, and using AI to accelerate my learning wasn’t just preparation—it was practice. I’m bringing that hands-on experience, plus years of production operations knowledge, to help Jasper build better infrastructure.

What I’m Looking Forward To

  1. Impact - Working on problems that directly affect product reliability and developer experience
  2. Learning - Jasper’s stack and challenges will push me to learn new technologies and patterns
  3. Collaboration - Working with a team that’s invested in building better systems
  4. Growth - This role bridges my infrastructure background with development skills I’m building

The Work Ahead

Observability is one of those things that’s easy to deprioritize until you really need it. But when incidents happen or performance degrades, good observability is the difference between hours of debugging and minutes of diagnosis.

I’ll be focusing on:

  • Metrics - What are we measuring? What should we be measuring?
  • Logging - Structured logging, log aggregation, and making logs useful
  • Tracing - Understanding request flows across services
  • Alerting - Building alerting that’s actionable, not noisy
  • Dashboards - Creating visibility that helps teams understand their systems

Technical debt cleanup is more nuanced. It’s not about rewriting everything—it’s about:

  • Identifying the highest-impact improvements
  • Modernizing incrementally without disrupting operations
  • Building patterns and tooling that prevent future debt
  • Documenting decisions and establishing best practices

Gratitude

I’m grateful for the time I had to reflect, learn, and build. The homelab project wasn’t just a hobby—it was a way to practice the skills I needed and build confidence in my abilities. The job search was challenging, but it led me to a role that’s a great fit for where I am in my career.

I’m also grateful to the Jasper team for seeing the value in my experience and giving me the opportunity to contribute. I’m excited to get started and see what we can build together.

Here’s to new beginnings and building better systems! 🚀

If you’re working on observability or technical debt challenges, I’d love to connect. You can find me on LinkedIn or GitHub.