team

About Us

Crafty Penguins, established in 1994, is a leader in Linux consulting and server support, driven by a passion for technology and a commitment to excellence. With over two decades of experience, our team offers expert IT solutions to a diverse range of clients.

We tailor our services to meet specific needs, ensuring solutions are effective and aligned with your goals. This client-centric approach, coupled with our in-depth expertise, positions us as not just service providers, but committed IT partners.

Our Core Values

We earn your trust

We consider ourselves a part of your team and care about your project as much as you do. We listen to you carefully, ask questions, follow through with our promises and keep our work transparent to help you navigate technology even if you may not fully understand how it works.

We lean into challenges

We aren’t afraid of bruising our egos, and we’ll admit that it’s a difficult task or an unknown component if we encounter one. We are happy to learn, seek other perspectives, and lean on experience and knowledge of others to help you run your business more efficiently.

We look at the bigger picture

We are your competent partner who not just puts out occasional fires but who is familiar with your IT landscape and sees the bigger picture. To provide you with solutions that last and scale, we consider internal relationships, context, market, industry and impact on other systems.

We constantly improve

We always try to be better today than yesterday. For example, we make incremental improvements to your documentation and automatic monitoring systems or remove redundant items that don’t help you. And we share new knowledge and experience within our team to help every member grow.

MEET OUR TEAM

Chris Pickett

Chris Pickett

President – Crafty Penguins/ CFO

Chris has 28 years of experience with Linux and DevOps. His experience in business matched with his technical knowledge puts Crafty Penguins in a unique position to provide sound advice and guidance for client infrastructures. He specializes in building microservice container infrastructures, bare metal to cloud computing migrations, and custom tool and integration development.

Richard Clark

Richard Clark

VP – Engineering/ CIO

Richard has 35 years of experience with systems administration and software engineering in the Linux ecosystem. He specializes in DevOps, automation, systems architecture, training and frugal clean-up of technical debt. He has been using deploying and managing Linux environments in production since the mid 90s. With CKA and CKAD certifications, he is a strong proponent of the Kubernetes platform for container management due to its elegance and scope.

Curtis Hildebrand

Curtis Hildebrand

Linux Systems Engineer/ Team Lead

Curtis has 20 years of experience deploying and securing Linux systems and 6 years of experience in DevOps engineering. He specializes in system audits for security, stabilization, and migration of infrastructure due to system growth.

Kevin Chee

Kevin Chee

Linux Systems Engineer/ Team Lead

Kevin, who is a Certified Kubernetes Administrator, has over 5 years of experience in Linux server administration in a variety of areas such as DevOps, containerization, and automation. He has an interest in evolving his automation and DevOps skills.

Mike Millman

Mike Millman

Linux Systems Engineer/ Team Lead

Mike has been working with Linux systems for over 25 years, with experience in development, systems engineering, administration, and testing. His specialties include microservices, cloud operations, containerization, and web technologies. He first discovered Linux in the 90's, and has been a staunch supporter and advocate ever since.

Nicole Mcfarlane

Nicole Mcfarlane

Sr. Linux Systems Engineer

Nicole has 10 years of experience with Linux, software engineering, and DevOps. She specializes in monitoring, metrics, and alerting, as well as our proprietary security automation systems of Crafty Penguins we use for all our clients.

Nishan Vivekanandan

Nishan Vivekanandan

Linux Systems Engineer

Nishan has over 8 years of Linux and DevOps experience in Cloud Operations support as well as retail software development. He has a keen interest in all things DevOps. His astute sense of reasoning helps him get to the core of an issue and resolve it quickly.

Jordan Dohms

Jordan Dohms

Linux Systems Engineer

Over 15 years of experience in Linux server administration in a variety of environments. Jordan contributes with his existing skill set in web technologies, application integration, and troubleshooting, while continuing to evolve his DevOps and security abilities.

Alan Bailward

Alan Bailward

Linux Systems Engineer

Alan has been working in the IT industry for 25 years, and has experience in system engineering, development, system administration and technical support. He specializes in linux system engineering, which has been his love since he discovered Linux in the early 2000s.

Conner Saunders

Conner Saunders

Linux Systems Specialist

Conner has been a Systems Administrator for 15 years; with a focus on Networking and Linux. His passion for Linux and System administration came from a need for a multiplayer Minecraft server during college. To this day, the administration of the server is more fun than the game itself.

Shayan Delavarkhan

Shayan Delavarkhan

Linux Systems Specialist

Shayan is a CKA and CKD-certified DevOps professional with 5 years of experience in Linux server administration on Debian-based systems. He specializes in container orchestration, infrastructure as code, automation (using tools like Salt and Terraform), and system monitoring. Shayan is passionate about streamlining deployments and advancing his skills in cloud-native technologies.

John Morrison

John Morrison

Linux Systems Specialist

Neal Lantela

Neal Lantela

Linux Systems Specialist

Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

Linux Systems Specialist

Johnny Borges

Johnny Borges

Linux Systems Specialist