Operations Executive · Forensic Laboratory Leadership · Systems & Infrastructure
Williamston, Michigan show email LinkedIn
Senior operations executive and self-taught technologist — an uncommon pairing of proven leadership in a high-complexity, high-stakes environment with deep, hands-on technical delivery. Across a 31-year Michigan State Police career — the past decade as an Inspector — have directed a statewide forensic operation of 290+ staff across seven laboratories and eight Laboratory Directors, owning operations, budget, IT strategy, and personnel for the entire division.
That command role was preceded by three years as the division's Quality Assurance Manager, carrying all seven laboratories through a full ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation cycle as primary liaison to the accrediting body — and remaining a certified ISO/IEC 17025:2017 ANAB assessor since, qualified to assess other laboratories against the standard. Quality systems, documented process, competency, and audit readiness are not an adjacent interest here; they are a discipline this career was built on and a lens applied to every operation and system since.
In parallel — and often to solve problems that operation faced — have personally built and run the technology behind the work: reverse-engineered case-management databases, a ticketing system that has logged 27,500+ requests, a commercial multi-tenant SaaS platform (Django · PostgreSQL · Docker · WireGuard), and a self-hosted 60+ container Linux environment secured behind SSO and a default-deny firewall — all delivered under audit, accreditation, and CJIS-security constraints, and grounded in 15+ years of IT work dating to a small IT services company.
The combination is the point. Few operations executives can specify, build, and run the systems their organization depends on; few technologists have carried budget, headcount, audit, and accreditation accountability for a 290-person operation. Equally at home owning the operation, the technology, and the translation between them — the work of making an organization measurable and efficient rather than merely busy.
Seeking a Director / Operations or Technology leadership role that leverages both dimensions — with genuine interest in hands-on technical roles (systems administration, DevOps, software development) where that combination is an asset.
Python · SQL · Bash · PHP · HTML/CSS · JavaScript · YAML · PowerShell · AutoHotKey · VBA/VBS
Django (4.2 LTS) · Django REST Framework · Celery · Gunicorn · Flask · React / Vite · Tailwind CSS
Operate and maintain multiple production Linux servers concurrently — self-managed bare-metal and managed cloud VPS (Linode) — covering provisioning, hardening, patching, storage (RAID/mdadm), backups, monitoring, log management, and incident recovery.
Docker · Docker Compose · Nginx · Apache2 · Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) · systemd · Watchtower · Git · Gitea · Portainer · Linode VPS · Samba
PostgreSQL · MySQL / MariaDB · MS SQL · MS Access · SQLite · Redis · Qdrant (vector) · Meilisearch
Authentik (SSO / IdP · proxy-outpost pattern) · OIDC / OAuth2 · SAML2 · TOTP MFA · RBAC · per-application access control at the reverse-proxy layer
WireGuard · GlueTun · UFW · iptables / nftables · SSH · Pi-hole · Let's Encrypt · AES-256 · FIPS 140-2 · CJIS Security Policy · managed firewalls
Postfix · Dovecot · Sieve · Nginx Proxy Manager · SSL/TLS certificate management · self-hosted mail (SPF/DKIM/DMARC)
Ollama (on-prem LLM inference) · Open WebUI · Qdrant embedding / semantic-search pipelines · Anthropic API · Claude Code · n8n
Drupal · WordPress · custom Django CMS work
ISO/IEC 17025:2017 (certified ANAB assessor) · Lean / Six Sigma · CJIS Security Policy · audit-log design · accreditation readiness
The strongest evidence of independent, delivered technical work. Ordered roughly by technical depth.
Sole architect and developer of a commercial multi-tenant SaaS (Django · Django REST Framework · PostgreSQL · Celery · Docker · WireGuard) built to FIPS 140-2 and CJIS-compliant standards for forensic breath-alcohol program management. Runs on a hardened Linode VPS with isolated staging and production stacks, containerized builds, and encrypted site-to-site networking.
Design and operate a production Ubuntu server running 60+ containerized services across independent stacks — document management (Paperless-ngx, Apache Tika, Gotenberg), media (Jellyfin, Sonarr/Radarr), productivity (Nextcloud, Vikunja), monitoring (Uptime Kuma, NetAlertX), and custom applications — unified behind Authentik SSO, forced SSL, WireGuard VPN, and a default-deny firewall. Full lifecycle: provisioning, networking, backups, monitoring, and security hardening.
Own and administer a self-hosted web and mail platform end to end: Postfix + Dovecot mail with SPF/DKIM/DMARC, Apache/Nginx, MariaDB, and Drupal — DNS to TLS to deliverability.
Built, hosted, and support a Drupal/PHP web platform through which statewide forensic staff report hardware, instrument, and software issues to the Technical Support Unit. Originated as a compliance remediation: an Office of the Auditor General audit found that case-management system administrators were making necessary corrections to data-entry errors with no record of the change or of the verification that it was warranted. The system created a documented, auditable trail of every correction and its justification — closing the finding and bringing the division into compliance. More than 27,500 issues logged to date, running continuously in production for a decade.
Engaged as an external vendor to design, build, and deploy a LAMP-stack / Drupal web application for the State of Iowa to track statewide-backlogged Sexual Assault Evidence Kits through the grant collection, submission, and testing process.
Wrote the complex SQL query that let STACS-CW (now STACS Casework) pull case and evidence records directly from Forensic Advantage, the division's case-management system. STACS-CW provided the integration module; what it could not provide was a query able to retrieve the right records out of a separate vendor's database. Supplied that from years of reverse-engineering the Forensic Advantage schema — knowledge neither vendor had — eliminating dual data entry between the two systems and the transcription errors it produced in a chain-of-custody context, where a mistyped evidence identifier is a defensible-record problem rather than a clerical one. The vendor has since reused the query in other customer deployments.
With no vendor support and limited IT resources, reverse-engineered significant portions of the Forensic Advantage case-management database and built a suite of reliable query and reporting tools — delivered via web, scripted direct-to-email, and client tools (Excel, Power BI) — now used routinely by division command for metrics, analytics, and strategic planning.
Identified, vetted, and pitched Atlassian Confluence as the division's documentation platform — a secure wiki with review and approval workflows, selected specifically because controlled documents under ISO/IEC 17025 must be versioned, reviewed, and formally approved, not merely stored. Won leadership approval, then led a team of division leadership to consolidate disparate paper and PDF manuals scattered across seven worksites into a single instance, establishing one authoritative source of truth for every member of the division. Served as the project's technology leader and as principal author of the first-version Laboratory Operations Manual and Quality Manual — the documents establishing policy, procedure, and quality practice division-wide. Trained staff on the platform and drove adoption across all sites; have retained ownership of portions of those documents in the years since. A technology-selection decision made to satisfy a quality-system requirement — and it held for over a decade.
Conceived and scripted (AutoHotKey) a workflow capturing structured XML data in an unused Forensic Advantage comment field, with an auto-launching UI for analysts and back-end queries to collate it. Solved a metrics-collection problem another MSP division could not otherwise meet — and let MSP Special Investigations build near-real-time drug-activity intelligence without funding a separate IT system.
Conceived using thin-client devices to remove full computers from contamination-prone wet-lab areas. Proved the concept to DTMB (state IT), pitched it to MSP leadership, and drove division-wide deployment — improving safety and cutting per-seat cost and contamination risk.
Built and administered the public website for a community-health initiative spanning the entire northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. In this 100-day program, participating hospitals across the region competed by having residents register on the site, log their activity miles, and associate them with a local hospital — the site served as the central platform aggregating 1,700+ registered users and their mileage each season. Developed on the Rainbow Portal (ASP.NET / C# open-source CMS) and managed across three consecutive seasons.
Habla — custom React / Vite application built against the Anthropic API. wordle-startword — Flask / Python web app served under Gunicorn.
The division's senior quality authority — accountable for the accreditation status of every laboratory in the system.
Presented to the national ASCLD membership on preparing laboratory leadership teams to make sound decisions in real time during genuinely novel emergencies — situations that defy existing policy and prior experience. Drawing on exercises conducted with the MSP Forensic Science Division operational leadership team, the session demonstrated how to build low-cost scenarios that evaluate team preparedness, test policies and procedures for completeness and accuracy, clarify roles, authority, and expectations under emergency conditions, validate disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans, and expose weaknesses in the decision-making process — while building critical thinking, confidence, teamwork, and trust. Emphasized that effective exercises need not be complex and can be run in as little as an hour.