Aaron S.

I've been building on Linux since 1994. Worked solely on Odesk/Upwork since April 2009. Linux/UNIX Engineer & Independent Consultant April 2009 – Present Provide high-end cloud architecture, server tuning, critical-incident recovery, and modern data engineering services to global clients. Completed 140+ engagements on Upwork with a perfect 5.0/5.0 feedback rating. AI Data Pipeline & Serverless Warehousing (2025 – 2026): Engineered a serverless data catalog pipeline using Python (BeautifulSoup, requests) to automatically scrape, parse, and clean investigative articles from target web sources [1]. Structured the raw extracted payload into optimized Apache Parquet tables and deployed them directly to Hugging Face Datasets for serverless hosting [1]. Built an interactive search and query dashboard in Gradio, utilizing custom DNS records (ALIAS/CNAME) to map and serve the app securely on DigitalOcean's cloud. Cloud Infrastructure & Migrations (AWS EC2 / VPS): Architected and built high-availability Linux cloud servers on AWS EC2, configured with WHM/cPanel, Concrete5 CMS, and optimized PHP environments. Successfully migrated legacy physical dedicated servers to scalable Virtual Private Servers (VPS) with CentOS/RHEL. Critical System Recovery & Administration: Diagnosed and resolved emergency service outages, including JBOSS server crash failures, Plesk/cPanel software conflicts on legacy CentOS nodes, and data recovery via mounting RAID arrays on FreeBSD. Configured Snort IDS, hardened server network boundaries, and conducted end-to-end performance audits. UNIX Engineer | E Solutions Corporation March 2008 – April 2009 (1 year 2 months) Supported physical operations and infrastructure for a Tier-1 collocation facility. Administered and engineered OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows server environments daily. Identified and successfully resolved a high volume of network and host-based security vulnerabilities. Stabilized the physical bandwidth billing system for accuracy and provided system-level engineering support to the web development team. UNIX System Engineer | Hilton Grand Vacations (HGVC) November 2006 – March 2008 (1 year 5 months) Served as the single onsite point of operations for all HP-UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, macOS X, and Linux servers. Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) Architecture: Designed and built a custom corporate Data Warehouse using RedHat Enterprise Linux, IBM Information Server, and the Sun N1 toolkit. Backported RedHat clustering utilities and GFS modules specifically for RHEL 4 to support database stability. Tailored operating systems to run the IBM Information Server 8 product family, including IBM DB2 V9.3, WebSphere 6.0, DataStage, and QualityStage. Web Presence Engineering: Designed and deployed the company's external web servers on the Solaris 10 platform using Sun T2000 hardware. Leveraged Solaris Zones, hardware RAID, and the ZFS filesystem to isolate and optimize traffic. Authored custom system automation utilities in Perl, C, and the Bourne shell to debug complex kernel and network issues. UNIX Administrator | Vortech, Inc. 2004 – 2006 (2 years) UNIX Administration & Support | Magna Computer Corp September 2003 – May 2004 (9 months) UNIX System Administrator & Network Engineer | Independent Consultant November 2001 – July 2003 Implemented OpenBSD, Linux, and Windows servers in high-density colocation centers. Configured custom web application servers from scratch using Apache, Perl, PHP, and MySQL. Programmed terminal-based console utilities in C and ncurses, utilizing the GTK toolkit and X11 API. Second Level Support | Jobwarehouse May 2001 – September 2001 (5 months) Provided secondary engineering support for primary web servers and high-volume data processing tasks. Education Valencia Community College | 1996 – 1998 | Computer Science & Systems Study Winter Park High School | 1992 – 1996 | Gifted Academic Program Professional Recommendation "Aaron is a very good systems engineer for Linux, UNIX and Windows. He has an in depth understanding of system internals. I found him to be an honorable man that stands behind his word and keeps on track of the project. He would make a good supervisor in any company." — Shelton R., Sr. IT Consultant / DB2 DBA Expert, Xtivia (worked directly with Aaron at HGVC)