// infrastructure · automation · agentic IT · martech

James Singley

Infrastructure & systems engineer. I run the entire technical stack for a 25-person bioinformatics company — from the datacenter rack to the AWS bill to the marketing CRM. One person, production systems, no safety net.

AWSLinuxAnsible OpenTofuOn-prem datacenter Claude / MCPTechnical SEO Montana · Remote

About

Nine-plus years from service desk to sole-charge infrastructure.

I'm the sole IT staff for a small bioinformatics software company, which means everything is mine: the on-premise datacenter rack, the AWS environment, identity and MFA, workstations, networking, vendor management, and the backup strategy that lets me sleep at night.

My career arc runs Tier I support → systems analyst (including two years in Frankfurt as part of a first-generation Follow-the-Sun support model) → systems administrator in a PCI/HIPAA-regulated fintech environment → sole-charge infrastructure. Along the way I picked up a bias for automation: if I do it twice, it gets an Ansible role or an OpenTofu module.

In 2026 I also took ownership of the company's technical marketing operations — CRM administration, the website, email campaign infrastructure, and Google Ads / technical SEO. This site is part of that portfolio: built, deployed, and instrumented by me.

Currently
Sole IT + marketing ops, bioinformatics company (25 ppl)
Previously
Systems Admin & Analyst, fintech (PCI/HIPAA) — Bozeman & Frankfurt
Certification
ITIL Foundation in IT Service Management
Interests
Agentic AI on real infrastructure, aviation (student pilot)
Location
Montana, USA — remote-native

Selected Work

Production outcomes, not lab exercises. Employer details available on request.

iac · aws · ansible

Infrastructure as Code standardization

Brought AWS EC2 and network configuration under OpenTofu across environments, and standardized Linux host configuration and centralized authentication with Ansible.

Environments are now reproducible instead of hand-built.
identity · security

Company-wide MFA rollout

Designed and drove MFA requirements across all user accounts — selection, rollout sequencing, exception handling, and the human side of getting 25 people through an auth change.

Full MFA coverage with no lockout incidents.
network · vendor mgmt

Three-month ISP migration

Coordinated an office and datacenter connectivity migration across a 3-month window — circuit provisioning, failover planning, cutover scheduling, and vendor wrangling.

Clean cutover on a live production site.
virtualization · datacenter

Hypervisor cluster expansion

Racked, cabled, and integrated a new hypervisor node into the production cluster — hardware through hypervisor config to workload rebalancing.

Added capacity with no cluster downtime.
martech · sole owner

One-person MarTech function

Took over the technical side of marketing operations after a staff departure: CRM administration and data flows, website operations and deployments, email campaign infrastructure (deliverability, segmentation, automation), and Google Ads with technical SEO — conversion tracking, Search Console, structured data.

A full MarTech stack, run alongside the infrastructure job.
fintech · production support

Follow-the-Sun support model, launched from Frankfurt

Spent two years in Europe designing and launching a PCI/HIPAA-regulated fintech's first Follow-the-Sun support model — building the operational framework and absorbing the escalations that would otherwise have paged US on-call overnight.

Lower overnight call volume and a less burnt-out US on-call rotation.
fintech · incident response

Emergency datacenter shutdown & recovery

Coordinated an unplanned shutdown of the fintech's Frankfurt datacenter on short notice for building maintenance — managing the controlled turndown and the full recovery afterward.

Systems down and back with minimal disruption to operations.
fintech · reliability

Cross-team protocols that cut escalations

Built internal training and cross-team collaboration protocols across development, networking, database, infosec, and support — turning repeat production escalations into documented, self-served procedures.

Escalations dropped from ~2 every 48 hours to ~2 a month.

Projects & Proofs of Concept

Working demonstrations of how I think agentic tooling and modern infrastructure should be built — with scope limits, approval gates, and guardrails treated as first-class features. Write-ups and repos land here as each one ships.

Agentic IT / AIOps
Planned

NetBox + MCP: network source of truth as an agent tool

Expose a NetBox instance to Claude via MCP so an agent can answer "what's racked where, on which VLAN, owned by whom" from documented truth — read-only by design, with the schema doing the guardrail work.

Stack: NetBox, MCP server, Claude, home-lab inventory.

Planned

Agent-assisted ticket triage with approval gates

An agent that reads an inbound queue, classifies, drafts responses, and proposes actions — but every state-changing step requires human approval. The PoC is as much about the gate design as the automation.

Stack: Claude, MCP, ticket system API, audit log.

Planned

Runbook execution agent with hard scope limits

Codify real operational runbooks (service restart, disk pressure, cert renewal) as agent-executable procedures with explicit boundaries: read-only diagnostics free, mutations gated, destructive actions blocked outright.

Stack: Claude Code, Ansible, systemd, allowlist policy layer.

Planned

IaC diff review agent

An agent that reviews OpenTofu plan output before apply — flags destructive changes, drift, and cost implications in plain English. Human stays on the apply button; the agent makes the plan readable.

Stack: OpenTofu, Claude, CI pipeline.

Infrastructure
Planned

Observability stack on the lab

Metrics, logs, and alerting over the reference stack — dashboards that answer real on-call questions, plus alert rules tuned to signal rather than noise.

Stack: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager.

MarTech
In progress

This website as a case study

jamessingley.com built as a demonstration: hand-rolled single-file site on Cloudflare Workers static assets, JSON-LD structured data, Search Console instrumentation, and Core Web Vitals as the benchmark. The write-up covers each decision.

Stack: Cloudflare Workers, HTML/CSS, schema.org, Search Console.

Planned

Email deliverability lab

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configured from scratch on this domain, with a monitoring loop on DMARC reports — the unglamorous plumbing that decides whether campaigns reach inboxes.

Stack: Cloudflare Email Routing, DMARC reporting, DNS.

Skills

The working stack, grouped by what it's for.

infrastructure

  • AWS (EC2, VPC)
  • Linux administration
  • On-prem datacenter ops
  • VMware / hypervisors
  • F5 BIG-IP
  • IBM MQ
  • Networking & DNS

automation

  • Ansible
  • OpenTofu / Terraform
  • Bash
  • Python (working)
  • Git / CI pipelines

ai & agents

  • Claude / Claude Code
  • MCP integrations
  • Agent guardrail design
  • Prompt engineering

martech

  • CRM administration
  • Email infrastructure
  • Google Ads
  • Technical SEO / schema
  • Search Console

practices

  • ITIL Foundation
  • PCI / HIPAA environments
  • Identity & MFA
  • Vendor management
  • Follow-the-Sun support

Get in touch

LinkedIn · Montana, USA · remote-native