Orion Van Oss's CV

• Phone: +1 850 524 7595
• Email: orion@van-oss.com
• Location: Tallahassee, FL
• Website: van-oss.com

Work Experience

Cloud Engineer II, Syntech Systems -- Tallahassee, FL

Jan 2026 – present

Syntech Systems has specialized in automating fuel management for over 40 years, serving clients from the U.S. Federal Government and Fortune 500 companies to local municipalities and schools.

• Architected and deployed a centralized OpenSearch logging platform for 8000+ cloud and edge nodes. Aggregated dozens of diverse logging structures into a cost-effective, searchable index. Created Kibana dashboards to display errors and engineering metrics.

• Led deployment of a redundant PCI-DSS compliant payment-processor connection using AWS Direct Connect, Megaport, and BGP; coordinated four engineering and datacenter teams, achieved sub-minute failover, and eliminated downtime during multiple failover events.

• Managed AWS infrastructure across 5 accounts, 12 VPCs, 2700+ EC2 instances, 5 production database clusters, and multiple ELB/ASG stacks, delivering reliable support for over 50,000 daily transactions in a regulated SaaS environment.

• Improved CI/CD and operational automation using Chef/Cinc, Ansible, Lambda, CloudFormation, Python, and Bash for application deployment, upgrades, reporting, and server lifecycle tasks.

• Supported PCI-DSS and SOC 2 certification efforts by assisting pentests, hardening access patterns, and maintaining secure network and application configurations.

Cloud Associate, Syntech Systems -- Tallahassee, FL

July 2023 – Jan 2026

• Architected network connectivity for 250+ edge-compute terminals using AWS Site-to-Site VPN and Transit Gateway, enabling secure field connectivity over cellular networks.

• Reduced monthly public IPv4 cost from roughly $8000 to under $1000 by moving about 2000 EC2 instances behind load-balanced, autoscaling Nginx reverse-proxy stacks.

• Built a parallel AWS-based test environment for engineering validation using Go and Terraform, migrating from prior dependence on on-site virtual machines.

• Continuously mentored summer interns every year and helped hire engineering interns.

Software Intern, Syntech Systems -- Tallahassee, FL

Oct 2022 – July 2023

• Built internal secure web applications using Python, Flask, JavaScript, and MariaDB/MySQL for payment terminal pin-pad workflows, cellular SIM lifecycle management, and support-access administration.

Education

Columbia University in the City of New York, BA in Physics and Mathematics -- New York, NY

June 2021

• Research experience in physics and astronomy, including detector-development work and X-ray spectral analysis.

• Teaching Assistant for introductory physics, astronomy, and electromagnetism laboratory courses.

• Computational Simulations for Applied Thermodynamics

Certifications Skills and Interests

Certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate; AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Cloud/Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, VPC, IAM, KMS, ACM, Route 53, ELB/ASG, Lambda, CloudFormation, RDS, OpenSearch, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect), Terraform, Go

Automation / Development: Python, Bash, JavaScript, SQL, Flask, Git, Linux, Ansible, Chef/Cinc

Networking / Security: TCP/IP, TLS, DNS, VPN, BGP, reverse proxies, PCI-DSS, SOC 2

Skills: Strategic Planning; Best-Practices Development; Cost-optimization; Shared Project Ownership; Internal Tooling and Automation; Efficient Data Structures

Languages: English, Spanish

Interests: Homelab Projects; Volkswagen/Audi; Music Production; D&D