Principal Architect

Nate
Crisler.

I build the infrastructure that makes AI possible — and the security that keeps it safe.

15+ years engineering production systems at scale. Custom Terraform provider author. HashiStack architect. Self-hosted AI/LLM infrastructure. Public speaker at Splunk .conf 2017 and Nutanix .NEXT 2018.

Open to the right opportunity — [email protected]

sovereign · nomad deploy
$ nomad job run sovereign.hcl
==> Monitoring deployment
✓ vault running
✓ consul running
✓ traefik running
✓ ollama-node running
✓ plausible running
✓ anchor running
$
15+ Years Eng.
3 Conf. Talks
92% Approval Rating
10k+ Customers Served
4 MSSP Offerings Built

Skills & Expertise

AI / LLM Infrastructure

Self-hosted LLM inference with Ollama — air-gap capable, zero cloud vendor dependency. RAG pipeline architecture using ChromaDB vector databases and embedding models. MCP (Model Context Protocol) server development with FastMCP. Production AI systems with confidence-tiered response engines and hallucination mitigation. Local LLM deployments for security-sensitive environments with full data sovereignty.

Multi-Agent Systems

15-agent orchestration architecture (FULCRUM). Cognitive profile-aware agent design. Claude API at depth — tool use, context management, multi-turn orchestration. Agent pipeline design for security, compliance, and infrastructure automation workflows.

HashiStack Platform Engineering

HashiStack architect — not a user, a designer. All five tools in production at SOVEREIGN scale: Vault for zero-trust secrets management, Consul for service mesh and service discovery, Nomad for workload orchestration, Terraform for IaC, Packer for hardened image pipelines. Zero hardcoded credentials anywhere. Zero manual SSH steps from git push to running service.

Infrastructure as Code — Custom Provider Author

Authored a custom Terraform provider for the Antsle hypervisor in Go using the Terraform Plugin SDK — 9 writable resource types, 15+ read-only data sources, full CRUD lifecycle. Beyond using Terraform — understands how it works at the plugin level. Also: Ansible for multi-machine orchestration, Packer for image hardening, Helm for Kubernetes workloads.

Platform Engineering

Internal developer platform design — git push to running production service with no manual steps. Service mesh (Consul), workload orchestration (Nomad), reverse proxy and TLS (Traefik), secrets management (Vault). Packer-based image hardening pipelines. Multi-machine Ansible deployment automation. MSP-scale platform delivery across dozens of enterprise client environments.

DevSecOps

Security embedded in CI/CD — not bolted on after. Auto-healing security controls that self-correct on drift. Policy as code with OPA/Rego for behavioral baseline-driven enforcement. eBPF/Tetragon for kernel-level network observation and runtime security (INTERCEPT). PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, SOC2 compliance automation — controls provisioned by Terraform, not manually configured.

Managed Security Services

Built four managed security service offerings from zero at C1: VMaaS (Vulnerability Management as a Service) on Tenable.io, AMaaS (Attack Surface Management as a Service) on Axonius, XDRaaS (Extended Detection and Response as a Service) on CrowdStrike and Cylance, SIEMaaS (SIEM as a Service) on Splunk. Owned platform onboarding, service delivery playbooks, detection tuning, and client relationships end-to-end.

Splunk & SIEM Architecture

SIEM architect — built enterprise Splunk solutions for 10,000+ customers at Genesys. Terraform and Splunk provider framework for automated SplunkCloud compliance deployments (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX). Custom searches, correlation rules, dashboards, and automated response workflows. Invited speaker at Splunk .conf 2017.

Multi-Cloud Security

AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously — not specialized in one, fluent across all three. Auto-healing security controls, threat hunting at 10,000+ customer scale, PCI pentests. IAM architecture, zero-trust design, cloud-native security tooling across all major providers.

Go (Golang)

Production Go development — not just familiarity, but shipped code. Custom Terraform provider (9 resource types, 15+ data sources, Terraform Plugin SDK). Concurrent systems, API clients, protocol bridges. Go as the language of infrastructure tooling.

API Security

Passive API traffic scanning and analysis. mitmproxy-based capture architecture. 24-rule behavioral detection engine (INTERCEPT). API threat modeling and vulnerability assessment. Security testing without disrupting production traffic.

eBPF / Tetragon

Kernel-level network observation and runtime security enforcement using eBPF and Tetragon (INTERCEPT). Process-level visibility without agents. Policy-driven enforcement at the kernel layer. Rare practical skill — most security engineers have not deployed eBPF in production.

OPA / Rego

Policy as code using Open Policy Agent and Rego for behavioral baseline-driven enforcement. Automated compliance controls, admission policies, and infrastructure guardrails. Decoupled policy from application logic — policies that audit themselves.

Python Development

Production Python across AI, security, and infrastructure tooling — Flask, FastAPI, async patterns. RAG systems (SPECTER), developer productivity platforms (ANCHOR), MCP servers (REMNANT), API security (INTERCEPT). uv for dependency management, RQ/Redis for task queues, SQLAlchemy for data layers.

Kubernetes & Container Orchestration

Kubernetes in production — cloud migration, custom controllers, CRDs. Container security: multi-stage builds, runtime hardening, image scanning pipelines. Nomad as a Kubernetes alternative for workloads where simplicity beats complexity.

Observability & Telemetry

Full-stack telemetry design: Splunk, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, Datadog, Sensu. Built the observability infrastructure Genesys’ 10,000+ customers depend on. MQTT for IoT and edge telemetry. Real-time alerting, dashboards, and automated response pipelines.

Networking & RF Engineering

Enterprise networking foundations: BGP, DNS, VPNs, firewalls, load balancing. RS-485 serial protocol engineering and passive hardware tapping (FRAMEWORK). LoRa mesh networking (Meshtastic/MeshCore), RF propagation, antenna design. Licensed amateur radio operator (WA7ABU) — federal exam, RF fundamentals.

Work Experience

Oct 2025 — Present C1 Remote
Current

Principal Architect

C1 is one of the largest IT solutions providers in North America — a Cisco Gold Partner and managed services organization delivering complex architecture across security, networking, collaboration, and cloud to enterprise clients.

  • Own the architecture on enterprise client engagements — cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, and security programs across financial services, healthcare, and Fortune 500 accounts
  • Write the Terraform frameworks, not just the modules — IaC that provisions entire client environments from scratch across AWS, Azure, and GCP
  • SplunkCloud compliance deployments built to pass audits — PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, SOC2 controls provisioned by code, not manually configured
  • Vault at client sites: zero hardcoded credentials across the full stack, policy-driven access, secrets rotation automated
  • Architecture review, engineering standards, client relationships, and mentorship — accountable for the technical outcome, not just the design
Dec 2022 — Oct 2025 C1 Remote

Manager, Cybersecurity Managed Services

C1 is one of the largest IT solutions providers in North America — a Cisco Gold Partner and managed services organization delivering complex architecture across security, networking, collaboration, and cloud to enterprise clients.

  • Built C1’s Cybersecurity Managed Services practice from nothing — service catalog, delivery architecture, team, and four live MSSP offerings all started at zero
  • VMaaS (Tenable), AMaaS (Axonius), XDRaaS (CrowdStrike+Cylance), SIEMaaS (Splunk) — owned each from initial design through multi-client revenue delivery
  • Defined the pricing model, service packaging, and go-to-market positioning — this wasn’t an inherited program, it was built from scratch
  • Took all four from concept to contract. Managed the enterprise client relationships end-to-end.
  • Designed the technical delivery architecture for each offering — not a program manager, an engineer who also ran the business
Nov 2021 — Oct 2022 Genesys Cloud Services Remote

Senior MultiCloud Security Engineer

Genesys powers customer experience solutions for 10,000+ companies worldwide.

  • Threat hunting across AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously — 10,000+ enterprise customers, active detection and neutralization before incidents materialized
  • Auto-healing security controls on the HashiCorp toolchain: when something drifted, it fixed itself — no ticket, no human intervention
  • PCI pentests and multi-cloud hardening — ran red team and blue team, same person, same environment
Oct 2017 — Apr 2019 Genesys Cloud Services Remote

Senior Cloud Security & Telemetry Engineer

Genesys powers customer experience solutions for 10,000+ companies worldwide.

  • Splunk architect for PCI-DSS and SOC2 — correlation rules, dashboards, and automated response workflows built from scratch, not from templates
  • Automated security monitoring pipelines that cut detection time — built to surface the signal before it became an incident
Mar 2014 — Oct 2017 Genesys Cloud Services Remote

Principal Telemetry Engineer

Genesys powers customer experience solutions for 10,000+ companies worldwide.

  • Shipped the telemetry infrastructure Genesys’ 10,000+ enterprise customers depended on — designed it, scaled it, owned it
  • Collapsed security, networking, and storage visibility into one coherent observability practice — unified what were three separate silos
  • Splunk .conf 2017 — Splunk invited me to present to their global practitioner community. That’s the credential.
Apr 2019 — Nov 2021 KAR Global Carmel, Indiana (Remote)

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Leading the transformation of digital infrastructure in the automotive wholesale industry.

  • Migrated legacy applications to AWS, OpenShift, and Kubernetes — cut deployment downtime 50%, no planned maintenance windows
  • Vault via Terraform: zero hardcoded credentials across the entire production environment. That’s how it should work.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines and real-time observability with Grafana and Prometheus — deployments became boring, which was the goal
Sep 2011 — Apr 2014 Lightbound Indianapolis, IN

Network Operations Specialist | Tier 3 Lead

Managed mission-critical infrastructure for enterprise network operations.

  • Automated hardware failure detection and replacement in real-time — this is where the automation instinct started
  • BGP, DNS, VPNs, firewalls at ISP scale. Physical layer first. Everything since has built on this.
Apr 2008 — Present nu11.info PNW (Remote)
Current

Lead Engineer & Founder

nu11.info is a cybersecurity and automation knowledge-sharing hub focused on SIEM, cloud-native security, and best practices.

  • Full-stack telemetry and observability using Splunk, Grafana, Loki, Prometheus, Datadog, and Sensu
  • IaC workflows using Terraform, Ansible, and Helm — automated infrastructure from bare metal to cloud
  • CI/CD pipelines across Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, GitLab, and Jenkins
  • Cloud security hardening and compliance automation across AWS, Azure, and GCP environments

Projects Independent Work

API Security · AI Governance · eBPF · OPA

INTERCEPT

Architect & Developer · 2025 - Present

Self-hosted passive API intelligence and AI governance platform. Sits transparently on the network as a proxy — no code changes required. Learns the complete API surface from real observed traffic. Runs 24 security rules synchronously on every flow: secrets detection, JWT vulnerabilities, PII exposure, CORS misconfiguration, unauthenticated endpoints. Maps every AI service call across the network — detecting shadow AI usage, PII in model prompts, ungoverned model access, and token-volume exfiltration signals. eBPF/Tetragon provides kernel-level process attribution for every TCP connection. OPA/Rego policy engine enforces rules derived from observed behavioral baselines — policies that build themselves from real traffic.

independentsecurityAI-governanceeBPFOPApython
Multi-Agent AI Orchestration

FULCRUM

Architect & Developer · 2024 - Present

Personal multi-agent orchestration system — 15 specialized AI agents functioning as an executive function layer. Each agent has a defined role, authority hierarchy, trigger conditions, and behavioral constraints. Deployed across two surfaces: Claude Skills (reactive, in-session) and Mattermost Bot via n8n (proactive, scheduled). Integrates REMNANT for persistent memory, ANCHOR for project state, Planka for task management. Cognitive profile-aware — agent behavior adapts to energy state and stress indicators.

independentAImulti-agentpythonclaude
AI Developer Tooling · Internal Developer Platform

ANCHOR

Architect & Developer · 2024 - Present

Self-hosted AI-integrated developer productivity platform for the multi-project engineering workflow. Zero-friction idea capture, context restoration on every project open, git hook auto-logging across all machines, and dormant project alerts. AI Daily Brief and Weekly Retrospective via Claude API. Idea-to-repo pipeline: raw concept to scaffolded Gitea repository with CLAUDE.md generated for Claude Code. Stack: Python/Flask, PostgreSQL, Redis/RQ, Docker, Ansible multi-machine deployment.

independentAIdeveloper-toolspythonclaude
Platform Engineering · HashiStack

SOVEREIGN

Architect & Developer · 2023 - Present

Full infrastructure control plane on self-hosted Antsle hypervisor hardware. Packer builds hardened AlmaLinux 9 base images across a five-tier pipeline (base to hashicore to hashiclient to ollama-node to data-node). Custom Terraform provider provisions all infrastructure. Vault manages all secrets — zero hardcoded credentials anywhere. Consul handles service mesh and service discovery. Nomad orchestrates all workloads. Traefik handles reverse proxy and TLS. Result: git push to running production service with zero manual SSH steps.

independentinfrastructurehashicorpterraformplatform-engineering
AI · Compliance Automation · Security

SPECTER

Architect & Developer · 2024 - Present

RAG-based system for automating enterprise security compliance questionnaires. Stack: Flask, ChromaDB vector database, Ollama local LLM inference — no cloud API dependency. Confidence-tiered response engine: above 0.85 auto-fills, 0.65–0.84 queues for human review, below 0.65 escalates to SME. Achieves 85%+ automatic completion rate. Deployed for a VP of Security at a financial services enterprise. Air-gap capable — all inference runs on-premises with full data sovereignty.

independentAIsecuritycompliancepythonRAG
Open Source · Go · Infrastructure

Custom Terraform Provider — Antsle

Author · 2023 - Present

Full Terraform provider for the Antsle hypervisor platform — written in Go using the Terraform Plugin SDK. Nine writable resource types with full CRUD lifecycle, 15+ read-only data sources. Enables complete infrastructure-as-code for self-hosted, privacy-first environments with no cloud vendor dependency. Powers the entire SOVEREIGN infrastructure provisioning pipeline. Writing a provider validates deeper Terraform knowledge than any certification — it requires understanding how Terraform works at the plugin level.

independentopen-sourcegolangterraforminfrastructure
AI Knowledge Infrastructure · MCP

REMNANT

Architect & Developer · 2025 - Present

Self-hosted knowledge graph that ingests AI conversation exports and engineering decision records. Hugo-based structured knowledge base with React Flow graph visualization. FastMCP server enables live semantic querying via Claude Code — AI assistant with persistent memory of everything ever built. Full data sovereignty. Nothing leaves the network.

independentAIMCPknowledge-managementpython
SIEM · Compliance · IaC

Splunk IaC Framework

Architect & Developer · 2022 - Present

Reusable Terraform and Splunk provider framework for enterprise SplunkCloud deployments across MSP client environments. Automated provisioning of compliance controls (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX), dashboard templates, and client handoff documentation. Single framework — repeatable across dozens of client deployments.

independentsplunkterraformcomplianceinfrastructure

Speaking & Recognition

October 2017 Splunk

Speaker — Splunk .conf 2017

Invited speaker at Splunk's global annual conference in Washington D.C. Session: 'What Got You Here Won't Get You There — The Journey to Enterprise Cloud from a Customer's Perspective.' Selected by Splunk to present to their global practitioner community — a third-party validation that no certification process replicates.
May 2018 Nutanix

Speaker — Nutanix .NEXT 2018

Invited by Nutanix to speak at their global user conference in New Orleans. Session: 'Splunk Enterprise on Nutanix: Keys to Success.' Received a 92.2% attendee approval rating — among the top-rated sessions at the conference.
December 2017 Nutanix + Splunk

Speaker — Nutanix + Splunk Global Webinar

Co-presented a global joint webinar for the Nutanix and Splunk customer community. Session: 'Become a Big Data Superhero with Splunk and Nutanix.' Reached a global audience of enterprise IT and security practitioners.
2018 — 2020 Nutanix

Nutanix Technology Champion

Recognized as a Nutanix Technology Champion for three consecutive years. Awarded to practitioners who demonstrate deep technical expertise and contribute meaningfully to the Nutanix community through speaking, content, and peer knowledge-sharing.