Caleb Tote

A Decade of Cloud Experience
Observability Obsessed
SRE Enthusiast
Proficiencies:
AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Datadog

About Me

While a software engineer since 2010, I've spent the past decade focused on DevOps principles, specializing in cloud infrastructure, observability best practices, large-scale container orchestration, and frequent, reliable production deployments.

Over the past six years, I've focused on growth in technical leadership—using my experience to empower engineering teams, foster collaboration, and create environments where engineers can excel in their work and confidently leave work at work.

  • Preferred Location: Remote
  • Residence Texas, USA
  • e-mail caleb.tote@gmail.com
  • Phone upon request
  • Games Shipped Moby Games

My Philosophies

Technical Leadership

Make on-call not suck.
The quickest way to make someone hate their job is repeatedly interrupting their personal time. If we want teams that perform with excitement, we must make it our mission as leaders to ensure on-call rotations aren't a constant source of dread.

Observability

Measure everything; assume nothing.
Become a storyteller. Instrument every aspect of your system with measurements that allow us to tell a story of the current user experience. We want to know where errors are happening, yes. We chiefly want to know how they are tangibly impacting our customers.

CI/CD

Friday deploys shouldn't be scary.
The fear of Friday deploys is a leading indicator of unaddressed tech debt. Teams generally fear Friday deploys because their pipelines are slow or there are gaps in observability; often, it's both.

Embrace Boredom

Keep toolsets simple.
Context-switching is mentally taxing, especially during incidents. Show preference for managed solutions that reduce complexity and cognitive load, even if that means giving up some customization. Resist the allure of the flashy F1 racer when a reliable Civic is all you truly need.

Resume

Experience

2019 - Current
Gearbox Software

Technical Director, DevOps

Manages a multi-national, cross-functional team of cloud/DevOps engineers supporting mission-critical services across a global cloud platform. Directs, oversees, and contributes to the design of Gearbox's cloud infrastructure. An active contributor to code reviews and production deployments.

2014 - 2019
Electronic Arts

DevOps Engineer

Infrastructure planning, monitoring, and alerting of online services to detect potential outages and reacting quickly to mitigate (or minimize) any downtime.

2010 - 2014
CGI Federal

Development Team Lead

Lead Software Engineer on C++ based Federal ERP solution.

2005 - 2010
Thrasher Engineering

Network Administrator

Primary network administrator for five offices across two states.

Education

2015
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Master's, Computer Science

focus: software engineering

2010
Bluefield State University

Bachelor's, Computer Science

minor: mathematics

Leadership Skills

Agile Project Planning

Incident Management

Mentorship / Training

Capacity Planning

Cloud Cost Management

Stakeholder Communication

Engineering Skills

Container Orchestration

Datadog

Terraform / Terragrunt

GitLab CI/CD

Docker

Python

Go

Bash

Linux

Mac

Windows

AWS Proficiencies

  • Fargate
  • ECS
  • Aurora
  • KMS
  • Secrets Manager
  • EC2
  • CloudWatch
  • Route53
  • AppConfig
  • Control Tower
  • Transit Gateway
  • Lambda
  • IAM
  • Cost Management