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Paul Abrams
Software Engineer
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DevOps & Cloud

Infrastructure automation, CI/CD pipeline design, and cloud enablement across Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and enterprise environments. A recurring theme: modernizing release engineering by deleting over-engineered tooling — replacing UI-driven release apps and contractor-built process wrappers with lightweight scripted alternatives that teams can read, version, and own.

CI/CD Pipeline Architecture (BDM)

Implemented CI/CD pipelines in Azure DevOps for the Benefits Delivery Modernization project at ESDC — one of the largest IT modernization efforts in the Government of Canada.

Designed build, test, and cloud deployment pipelines. Supported and advised multiple teams on pipeline implementation and management. Ensured pipelines met ITSG-33 (NIST-based) security controls for SA&A submissions against a PBMM security profile.

Technologies & tools
Azure DevOps Pipelines
YAML
PowerShell
CI/CD
Azure

Azure DevOps Services Administration

Administered Azure DevOps for application teams across multiple Government of Canada departments. Beyond day-to-day administration, the role spanned process design, drift detection, dashboards, and onboarding.

  • Migrated multiple application teams from on-premises Azure DevOps Server to cloud-based Azure DevOps Services, including process-template translation and pipeline migration.
  • Advised on custom Agile, Scrum, and CMMI process templates and on branching strategies; designed pull request workflows and code review practices that fit each team’s release cadence.
  • Managed cross-project and cross-organization credential, identity, and secret management - Entra/Azure AD app registrations, Key Vault, managed identities, service connections.
  • Built PowerShell tooling against the Azure DevOps REST API to inventory area paths, iteration paths, security configurations, and other org-level state, and to commit those snapshots into source control on a schedule. This served as a stopgap configuration-drift detector for state that could only be edited via the UI, and made unintended changes visible the next time a PR opened against the inventory repo.
  • Provisioned capacity-planning and forecasting dashboards (sprint burnup/burndown, lead/cycle time, velocity) and mentored teams on building and maintaining their own, including connecting Power BI to ADO Analytics for richer reporting.
  • Onboarded new application teams onto shared infrastructure as a continuing internal service, and led demos and walkthroughs for junior developers on Azure and on the team’s Azure DevOps tooling.
  • Maintained accessibility compliance aligned with departmental standards (WCAG).
Technologies & tools
Azure DevOps
PowerShell
REST APIs
Power BI
Agile Process Templates
Git
WCAG
Scrum

CI/CD Modernization (CIC)

Hired alongside one other engineer at the Department of Citizenship and Immigration to take over a TFS/release-management environment that had been built and maintained by a contractor team. The environment was over-engineered: release engineers were clicking through custom desktop UIs every release night, and the GCMS team’s process template was being maintained as raw XML deployed via witadmin.exe through a layer of contractor-built tooling rife with technical debt and unnecessary developer-facing features.

  • Decommissioned the legacy C# desktop applications used for release management and replaced them with lightweight PowerShell scripts calling the TFS Client APIs and witadmin directly. Net result: most of the contractor tooling was simply deleted.
  • Guided teams in migrating from legacy XAML builds to modern, scriptable build definitions.
  • Improved build reliability and maintainability across the organization.
  • Wrote runbooks for TFS instance operation, maintenance, and troubleshooting so the work could be handed off cleanly.
  • Mentored a junior team member on SSRS, T-SQL, and reports development as part of the broader handover.
  • Worked under the constraint of an IE8-mandated environment well into the mid-2010s, which forced backward-compat work on Team Calendar and other extensions used in the department.
Technologies & tools
TFS
PowerShell
CI/CD
XAML Builds
TFS Client APIs
witadmin

Portfolio Site & GitHub Pages

This portfolio site itself — built with Astro and deployed via GitHub Pages with CI/CD. Source code is available on GitHub.

Technologies & tools
Astro
TypeScript
GitHub Actions
HTML/CSS