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Résumé / James Asuncion

Reliability.
Built on experience.

Site Reliability Engineer Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Site Reliability Engineer with over five years of experience supporting production systems and business-critical applications across the financial and marketing sectors. Focused on AWS infrastructure, observability, incident response, and improving system reliability, performance, and operational efficiency.

Find me on GitHub

01 / Where I’ve worked

Experience

Rentsync

Site Reliability Engineer

August 2025 – October 2026

St. Catharines, ON

  • Designed and maintained centralized observability infrastructure with Grafana, Prometheus/Mimir, Loki, Tempo, and Grafana Alloy, bringing metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting together across production services.
  • Deployed Grafana Alloy across AWS EC2 environments to discover workloads and collect application, Docker, and system logs. Built dashboards to track system health, performance, and service reliability.
  • Built and tuned actionable alerting with Grafana, AWS CloudWatch, SNS, EventBridge, and PagerDuty. Audited and enhanced monitoring across AWS, Azure, Zabbix, and Grafana, increasing observability by 135%, reducing incident resolution time by 52%, and improving incident acknowledgement rate by 4%.
  • Supported AWS infrastructure across EC2, ECS, ECR, RDS/Aurora, Route 53, IAM, SSM, CloudWatch, application load balancers, and target groups. Managed client DNS records and application connectivity using Cloudflare and Route 53.
  • Developed automation scripts to remediate filesystem permissions and credential issues. Created least-privilege IAM policies and roles for monitoring, logging, and observability tooling.
  • Administered PagerDuty services, escalation policies, schedules, integrations, and IT Operations on-call rotations to clarify ownership and improve incident response.
  • Created runbooks, service documentation, monitoring standards, and onboarding processes. Partnered with engineering teams to troubleshoot production issues and identify opportunities for automation and proactive monitoring.
  • Used ChatGPT, Claude, and AWS DevOps Agent to support deployments, troubleshoot infrastructure and CI/CD issues, and generate and review configurations.

Morgan Stanley

Site Reliability Engineer

January 2021 – October 2024

Montréal, QC

  • Performed IT security administration for six applications, including maintenance, problem resolution, access provisioning, and monitoring, while maintaining compliance with company policies and data protection requirements.
  • Investigated production issues and monitored applications with Splunk, PagerDuty, and proprietary tools to support high availability.
  • Planned and executed weekly technology change management activities and deployments for bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements through CI/CD.

Contract engagements: FDM (2020–2023), Procom (2023–2024), and Randstad (2024).

Bell

Associate Computer Application Support Student Co-op

May 2018 – August 2018

Hamilton, ON

  • Gathered stakeholder feedback on a GIS mapping system and worked with developers to improve the user interface, acting as a business analyst.
  • Automated the survey and polling workflow with VBA for Microsoft applications while maintaining data security.

Black & McDonald Ltd.

IT Service Desk Technician Co-op

May 2017 – September 2017

Markham, ON

  • Led a cellular migration project, staging company devices on an Android for Work network.
  • Provided employee technical support throughout the migration.

02 / My toolkit

Technical skills

Cloud & infrastructure

  • AWS
  • Linux
  • EC2
  • ECS / ECR
  • RDS / Aurora
  • Route 53
  • IAM
  • SSM
  • ALB
  • Cloudflare
  • TCP/IP

Observability & incident response

  • Grafana / Grafana Cloud
  • Prometheus / Mimir
  • Loki
  • Tempo
  • Grafana Alloy
  • CloudWatch
  • SNS
  • EventBridge
  • Splunk
  • PagerDuty
  • Zabbix

Languages & automation

  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
  • C++
  • HTML / CSS
  • VBA

Delivery & operations

  • Git / GitHub / GitLab
  • CI/CD
  • ServiceNow
  • Jira
  • Illumio
  • Cloudflare Agents
  • Runbooks
  • On-call operations

Additional tools

  • Computer hardware
  • Microsoft Office
  • Outlook
  • ChatGPT
  • Claude
  • AWS DevOps Agent

03 / Foundations

Education

McMaster University

Bachelor of Technology — Automation Engineering

  • Minor: Advanced Diploma in Chemical Engineering
  • Certificate in Business Management (2018)

04 / Credentials

Certifications

AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
2025
ITIL 4 Foundation
2022–2028

05 / Building together

Project

Care-Flow Nurse Scheduling System

Partnered with a colleague to develop an application that helps nursing teams schedule shifts and communicate more effectively.

Stack GitHub, Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, Resend, Twilio