Thomas Houston

I'm a Senior Support Engineer with 25 years of professional IT experience and an MS in Computer Information Systems and Security. I spent nearly seven years at GitLab, joining when the company had around 500 employees and staying through the 2021 NYSE listing. During that time I became one of three US-based engineers who owned the licensing and entitlement function. It was work that most engineers on the team avoided because it required deep knowledge of internal tooling and purchasing complexity that wasn't documented anywhere. There were no runbooks. I handled it anyway and wrote the documentation so the next person wouldn't have to figure it out from scratch. My background before GitLab includes four and a half years at Rackspace working through SMB, Enterprise, and Strategic customer tiers on managed Linux infrastructure, and seven years at AmeriPath where I was the primary IT presence across laboratory sites in Texas and Arizona. I hold an RHCSA and have administered Linux in production environments for most of my career. I maintained a 100% customer satisfaction rating in 2026 and consistently high-90s before that. Outside of work I run an active homelab with a local LLM stack, self-hosted services behind a reverse proxy with wildcard TLS, and a GPU-accelerated transcoding node. I don't stop learning when the workday ends. I'm looking for a fully remote Senior Support Engineer role where I can own complex problems, work autonomously, and bring real depth to the team. I'm available now and have been working remotely since 2019.