Caesar Kabalan

AI products, strategy, and governance

• Wrote the GenAI architecture guidance for Gore Medical: an AI primer, reference architectures, case studies, and a menu of implementable patterns written for both business and technical readers.
• Launched a agent research chatbot to 7,000 internal associates. It answers more than 15,000 questions a month against internal product, scientific, and quality documentation. Users report shorter project timelines, more productive meetings, less manufacturing downtime, and less re-work.
• Created a custom RAG indexing pipeline with Azure AI Search and Microsoft Foundry for a large corpus of internal scientific and quality documents in Product Lifecycle Management.
• Designed a Document AI Readiness Engine that converts Word, PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, image, audio, and video files into AI-ready Markdown as a central service, so teams stop rebuilding fragile document conversion pipelines. Built on FastAPI, Azure Container Apps, Event Grid, Service Bus, and Azure AI Content Understanding.
• Generated AI insights into manufacturing machine maintenance work order data to identify trends despite challenging data quality (Azure OpenAI).
• Inspected our public DNS landscape and produced AI-driven insights into our public web presence to protect security, accuracy, and brand reputation (Azure OpenAI).

Cloud and Infrastructure

• Own the assessment for retiring our primary on-premises data center. Current phase is scoped to scoped moving ~30 AIX LPARs running Oracle databases and dozens of on-premises VMs to Azure.

Platform, network, and operations

• Built a fully automated best-practices Azure Landing Zone powered by Bicep and GitHub Actions.
• Enabled developers to operate effectively in Azure through video presentations, sample code repositories, documentation, standards, training plans, and coaching sessions.
• Run proactive Azure Well-Architected and security reviews for Gore Medical builders before they hit validation gates. Reviewed topics include RBAC, managed identities, public surface area, and credential hygiene.
• Created automated pipeline to align Datadog monitoring with ServiceNow CMDB data for targeted and informative alerting to application owners across >1,500 servers.
• Drove the re-design of Gore's Arizona network design with a priority on improving resiliency, failover, and WAN technology modernization.
• Assisted in the planning and integration of Gore Medical's acquisition of Conformal Medical, including adopting their M365 tenant, users, devices, and IT infrastructure..

• Primary architect partnering with all government customers in the State of New Mexico to design cloud architectures and advise on best practices using Amazon Web Services.
• Regularly led in-depth technology discussions across all levels, including CIOs running large state agencies, technical architects, and engineers across multiple disciplines.
• Consulted weekly on complex hybrid cloud network architectures as part of a specialist networking team, integrating across AWS, Azure, Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, Palo Alto, on-premises and co-located data centers, routing protocols, and automation, often all in the same architecture.
• Spoke publicly on AWS topics at several local New Mexico events, and presented to large customer audiences to teach cloud concepts, run live demos, and drive progress.
• Created several public technical artifacts including blog posts and sample code demonstrating AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices for scalable, reliable, and secure deployments.
• Looked around corners to protect customers before they had issues, covering proactive cost optimization, architecture reviews, security, resiliency, and general cloud best practice.
• Leveraged my wider experience to help customers tackle on-premises technical challenges, which built trust and positioned AWS as a long-term partner even before they were a customer.

• Architected and implemented a new global AWS network topology using many VPCs, AWS Transit Gateway, Palo Alto firewalls, Direct Connect, and VPNs, automated with CloudFormation and Terraform.
• Architected and implemented the company's first public cloud presences in both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure using Infrastructure-as-Code and automation.
• Integral in the design and implementation of an R&D-focused IoT platform on AWS using IoT Core, IoT Greengrass, API Gateway, Lambda, Kinesis Data Firehose, DynamoDB, ElasticSearch, S3, and Cognito.
• Integral in the design and implementation of a cross-cloud virtual server deployment process spanning AWS, Azure, and on-premises VMware using Ansible Tower.
• Developed multiple Jenkins pipelines to speed up developer and admin productivity, including pipelines for deploying AMIs, CloudFormation and SAM templates, Ansible playbooks, Terraform, and Packer.
• Built serverless, event-driven applications combining API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and IoT using Python and the AWS Serverless Application Model.
• Wrote quality assurance documentation including design and requirements specifications and build and test procedures, so workloads met compliance requirements.
• Contributor to the AWS CLI codebase (pull requests #4573, #4574, #6365).

• Architected and built the first Amazon Web Services cloud deployments, focusing on Infrastructure-as-a-Service, automation, and scalability.
• Upgraded a multi-vCenter VMware environment from ESX 5.1 to 5.5 with zero guest downtime. The new vCenter architecture meant rebuilding from scratch.
• Implemented Puppet configuration management to fully manage 200+ previously independent Linux systems.
• Planned, automated, and executed the migration of hundreds of NAS shares from a Hitachi HNAS to an EMC VNX.
• Assisted in implementing a second 250 kW UPS and generator to provide a redundant active/active power path to data center equipment.
• Championed SolarWinds Orion across multiple continents to monitor, analyze, and alert on server and network health worldwide.
• Built extensive dashboard tools for public display and quick identification of systemic issues across many vendor products.
• Lifecycled a high-performance compute cluster including hardware, job scheduler, queuing system, analysis software, filesystems, and license servers.
• Heavily involved in bringing several aspects of infrastructure into a qualified state to support business compliance with FDA regulations.

• Championed the implementation of a regional data center monitoring solution for servers, services, and storage: Nagios XI Enterprise.
• Extensive evaluation of multiple hyper-converged products (Nutanix and SimpliVity) against existing internal infrastructure.
• Built dozens of deployment bundles for many different software applications, including those under strict change-control procedures.
• Upgraded the global Novell ZENworks environment from 10.x to 11.3.2.
• Provided ongoing third tier support to users, desktop support associates, and phone support agents.

• Extensively tested and assisted in the initial rollout of a contractor-developed printer removal script via Novell ZENworks.
• Assisted in imaging and configuring over one hundred laptops for field sales associates.

• Developed in PHP, JavaScript, and HTML/CSS for the W. A. Franke College of Business.
• Ended up in use by 6 professors and over 900 students.