Max J Espinoza
My Personal Page
About Me
I am a Tech Lead and Platform Architect at Viasat, where I lead a team building application platforms. Over the years I’ve worked across the stack—Ansible, Jenkins, AWS, Kubernetes, Istio, Cilium, and the broader cloud-native ecosystem.
I enjoy the challenge of making complex infrastructure feel simple. Good platform work means developers spend less time fighting tooling and more time building. I also have a soft spot for debugging gnarly issues in distributed systems—there’s something satisfying about tracing a problem through the networking and application layers.
In general I love learning about history, from the antics of the Gracchi Brothers of Ancient Rome to how bulky vacuum tube transistors came to be 50 atoms across. I believe to understand where we are going, knowing how we got here is key.
That said, if you have any good history-tech related reads please send them my way! 😉
Other tidbits:
- I’m into bouldering (rock climbing but on boulders instead of cliff sides)
- Simple black coffee is my signature drink
- I have an ever-growing collection of indoor plants
More details on my prior work experience can be found on my resume.
Talks
KubeCon 2025 - There Is No Silver Bullet: The Complexities of Building IDPs
Blog
I find myself in some niche stuff with a lack of human-friendly docs. This blog is my attempt at giving back by providing quick, high-level, visual guidance on configuring some of those newer technologies.
Research
In a past life I did research in the Computer Graphics Lab at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. There I developed a novel online architectural sketching interface for daylighting simulation, as well as experimented with wave/particle simulations for architectural acoustics prototyping.