Technical Lead | SRE & AI @ BMO | Building reliable systems at scale | AI-Augmented Development

Building infrastructure and tools across IoT, observability, and community data, with AI used as part of the engineering workflow:

• Ottawa River freshet case file for a community-built flood-monitoring stack covering the Ottawa River watershed with k3s, TimescaleDB, PostgREST, and a static HTML dashboard at freshet.xgrunt.com. The case file documents a post-2017 regime change in spring flood peaks at Lac Coulonge through nine illustrated exhibits, four statistical tests, daily plain-language briefs, and a calibrated seasonal probability forecast. The goal is to keep the work public, reproducible, and easy to challenge.
• Multi-camera surveillance system with Raspberry Pi cameras, HLS streaming, MQTT integration, and web UI
• LoRa sensor network with ESP32-S3 nodes → LoRa gateway → MQTT → InfluxDB for long-range monitoring
• Temperature monitoring with 4 deployed ESP8266 sensors → InfluxDB → Grafana

What I learned: AI tools such as Claude Code, Claude Pro, GitHub Copilot, AWS Bedrock, and the Anthropic API are useful force multipliers for infrastructure work. I still steer the architecture, security, and reliability decisions, while using AI to speed up implementation, analysis, and review. The freshet project pushed this further by using scheduled agents for daily ingest, plain-language synthesis of technical telemetry, and analytical scripting against historical hydrometric records.

SRE/DevOps: Terraform · Terragrunt · AWS CDK · Kubernetes (k3s, EKS) · Docker · Dynatrace · Grafana · Prometheus · GitHub Actions Cloud: AWS · Azure · GCP · OpenStack · OpenNebula · Cloudflare Tunnel Databases: Postgres · TimescaleDB · PostgREST · InfluxDB · Cassandra · Oracle · MariaDB IoT/Embedded: ESP32-S3 · ESP8266 · Raspberry Pi · LoRa · MQTT · C/C++ · PlatformIO · Arduino Languages: Python · Bash · C/C++ · Java · JavaScript AI Tools: Claude Code · Claude Pro · GitHub Copilot · AWS Bedrock · Anthropic API

Community-built flood-monitoring stack for the Ottawa River watershed, driven by a real need to document and statistically test a post-2017 regime change in spring flood peaks at Lac Coulonge, Quebec. The live dashboard at freshet.xgrunt.com brings Hydro-Québec, ECCC, MVCA, and Quebec Vigilance telemetry into a TimescaleDB / PostgREST stack on a homelab k3s cluster. The case file includes nine illustrated exhibits, four statistical tests, a daily plain-language brief generated by a scheduled Claude routine, and a calibrated seasonal probability forecast using Gaussian-kernel analog matching with post-2017 era weighting. It is built to be public, reproducible, opinionated, and falsifiable.

Tech: TimescaleDB · PostgREST · k3s · Cloudflare Tunnel · Python (stdlib only) · Static HTML/SVG · Chart.js · GitHub Actions (auto-mirror) · Anthropic Claude routines · puppeteer (PNG render)

Multi-camera surveillance system with web UI, dual streaming modes (HLS/VLC), and MQTT integration. Hardware H.264 encoding with ffmpeg, real-time settings control, and system monitoring.

Tech: Python · Raspberry Pi · HLS · MQTT · ffmpeg · Flask · Hardware H.264

Long-range wireless sensor network with ESP32-S3 LoRa nodes and gateway. BME280 sensors monitor temperature, humidity, and pressure with MQTT bridge for cloud integration.

Tech: ESP32-S3 · LoRa · MQTT · BME280 · C++ · PlatformIO

Production IoT system with 4 deployed sensors. C++ firmware with WiFi fallback, InfluxDB integration, and proper secrets management.

Tech: ESP8266 · C++ · PlatformIO · InfluxDB · DS18B20 · WiFi

Production self-hosted stack: InfluxDB, Grafana, Home Assistant, Prometheus, Nginx Proxy Manager, Cloudflare Tunnels.

Tech: Docker · InfluxDB · Grafana · Prometheus · Nginx · Cloudflare · Raspberry Pi

• BMO - Technical Lead, SRE & AI (2023-Present)

  • Leading high-availability systems design and practical AI-augmented engineering practices

• BlackBerry - Senior Technical Manager (2013-2019)

  • Led Enterprise Cloud & Data Platforms across AWS, Azure, and private clouds

• BlackBerry - Senior Software Developer (2010-2012)

  • Scaled BBM infrastructure to 100M+ users across distributed data centers

• Research In Motion - Infrastructure Engineering Specialist (2007-2010)

  • SME for BBM infrastructure and massively distributed cloud systems

💡 Always learning and always building. Right now I am exploring AI's role in SRE practices and community-data work where the stakes are real and the audience is actual neighbours.