John Plesner
Software Engineer | Platform & Systems
- xxx-xxx-xxxx
- john@plesner.ca
- www.plesner.ca
- Toronto, ON.
Software engineer with 10 years of experience building internal tools, backend services, and cloud-hosted applications. Strong background in C#, .NET, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, SQL, and modern web stacks. Known for taking ownership of complex systems end-to-end and improving engineering workflows across application, infrastructure, and delivery boundaries.
Professional Experience
DevOps / Site Reliability Engineer
- Transitioned into a DevOps / SRE role to stabilize infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment processes across the company.
- Reduced CI build times by 60% by rebuilding VM images with Packer, moving infrastructure into Terraform, and improving agent scale-out behavior
- Reduced Azure spend by auditing unused resources, implementing service and budget alerts, and building Azure Workbooks to expose high-cost logging patterns.
- Rebuilt Octopus Deploy into a reliable deployment system for site-specific releases, including automated certificate and secure service-communication deployment steps
- Replaced unreliable MSIX-based deployments and Dockerized on-site services to reduce configuration drift, simplify testing, and improve release consistency.
Software Developer
- Took long-term technical responsibility for a business-critical internal operations platform supporting inventory, maintenance workflows, and operational visibility across multiple sites.
- Developed and maintained a multi-service internal platform built with Vue, C#, .NET, Azure App Services, Azure SQL, Service Bus, and Function Apps, supporting internal web and CLI tooling.
- Containerized a multi-service internal platform and delivered a Kubernetes-ready deployment in Azure using Docker Compose, Helm, Redis, Kubernetes secrets, and supporting certificate infrastructure.
- Contributed to a high-risk rewrite of core on-site services, helping migrate functionality from a fragile monolith to a service-oriented architecture using gRPC and event-driven messaging.
- Reworked a Blazor-based operational UI to improve performance, maintainability, and developer productivity through clearer implementation patterns.
Senior Product Software Engineer
- Took de facto ownership of a revenue-generating Magento e-commerce platform supporting purchases and subscriptions in US and Canadian markets.
- Developed and maintained integrations between Magento, a legacy .NET / Oracle ordermanagement system, and third-party services including DocuSign and Salesforce to support feature delivery and operational continuity.
- Replaced manual deployment processes with Azure DevOps pipelines and helped expand modern delivery practices across other projects.
- Dockerized the Magento development environment, replacing opaque shared VM images with a reproducible local setup that improved onboarding and developer consistency