# TJ Hoth
> Senior Manager of Release Engineering. SRE leader with 16 years in tech. Incident response, automation, and teams that ship reliably.

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## About
Senior Site Reliability Engineering leader with 16 years of technology experience, including over a decade in SRE and operations leadership. I've directed company-wide incident response, automated processes to reduce toil, and helped drive service availability toward **99.99%**.

I'm skilled at building and mentoring high-performing teams, transforming organizations toward modern SRE practices, and delivering reliable systems in complex socio-technical environments — the kind where the runbook, the org chart, and the on-call rotation all matter equally.

Currently at **Early Warning**, I lead Release Engineering and DevOps — transforming how we plan, intake, and communicate releases. Before that, I spent eight years at **Workday** climbing from operations engineer to SRE manager and senior IC, with a lot of major incidents, postmortems, and automation wins along the way.

Off the clock I run a Talos/Kubernetes homelab on GitOps, write at [nerd.dad](https://nerd.dad), and build tools like observability agents and cluster visualizers — because the best leaders still read diffs.

## Currently focused on
- release engineering & DevOps delivery
- Scrum transformation & PI planning
- Jira / Teams release automation
- AI-assisted tooling

## Experience
### Senior Manager of Release Engineering — Early Warning — PAZE
Jan 2026 → Present
- Lead Release Engineering and DevOps teams, driving cross-functional delivery and operational excellence
- Transformed Release Engineering to Scrum — improved collaboration, delivery planning, and execution
- Built a centralized work intake portal that automated request management and reduced ad hoc interruptions
- Partnered with PMO leadership to align OKRs and Program Increment initiatives with engineering execution in Jira
- Developed Jira and Microsoft Teams automation for real-time deployment and release communications
Tags: leadership, release-engineering, devops, agile

### Senior Site Reliability Engineer — Workday
Feb 2025 → Jan 2026
- Designed automated documentation systems with MkDocs and custom Python modules, reducing manual upkeep
- Built integrations across multiple tools via APIs to surface incident data more effectively
- Served as primary escalation point for high-impact incidents, driving resolution of business-critical outages
Tags: sre, python, incident-response, automation

### Manager of Site Reliability Engineering — Workday
Nov 2023 → Feb 2025
- Directed company-wide major incident response, coordinating cross-functional teams and reducing MTTR
- Designed and implemented automated incident management pipelines, streamlining escalation and triage
- Mentored and developed SREs, fostering a culture of reliability, innovation, and proactive problem-solving
- Partnered with engineering and product owners to improve system resilience and eliminate toil
Tags: leadership, sre, incident-response, automation

### Associate Manager of Site Reliability Engineering — Workday
Mar 2022 → Nov 2023
- Led organizational transformation into a modern SRE practice with a focus on reliability engineering
- Empowered engineers through training and process improvements, reducing deployment risks and manual work
Tags: leadership, sre, transformation

### Operations Team Lead — Workday
Aug 2018 → Mar 2022
- Served as lead during major incidents, ensuring rapid resolution and clear communication
- Streamlined incident response processes, reducing time-to-detect and time-to-resolve
- Mentored junior engineers, elevating team technical and operational capabilities
Tags: operations, incident-response, leadership

### Operations Engineer — Workday
Nov 2017 → Aug 2018
- Triaged and resolved production incidents across customer-facing environments
- Built Slack automations to reduce administrative toil and accelerate response
- Contributed to deployment reliability through reviews and continuous improvements
Tags: operations, automation, incident-response

### Network Operations Center Engineer — Robert Half
Apr 2013 → Nov 2017
- Monitored and ensured network availability for field offices nationwide
- Coordinated with ISPs and vendors to troubleshoot and resolve outages
- Managed backup systems and performed datacenter tape rotations
Tags: noc, networking, operations

## Projects and writing
- **nerd.dad** (2024) — https://nerd.dad: Blog, homelab docs, and runbooks — SRE writing, GitOps manifests live elsewhere, prose lives here.
- **Homelab GitOps Cluster** (2024) — https://nerd.dad/latest/homelab/: Talos Linux, Flux, Longhorn, and a full observability stack — production patterns at home scale.
- **Hearth** (2025) — https://github.com/nerddotdad/hearth: Godot-powered 3D homelab visualizer with an agent bridge — because kubectl get pods isn't immersive enough.
- **SRE Today 2025** (2025) — https://nerd.dad/latest/blog/posts/sre/sre_today_2025/: Notes from the field — what SRE looks like when AI, platform teams, and pager duty all show up to the same meeting.

## Skills
- **Platform & Delivery:** Kubernetes, Helm, Jenkins, Git / GitHub Actions, CI/CD, Product Deployment, Bash / Shell Scripting
- **Reliability & Observability:** Site Reliability Engineering, Incident Response, Grafana, BigPanda, Jira / JSM, 99.99% Availability Targets, Toil Reduction & Automation
- **Leadership & Practice:** Engineering Management, Technical Product Management, Agile / Scrum, Mentorship, Python, Effective Communication, Critical Thinking

## Homelab
Self-hosted Talos Kubernetes cluster, managed with Flux GitOps. Public docs: https://nerd.dad/latest/homelab/
- Talos Linux (Kubernetes)
- Flux CD (GitOps)
- Longhorn (Storage)
- Observability (Prometheus · Grafana · Hearth)
- Media (Jellyfin · Immich)
- GitOps repo (truecharts / clusters/main)

## Links
- GitHub: https://github.com/nerddotdad
- nerd.dad: https://nerd.dad
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjhoth
- Site: https://tjhoth.me
- Support chat: https://support.tjhoth.me