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.
- Automated mTLS certificate lifecycle end-to-end using cert-manager and Vault, eliminating manual rotation and recovering ~90 engineering hours/month at 0% failure rate.
- Founded the Security Champions program across 200+ engineers, embedding security ownership and driving 120+ CVE remediations per year through structured threat review cadences.
- Led Jira Align database migration rollback under incident conditions, protecting ~20 enterprise customers from data exposure through rapid cross-functional coordination.
- 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 using SignalFx and Splunk, reducing MTTR for high-severity incidents through improved alert fidelity and dashboard coverage.
- Led SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance evidence collection and gap remediation, aligning SRE operations with audit controls across production systems.
- 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 and delivered the Alert Logic MDR product from concept to a fully supported managed detection and response offering, including sensor deployment, SIEM integration, and customer-facing triage workflows.
- Designed network security architectures for enterprise customers using Palo Alto NGFW, Cisco ASA/Firepower, F5 LTM/GTM, and BGP — spanning managed hosting, public cloud, and hybrid environments.
- Led zero-trust architecture and compliance-driven network segmentation engagements, including technical presales and solution design for regulated industries.
- Held GCIH and CySA+ certifications; served as internal SME for incident handling, threat analysis, and security assessments.
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.