Arnold Perlas — Enterprise Systems, SecOps & Cloud Engineering
Senior IT Systems Engineer with over 13 years of experience building vulnerability remediation engines, hybrid-cloud architecture, automated zero-touch endpoint systems, and infrastructure-as-code.
Systems engineering, SecOps, cloud & infrastructure leadership.
Cleared 1M+ findings across hybrid enterprise endpoints & VMs within 90 days.
Zero-touch Intune MDM, Autopilot, Tanium, and CrowdStrike deployment.
Transitioned nationwide enterprise locations to Azure & Entra ID.
Engineering Focus & Career Journey
My technical work spans more than a decade of designing, governing, and automating infrastructure across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments. Throughout my career, I've specialized in transforming complex operational challenges into streamlined, self-healing systems:
- Enterprise Vulnerability Remediation: Engineered automated Python and PowerShell engines that slashed vulnerability backlogs by up to 96% across more than 1,000,000 endpoint and server findings.
- Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Led site migrations from legacy colocated VMware environments to Microsoft Azure and Entra ID across 370+ nationwide locations.
- Zero-Touch Endpoint Management: Managed zero-touch Intune MDM, Autopilot V2, Tanium, and CrowdStrike security deployments across 10,000+ endpoints.
- M&A Integration & Hardening: Standardized baseline security toolkits and NIST CSF 2.0 alignment for 30+ acquired organizations within 90 days.
AI-Assisted SecOps & Workflow Automation
I actively integrate modern AI capabilities into my daily engineering workflows. By pairing agentic AI tools (Codex, Gemini, Claude, Kimi, and local models via Ollama) with automated orchestrators like n8n and REST APIs, I accelerate script generation, automate security feed triaging, and build reproducible validation sandboxes before ring-group deployments.
Technical Stack & Tools
Core platforms, languages, frameworks, and security suites engineered across enterprise and self-hosted production environments.
Security, SIEM & Identity
Vulnerability management engines, SIEM/XDR threat detection, endpoint security governance, SAML/OIDC SSO federation, system hardening, and audit compliance.
Cloud, Hypervisors & Storage
Architecting hybrid cloud workloads, multi-node hypervisor clustering, enterprise ZFS storage tiering, container microservices, and disaster recovery.
Automation, IaC & DevOps
Declarative infrastructure as code, automated rolling update orchestration, API-driven workflows, self-healing deployments, and automated testing.
Endpoint Engineering & MDM
Zero-touch MDM provisioning, centralized fleet patching, SAML/SSO authentication, RBAC, PIM, zero-trust conditional access, and automated migrations.
Networking, Ingress & Defense
Enterprise firewall policies, 802.1Q VLAN segmentation, zero-inbound edge tunnels, reverse proxy SSL termination, and split-horizon high-availability DNS.
AI Tools & AI Governance
Integrating AI development workflows, local LLM evaluation, prompt engineering, vector database embeddings, and organizational AI security governance.
Engineering Capabilities & Systems Architecture
Architectural focus areas and technical solutions designed for scale, resilience, and security.
Automated Remediation Engine & Vulnerability Slashing
- Built custom Python and PowerShell workflows consolidating multi-stream security feeds (Qualys, CrowdStrike, Tanium) into actionable remediation tasks.
- Engineered trigger-based restoration scripts that compare identified issues against automated script libraries before deployment.
- Implemented automated log-parsing to determine pass/fail outcomes, isolate failure points, and run retry logic in isolated local sandboxes before ring-group rollouts.
- Successfully reduced over 1,000,000 detected vulnerabilities by 96% and cleared 83% of backlog findings within 90 days.
Enterprise Cloud & Zero-Touch Endpoint Management
- Architected the end-to-end transformation from legacy colocated VMware infrastructure to Azure and Entra ID across 370+ nationwide sites.
- Designed and governed zero-touch Microsoft Intune MDM, Autopilot V2, and automated patching controls across 10,000+ endpoints.
- Created and managed Entra applications, SAML SSO, SSL certificates, RBAC, PIM, and zero-trust conditional access policies.
- Engineered over 100 NIST CSF 2.0 aligned security policies and orchestrated enterprise-wide Windows 11 migrations.
Infrastructure-as-Code & Integration Hardening
- Managed version-controlled Terraform configurations for default applications, network parameters, configuration metadata, and parameter-driven infrastructure.
- Engineered baseline security hardening standards for acquired organizations, standardizing security toolkits across 30+ acquired entities.
- Integrated API-derived SaaS reporting data directly into deployment validation workflows to automatically test issue resolution.
- Coordinated cross-functional remediation to clear ~90% of newly identified vulnerabilities within strict compliance windows.
Azure & AWS Server Lifecycle, Maintenance & Migration
- Provisioned, configured, and maintained enterprise Azure VMs and AWS EC2 instances, managing the full server lifecycle across production environments.
- Orchestrated zero-downtime server maintenance, automated patch cycles, and OS upgrades using standardized golden images (Azure Compute Gallery / AWS AMIs).
- Configured cloud networking perimeters including Azure VNets, AWS VPCs, NSGs, Security Groups, site-to-site VPNs, and secure JUMP hosts.
- Implemented automated snapshot backup vaults, storage lifecycle policies (Blob/S3), and pro-active server monitoring via Azure Monitor and AWS CloudWatch.
Hypervisor Clustering, ZFS Tiering & Zero-Trust Ingress
- Engineered a 3-node Proxmox VE hypervisor cluster utilizing active-backup bonded NICs, QEMU/KVM virtual machines, LXC containers, and hardware GPU passthrough (Intel QuickSync).
- Architected tiered enterprise storage featuring direct-attached 18TB ZFS IronWolf storage pools, RAM transcoding disks, and 23TB Synology NAS shared CIFS/NFS clusters with automated Rsync replication.
- Orchestrated zero-downtime rolling hypervisor and container maintenance using Ansible automation playbooks with pre-update snapshotting (`pct snapshot`) and automatic rollback triggers.
- Enforced a defense-in-depth perimeter with 802.1Q VLAN matrix, Authentik SSO/MFA federation, Wazuh SIEM threat monitoring, and zero-inbound Cloudflare Tunnels.
Homelab & R&D Sandbox
Continuous self-driven experimentation, enterprise-grade GitOps architecture, multi-node clustering, and open-source infrastructure testing.
A fully modular, sanitized GitOps infrastructure project modeling enterprise infrastructure concepts: multi-node hypervisor clustering, declarative Terraform & Ansible automation, 802.1Q VLAN isolation, split-horizon DNS, machine learning vaults, hardware GPU acceleration, and automated disaster recovery.
3-node clustered Proxmox VE hypervisors with active-backup bonded NICs, LXC microservices, GPU passthrough (Intel QuickSync), and isolated VM workloads.
Direct-attached 18TB ZFS IronWolf storage arrays, 23TB Synology NAS shared cluster storage (CIFS/NFS), and automated cross-node backup replication.
Standardized 802.1Q VLAN isolation (Management, SecOps, DMZ, Services, IoT), Authentik SSO/MFA, Wazuh SIEM/XDR, and dual zero-inbound Cloudflare Tunnels.
Declarative Terraform modules, Ansible rolling update playbooks with automated pre-update snapshots & QA rollbacks, and UEFI PXE automated OS deployment.