NATALIE PIERCE

317-922-8130 | piercnic@gmail.com | LINKEDIN | GITHUB

/// SUMMARY

Principal Cloud Platforms Engineer with 5+ years architecting large-scale Kubernetes infrastructure. Led EKS platform serving 12,500+ customers across 850+ namespaces with 60-70% cost reduction. Expert in observability, disaster recovery, AI/ML integration, and platform engineering. Recognized technical leader and mentor.

/// EXPERIENCE

ELI LILLY AND COMPANY

2022 – PRESENT

Principal Cloud Platforms Engineer | Indianapolis, IN

  • Architected and maintained primary AWS EKS cluster serving 12,500+ customers across 850+ namespaces with 99.9% uptime
  • Achieved 60-70% cost reduction through multi-cluster optimization and Densify rightsizing with $6M potential savings
  • Built self-hosted observability platform (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Jaeger, Opencost) avoiding millions in SaaS costs
  • Established enterprise disaster recovery using Velero with automated backup/restore workflows adopted company-wide
  • Led team of 10+ contractors delivering cluster-wide telemetry, logging, and cost-monitoring solutions ahead of schedule
  • Implemented EKS Auto Mode reducing infrastructure management by 80%; deployed event-driven workflows with Temporal.io/Kafka
  • Created Platform and Hangar Agents using RAG models, handling thousands of support questions
  • Mentored interns and junior developers; established Level 4-5 Kubernetes interview question bank

ELI LILLY AND COMPANY

2020 – 2022

Senior Software Engineer | Indianapolis, IN

  • Created lab instrument integrated sample tracking tools cutting manual data entry from 45 mins/plate to under 5 mins/plate
  • Collaborated on mass spectrometer automated peak integration cloud-native application saving 7.5 hours/plate
  • Performed emergency database and cloud tasks during key metabolomics studies for Tirzepatide molecule trials
  • Modernized GitHub Actions CI/CD workflows improving reliability and deployment velocity through streamlined automation
  • Integrated merge queues into IaC repositories saving hundreds of hours by synchronizing CI workflows

/// EDUCATION

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

DEC 2021

M.S. Computer Science | Indianapolis, IN

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

DEC 2020

B.S. Computer Science | Indianapolis, IN

/// TECHNICAL SKILLS

KUBERNETES & CONTAINERS

AWS EKS, EKS Auto Mode, Docker, ArgoCD, Helm, Karpenter, Velero, multi-cluster (5+ years)

CLOUD PLATFORMS

AWS (EKS, RDS, Lambda, S3, EC2, Bedrock, CDK, IAM), Azure (OpenAI, Cost Management)

OBSERVABILITY

Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Jaeger, Opencost, distributed tracing, monitoring stacks

EVENT-DRIVEN

Kafka, Temporal.io, microservices orchestration, event streaming

LANGUAGES

Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java, C#, Bash

AI/ML

LangChain, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, RAG models, PyTorch

IAC & DEVOPS

Terraform, AWS CDK, GitHub Actions, GitOps, CI/CD, Tilt

METHODOLOGIES

Platform Engineering, DevOps, Agile/Scrum, SRE, cost optimization

/// CERTIFICATIONS

AWS Solutions Architect Associate | AWS Cloud Practitioner | CompTIA Network+, Security+ | Microsoft MTA

/// CONTACT