Hello, my name is

Jesse Almanrode.

Engineering Leader, Platform & Reliability

I lead teams that make services and platforms easier to operate and more reliable. I still love getting into the details: reviewing a design, writing code or testing a new tool, or tracking down what’s behind a reliability issue.

Resume

About Me

I became a manager because I loved solving problems, which sounds backwards, but it’s true. Moving from engineer to leader meant taking the thing I enjoy most and pointing it at a harder problem: helping other people grow. It’s still the most unusual challenge of my career. Debugging a system is one thing. Figuring out what an engineer needs to get unstuck, or take on something bigger, is another.

I still read code, review designs, and dig into failures, mostly so I stay close enough to the work to coach well. These days I lead SRE, platform, and DevOps teams behind video services used by millions, and I’m building AI agents that help us find root causes faster.

Away from work, I’m an amateur photographer focused on headshots and landscapes. Take a look at my 500px portfolio, and if you’re around Denver and need a headshot, get in touch!

I also own a Jeep. Meet Stormborn!

A few tools and areas I work with:

Site Reliability Engineering
SLIs, SLOs, and incident response
AI agents and AI-assisted development
Kubernetes and Helm
CI/CD, Git, and GitHub
AWS and Linux (RHEL)
Python
Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK
Security hardening and compliance
Hiring and coaching engineers

Experience

Comcast
Apex Systems
Level 3 Communications (formerly tw telecom)
Cabela's

Sr. Manager: Software Dev/Eng - Comcast

April 2022 - present

I lead the SRE Advanced Troubleshooting team, which gets called when something is wrong and nobody knows why yet.

Raised our Stream Quality Index from the 70s to over 90. We built AI agents to root-cause low-quality playback sessions, worked with player developers on fixes, and followed each one through production.
Rebuilt our CI/CD platform as a managed service with blue-green redundancy and safe rollback.

Manager: Software Dev/Eng

May 2018 - April 2022

I joined full-time to lead Linear Operations, a team keeping 30,000+ live channels running 24x7, and later took on ad insertion and sports blackouts too.

Moved the IP linear packager from Puppet-managed VMs to Kubernetes and Helm, working with development teams I didn’t manage.
Started the shift from a traditional operations model to SRE, then moved our teams fully remote in 2020, which changed how we worked together more than any tool did.

Sr. Dev/Ops Engineer - Apex Systems

Sep 2015 - May 2018

My first look inside video at scale, and where I learned that a good CLI toolkit saves a team more time than heroics.

Principal Infrastructure Engineer (formerly tw telecom) - Level 3 Communications (formerly tw telecom)

Mar 2014 - Sep 2015

Merging two companies’ infrastructure meant automating things at a scale you can’t do by hand, like re-IPing 1,000+ VMs.

Sr. Unix Administrator

Jan 2014 - Mar 2014

Deployed and managed an Infoblox DDI grid, and wrote the Python API that let people update DNS records by email or command line instead of filing a ticket.

Unix Administrator

Jan 2012 - Jan 2014

This is where I first started leading, before I had the title. I took on the UNIX team’s development work, brought in version control (SVN) and an agile cycle for our scripts, and built tools to replace manual work:

A Flask/MongoDB application that automated monthly Linux security patching.
A self-service LDAP portal with REST APIs.
Automated Red Hat builds on VMware and AWS, and ELK for syslog and security auditing.

Sr. Systems Specialist - Cabela's

Oct 2002 - Dec 2011

Ten years, intern to server admin. It’s where I learned to support real users, and why I still care about making things usable.