Alfred Cazares

About

I take things apart and make them work. That has meant aircraft, then cloud systems, and now mostly whatever I decide is worth building.

I enlisted at eighteen and spent four years as a helicopter mechanic on HH-60H and SH-60F Seahawks — hydraulics, avionics, powerplants, flight controls — and qualified as an aircraft handler and director, moving aircraft on flight lines and ship decks.

That is where I learned how I think about systems, and I have never really stopped applying it. On an aircraft, it works right now and it is safe to hand to someone else are two different claims, and only the second one counts. Something nobody can safely maintain at three in the morning is not finished, however elegant the design is.

Afterwards I came home to El Paso, worked IT support while going back to school, and finished a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics — moving into cloud work partway through, before the diploma arrived. The decade since has been spent largely on the architecture side: working out what should get built, how it should be secured, and what it will actually cost to run.

What I am doing now

Building. The advisory work was genuinely interesting, but the part I keep coming back to is having my own hands on the thing — carrying something from an idea through architecture, implementation, infrastructure, and deploy, and then living with the consequences of my own decisions.

What I build tends to be for someone specific rather than for a portfolio. A site that has tracked my son's baseball and swim seasons for years. A storefront for a real business with real compliance obligations. A QR code hidden inside a 3D scene, because the geometry turned out to be more interesting than I expected. An agent that manages my own files and inbox, built around a safety layer because I was not willing to let a model loose on my actual data without one.

The through-line is the same one from the flight line: understand the system properly, decide where the trust boundaries go, and build it so it still makes sense to whoever touches it next. Tooling has made the distance between an idea and a running system much shorter, and I lean on that hard — but it does not decide what is worth building or what happens when it fails. That part is still the job.

Everything I am working on is on the shelf. Some of it is deployed and in daily use, some is half-finished, some has sat untouched for years. Anything with a link, you can open.

Where I have worked

Context rather than identity, but people ask.

Rackspace Private Cloud

May 2022 — Jul 2026

Senior Solution Architect · Remote

  • Led technical strategy across AWS and private cloud managed services.
  • Architected secure, scalable solutions for enterprise workloads.
  • Owned discovery, architecture design, migration planning, and operational readiness for customer workloads.

Amazon Web Services

Mar 2018 — Apr 2022

Solution Architect · Seattle, WA

  • Led technical architecture for enterprise and startup customers — modernization, cost optimization, operational excellence.
  • Owned long-term technical strategy for key accounts, turning business objectives into scalable architectures.
  • Ran architecture reviews, migration assessments, and hands-on design sessions across security, networking, automation, and cost governance.

Dyonyx

Nov 2016 — Feb 2018

I.T. Intern · El Paso, TX

  • Tier 2 support for desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.
  • Maintained workstation and mobile configurations to organizational standards.
  • Applied security practices to network and endpoint design alongside security specialists.

United States Navy

Aug 2006 — Aug 2010

Helicopter Mechanic · San Diego, CA

  • Maintenance, inspection, and troubleshooting on HH-60H and SH-60F Seahawk helicopters.
  • Serviced hydraulics, avionics, powerplants, and flight control systems.
  • Qualified aircraft handler and director — launch, recovery, taxi, and repositioning on flight lines and ship decks.

Certifications

AWS Solutions Architect – ProfessionalAWS Solutions Architect – AssociateAWS Security – SpecialtyAWS Developer – AssociateAWS SysOps Administrator – AssociateAWS Cloud Practitioner

Education

University of Texas at El Paso — BS, Computer Science and Mathematics (Dec 2018)
El Paso Community College — AA (May 2015)

What I am after

Work where deciding the approach and building it are the same job. I am most useful at the seam between application code and the infrastructure it runs on — the place where a design decision and an operational consequence turn out to be the same decision — and I would rather be somewhere that wants someone to own a problem end to end than to hand it across a boundary.

Get in touch

Email is best: Alfred.Cazares@gmail.com. Code is on GitHub.

A few projects here are private — client work, or things carrying personal data. Happy to walk through any of them in detail on a call.

Resume available on request. Ask by email and I will send the current PDF. It is not posted here because it carries a phone number, and this page is public.