Cory Francis · Seattle, WA · me@corymf.com · LinkedIn · GitHub

Engineering and technology leader with nearly a decade leading infrastructure, cloud operations, and SRE teams in high growth environments. Proven record building and directing distributed engineering teams, owning multi million dollar technology budgets, managing vendor relationships at scale, and translating complex technology strategy into clear executive guidance. Skilled at modernizing legacy systems, building DevOps culture, and delivering large projects on time and on budget.

Core competencies

  • Leadership: team building and management, distributed and global teams, hiring and mentoring, executive communication
  • Operations and finance: cloud budget ownership, vendor and contract management, SaaS cost optimization, monthly financial reviews
  • Technical direction: cloud strategy (AWS, Azure), DevOps and SRE practices, CI/CD modernization, Infrastructure as Code, microservices migration
  • Stack: AWS, Azure, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes, ECS Fargate, PowerShell, Python, Node.js, Datadog, New Relic

Experience

Independent Technology Consultant

Seattle, WA · Mar 2024 - Present

Cloud architecture, infrastructure automation, and IT strategy for organizations across the Pacific Northwest.

  • Directed end to end cloud migrations to Azure and SharePoint Online for multiple organizations, including full on premises to cloud transitions
  • Designed Microsoft 365 and Azure environments that let clients scale operations and reduce infrastructure overhead, including Entra ID B2B authentication, conditional access policies, and external partner access controls
  • Established DevOps pipelines and IaC best practices for client engineering teams
  • Configured Microsoft Intune device compliance policies and application deployment for company-owned Windows devices across client engagements

Director of Developer Operations · A Place for Mom

Seattle, WA · Sep 2021 - Jan 2024

Primary technology advisor to senior leadership for a top ranked senior living referral platform.

  • Led a global team of 8 Site Reliability Engineers with direct reports in Bosnia, Costa Rica, and multiple US time zones
  • Drove the transformation of a legacy monolith into more than 100 containerized microservices on AWS, improving performance, reliability, and team velocity
  • Architected IaC driven CI/CD pipelines that scaled production deployments from once every two weeks to more than 100 per week
  • Rebuilt the primary consumer website in Node.js on AWS, improving performance and accelerating time to publish for the SEO team
  • Integrated on premises Active Directory with AWS to automate secure access and lifecycle management

Systems Engineering Manager · A Place for Mom

Seattle, WA · Sep 2017 - Sep 2021

Transformed the systems administration team into a full SRE organization across three countries.

  • Owned and optimized a $250K per month cloud operating budget, presenting monthly financial reviews to finance leadership and the executive team
  • Managed vendor relationships and contracts for 140+ technologies and services; consolidated $110K in redundant SaaS spend
  • Standardized CI/CD tooling by migrating from Jenkins, Ansible, and TeamCity to a unified GitHub Actions platform
  • Served as Acting Sr. Director of Enterprise Technology during executive parental leave, leading both Systems Engineering and Tech Support organizations

Windows Systems Administrator · Expeditors International

Seattle, WA · Nov 2016 - Sep 2017

  • Managed thousands of Windows servers supporting IT operations across 350+ offices in 100+ countries
  • Led a Desired State Configuration initiative that improved global server deployment speed and consistency
  • Served as PowerShell subject matter expert and primary trainer for WSA and corporate teams

Information Services Supervisor · Expeditors International

Grapevine, TX · Oct 2014 - Nov 2016

  • Oversaw IT support delivery across three US states, Mexico, and Brazil with regional management teams across the Americas
  • Delivered training that improved staff technical capability and reduced escalation rates, earning high satisfaction scores

Projects

Current open source and client work lives on the projects page. Highlights: ai-job-tracker, an AI-powered job search tool in production on Azure, and SP-MembershipManager, a PowerShell 7 + .NET 8 tool for SharePoint access management.

Education

A.A.S., Computer Networking and Systems Administration, Texas State Technical College, Waco, TX