James McCulley
Senior Site Reliability Engineer with 17+ years in infrastructure, cloud security, and observability. Most recently at Atlassian owning incident response, vulnerability management, and the observability platform for Jira Align across AWS and Azure. Track record of reducing MTTR, hardening production posture, and building the tooling that prevents problems before pagers fire. Currently building Meridian — a multi-cloud observability and security platform spanning on-prem k3s, AWS EKS, and Azure AKS.
- Owned vulnerability management lifecycle end-to-end — from detection through remediation tracking — across multi-cloud infrastructure spanning AWS and Azure.
- Built and maintained the observability platform for Jira Align, including metrics pipelines, alerting, and dashboards using SignalFx and Splunk, reducing MTTR for high-severity incidents.
- Led incident response coordination for security-impacting events; authored runbooks and post-mortem processes adopted across the SRE org.
- Implemented PKI/TLS lifecycle automation, eliminating certificate expiry incidents across internal and customer-facing services.
- Partnered with security engineering to integrate Wiz findings into SRE workflows, driving down critical cloud misconfigurations.
- Drove Okta and Entra ID access governance improvements, tightening least-privilege posture across production systems.
- Designed and deployed network security architecture for cloud and hybrid environments, establishing security baselines across AWS and Azure tenants.
- Led evaluation and implementation of cloud security tooling including WAF, DDoS mitigation, and network egress controls.
- Collaborated with product engineering teams to embed security requirements into CI/CD pipelines and service delivery.
- Architected network security solutions for enterprise customers across managed hosting, public cloud, and hybrid environments.
- Led technical presales and solution design for security-focused engagements including perimeter defense, SIEM onboarding, and compliance-driven network segmentation.
- Mentored junior engineers and contributed to internal tooling for network automation and security assessment workflows.
- Held GCIH and CySA+ certifications; served as internal SME for incident handling and threat analysis.
Production-grade observability and security platform spanning on-prem k3s (OrbStack), AWS EKS, and Azure AKS. Full-stack signal collection via VictoriaMetrics, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Fluent Bit, Quickwit, and Grafana. Security layer with Falco (eBPF), OPA/Gatekeeper, Trivy, Wazuh, and Suricata — mapped to SOC2/PCI-DSS controls. GitOps delivery via ArgoCD and Helm. Python tooling for alert routing, log parsing, and canary analysis.