Azande Porter

About

I’m a Site Reliability Engineer II at LexisNexis Risk Solutions in Atlanta, GA.

I build and run cloud infrastructure across several production platforms. That means defining Azure environments in Terraform, running services on AKS, and delivering them with Helm, Argo CD, and GitHub Actions. The platforms share a common foundation, but each has its own applications, topology, and failure modes. My job is to keep production stable and make deploys routine, so teams can ship without wondering what will break.

Outside of work I build Distinctful, my software product, and I write Founder Frames, a newsletter about the founders behind companies I find interesting. Entrepreneurship fascinates me: how an idea becomes a product, and how a product becomes a business.

Before LexisNexis I interned at SAS, where I worked on the CI/CD and release tooling behind SAS Viya, and at TIAA, where I built an internal system for managing data center workflows.

Experience

  1. Site Reliability Engineer II (current role)

    June 2026 – Present

    LexisNexis Risk Solutions · Atlanta, GA

    • Operate three production platforms on Azure Kubernetes Service, including the payment processing platform behind its payment APIs and services. Each carries its own applications, namespaces, node pools, and environment topology on a shared platform foundation.
    • Manage infrastructure as code in Terraform and ship workloads with Helm, Argo CD, and GitHub Actions, keeping environments reproducible and drift-free rather than hand-tuned.
    • Run ingress through Azure Application Gateway and Envoy Gateway and service-to-service traffic through Linkerd, tuning routing and exposure for production load.
    • Deliver secrets with External Secrets and Akeyless so credentials stay out of source control and rotate without a redeploy.
    • Maintain observability and security coverage with Grafana, Loki, Alloy, Fluent Bit, and Wiz, so failures surface with context instead of guesswork.

  2. Software Engineer I

    June 2025 – June 2026

    LexisNexis Risk Solutions · Atlanta, GA

    • Provisioned Azure infrastructure with Terraform, including cross-subscription VNet peering and network configuration supporting enterprise-scale analytics workflows.
    • Built GitHub Actions pipeline foundations with parameterized workflows and Vault OIDC authentication for secure, repeatable deployments.
    • Standardized reusable infrastructure and deployment patterns, cutting manual configuration and drift between environments.

  3. DevOps Software Developer Intern

    May 2024 – August 2024

    SAS · Cary, NC

    • Extended a RESTful service in the CI/CD path to improve artifact promotion, supporting 1,000+ concurrent builds for SAS Viya.
    • Automated functional and integration coverage in Python with pytest, reducing manual validation before release.
    • Contributed to Kubernetes deployment automation for internal delivery systems, improving packaging and release efficiency by roughly 30%.

  4. Software Engineer Intern

    June 2023 – August 2023

    TIAA · Charlotte, NC

    • Built features for an internal workflow management system with Python, Flask, JavaScript, and REST APIs to streamline data center operations.
    • Integrated backend API workflows to improve reliability and performance across multi-data-center processes.
    • Worked in a 9-person engineering team on Git-based workflows to support higher operational load.

Interests

Cloud
Azure, AWS, Linux
Infrastructure
Terraform, Kubernetes, AKS, Docker
Delivery
Argo CD, Helm, GitHub Actions, Git
Networking
Envoy Gateway, Azure Application Gateway, Linkerd
Secrets
External Secrets, Akeyless, HashiCorp Vault
Languages
Python, Go, TypeScript, Bash
Observability
Grafana, Loki, Alloy, Fluent Bit, Wiz
Design
system design, user experience, architecture tradeoffs

Contact