Skip to content
Camron Lacy Shelton

§ 02About

Engineer by trade.
Writer by training.
Both — on purpose.

The bio

The longer story. Skim the timeline if you'd rather see the work.

I'm Camron Lacy Shelton — a platform engineer, technical communicator, and unrepentant student. The career started in the United States Navy as an Aviation Electronics Technician, and the discipline of that work — fix it right, document everything, never wing it — has stuck through every job since.

A decade and change of cloud and infrastructure work has spanned chemical manufacturing, home building, regional banking, and SaaS — most recently leading platform engineering at CXT Software. The shape of the work is consistent: stand up Azure-first platforms that don't break, build CI/CD that the team trusts, and make sure observability wakes up the right person at the right hour.

The other half is the writing. I finished a Master's in Technical Communication at Texas Tech in 2025 — research focus on rhetoric in health and medicine, especially how pharmaceutical companies frame GLP-1 drugs for diabetes care vs. weight loss. And I'm stacking another Master's in Computer Science on top of it because, apparently, I can't stop.

Language is infrastructure too. The words people read shape what they do — same as the systems we build for them.

On the side I run NxGen AI Labs — a small studio building three AI products: Veltoria (chat), NxResolve (autonomous operations remediation), and NxCode (multi-agent engineering).

§ 02.1Work history

A working timeline.

  1. CXT Software · Phoenix, AZ

    Lead / Senior DevOps & Platform Engineer

    2023 — 2026

    • ▪ Designed and operated Azure-first SaaS infrastructure — AKS, deployment safety, DR.
    • ▪ Built GitHub Actions + Blacksmith pipelines, cutting release cycles from 4 days → 2.
    • ▪ Standardized GitOps with ArgoCD and shared templates; reduced engineering toil ~40%.
    • ▪ Designed Grafana / Prometheus / Datadog / ELK alerting; cut MTTD ~60%.

  2. Herring National Bank · Amarillo, TX

    Development Manager → Chief Technology Officer

    2022 — 2023

    • ▪ Stabilized core services in a regulated banking environment; cleared a 2,300+ ticket backlog.
    • ▪ Migrated 30+ legacy Hyper-V hosts to VMware.
    • ▪ Strengthened Microsoft 365 + Entra ID governance with RBAC and audit posture.
    • ▪ Negotiated vendor + hosting contracts; cut annual spend 26%.

  3. Highland Homes · Dallas, TX

    Senior Infrastructure Engineer / Cloud Architect

    2021 — 2022

    • ▪ Owned Azure stack architecture across production and test platforms.
    • ▪ Migrated 50+ on-prem and Rackspace VMware workloads into Azure.
    • ▪ Generated ~$250K/yr cost savings through automation and right-sizing.

  4. Smart Chemical Solutions · Amarillo, TX

    Lead Infrastructure Engineer / Asst. Director of IT

    2016 — 2021

    • ▪ Engineered hybrid Azure / AWS / GCP architecture supporting 50+ critical workloads.
    • ▪ Integrated Tailscale mesh VPN + IPsec across 12 locations; cut remote-access incidents 40%.
    • ▪ Formalized server hardening and patch compliance for 200+ endpoints.

  5. United States Navy · Active duty

    Aviation Electronics Technician

    1999 — 2002

    • ▪ Maintained mission-critical avionics and electronic assemblies.
    • ▪ Completed officer leadership training; foundation in disciplined execution and accountability.

§ 02.2Education

One in motion. Several already framed.

  • Master of Science — Computer Science

    In progress

    Texas Tech University · Lubbock, TX

    In progress · expected Dec 2026

  • Master of Arts — Technical Communication

    Texas Tech University · Lubbock, TX

    Dec 2025

  • Bachelor of Arts — General Studies

    Texas Tech University · Lubbock, TX

    Dec 2021

  • Associate of Science — Psychology

    Amarillo College · Amarillo, TX

    Jun 2020 · with Honors

  • Associate of Arts — English

    Amarillo College · Amarillo, TX

    May 2020 · with Honors

  • Associate of Applied Science — General Studies

    Amarillo College · Amarillo, TX

    Jul 2019

  • Bachelor of Science — Software Engineering

    West Texas A&M University · Canyon, TX

    Dec 2013

  • Associate of Science — Nursing

    Amarillo College · Amarillo, TX

    Dec 2012

Both Master's degrees are from Texas Tech. Guns up.

§ 02.3Certifications

Credentialed where it counts.

  • AZ-305 Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
  • AI-102 Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate
  • AZ-900 Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
  • — Emergency Medical Technician

§ 02.4Stack

What I reach for.

Cloud

Microsoft Azure · AWS · GCP · VMware · Hybrid Cloud

Platform

AKS / Kubernetes · Docker · Helm · ArgoCD · GitOps

IaC & CI/CD

Terraform · Bicep / ARM · Ansible · GitHub Actions · Azure DevOps · PowerShell

Observability

Datadog · Grafana · Prometheus · ELK · New Relic · SLO/SLA

Security & ID

Entra ID · Active Directory · CrowdStrike · Defender · RBAC · MFA · SOC 2 readiness

AI / Data

Azure AI Foundry · Azure OpenAI · RAG · MCP Servers · FastAPI · Ollama

Languages

Python · TypeScript · C# · JavaScript · PowerShell · Bash · SQL · C++