New Cert! AI for Organizational Leaders — Microsoft, 2026

I'm Pete Fraedrich.

A technology leader with 15+ years across software development, developer tooling, reliability, and infrastructure.

Portrait of Pete Fraedrich

By the numbers

A track record of measurable impact.

11
Years from entry-level to Vice President
$4M+
Annual cloud cost savings realized
+30%
Average team velocity improvement
+3%
Average annual uptime improvement
<1%
Team turnover rate

About

Building high-performing teams and durable systems.

I bring experience across multiple verticals — SaaS, fintech, healthcare, and hospitality — but I'm always open to jumping into something new. I'd love the opportunity to dive into HPC, developer tooling, B2B SaaS, and anything relating to SPACE.

Outside of work I'm an avid writer, sharing my thoughts on technology on my Medium blog. I mix, master, write, and record music, and I occasionally build guitars.

I reside in Herndon, VA with my amazing wife and three wacky kids.

Based in Herndon, Virginia
Experience 15+ years in technology
Currently Seeking CTO, CIO, VP, Senior Director roles
Ideal Verticals Space, HPC, Developer Tooling, B2B SaaS

I've built and led teams across the full breadth of engineering and operations — from software delivery to the network floor.

Software Development Platform Engineering Cloud (Public / Private) DevOps SRE Security IT NOC

Areas of expertise

Where I create leverage.

People Management

Growing engineers and building teams that ship — with <1% turnover.

Strategic Planning

Turning multi-year vision into roadmaps teams can actually execute.

Systems Architecture

Designing software and infrastructure that scales and stays maintainable.

Developer Experience

Tooling and platforms that make the right thing the easy thing.

Leadership philosophy

How I lead.

01

Ownership Without Permission

State your intent and ask for input — don't ask me for permission to do your job. I'll give you the context to make good calls and the room to make them. Failure that comes from a well-reasoned decision is a learning opportunity; failure that comes from waiting to be told what to do is a management problem I need to fix.

02

Direct, Private, Timely

I'll never share publicly what we haven't discussed privately. When something needs correcting, it happens in a one-on-one, close to the event, with a plan. Public praise, private correction — always, without exception.

03

Coach, Don't Criticize

Correction should come with a path forward, not just a verdict. If I'm pointing out something you did wrong, I'm also telling you what “right” looks like, why it matters, and what I'll do to help you get there. If I can't do that, I haven't thought about it hard enough yet.

04

Trust Comes Standard

You don't need permission to take your kid to the doctor, leave early for a school pickup, or block off time to think. If you're reachable and your team knows where you are, I trust you to manage your own time. After-hours messages wait until tomorrow unless they're marked otherwise. Time isn't the metric; output is.

05

Invest 20%

I expect you to spend roughly a fifth of your time on things that make you better — side projects, self-directed learning, reading, writing, or exploring adjacent domains. This isn't a perk. It's how you stay sharp, how the team stays ahead, and how I ensure the people who work with me keep growing whether they stay on my team or eventually move on.

06

The Buck Stops With Me

I own my team's failures the same way I celebrate their successes. If leadership needs to know something went wrong, I'm the one who tells them, and I'm the one whose name is on the fix. Your job is to do the work well; my job is to defend the conditions that let you do it.

Career highlights

Selected work.

Agentic Vulnerability Monitoring

Porttech

Developed AI agents in Copilot Studio to ingest, triage, track, and disseminate real-time CVE feeds from the National Vulnerability Database. Agentic AI filtered, gauged CVE impact, and compiled multiple similar CVEs into comprehensive reporting packages.

AI Skill Development

Thrive Market

Developed branching and delegation Claude skills as part of a larger SRE-focused incident triage pipeline.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Cendyn

Reduced public cloud expenditure by $1.3M annually through resource rightsizing, decommissioning stale resources, CSP and third-party recommendations, application re-architecture, and realistic data lifecycle policies.

Cloud Migration Strategy

Cendyn

Built and began executing a 5-year consolidation from seven cloud providers to two (AWS & Azure), migrating core AWS infrastructure to Terraform for IaC — targeting a net 5% cost reduction and far more manageable infrastructure.

Increased Global Product Uptime

Cendyn

With a strong focus on reliability, observability, and automation, increased product uptime by 3% annually — roughly 12 additional days of availability each year.

Team Process Improvement

Ally Financial

Increased team velocity by 27% by spearheading Agile-inspired processes in the SRE organization, lifting team morale and execution on strategic goals.

Incident Duration Reduction

Ally Financial

Reduced incident duration by 2% month-over-month through better application observability, production readiness, and post-incident Root Cause Analysis.

CI/CD Rearchitecture

ID.me

Cut build and deploy times by 30% and removed manual steps by designing and deploying a net-new CI/CD system focused on containerization, pipeline reusability, and end-to-end automated deploy and rollback.

Skills & certifications

Credentials and toolkit.

Certifications

Certified Cloud Practitioner AWS
DevOps Professional PagerDuty
IT Leadership Professional ServiceNow
Agile Project Management Professional Atlassian
AI for Organizational Leaders Microsoft

Technical skills

Languages · Go, Python, JavaScript, Shell
Containers · Docker, Kubernetes, Nomad
Automation & IaC · Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, CDK
Databases · PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, DynamoDB, ClickHouse
Cloud Providers · AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean, Linode
AI · Agentic Workflows, Skill Authoring, Governance & Oversight

Work with me

Let's talk.

Full-Time Roles

Seeking technical leadership positions at the Director+ level (ideally VP or C-level).

  • CTO / CIO
  • VP of Engineering / Platform
  • Director of Engineering
Email me

Thought Leadership

Not sure what to do next or how to improve your organization? I can help.

  • Zoom consultations
  • Short-term engagements
  • Technical advice & discussion
Email me

Public Speaking

Book me for your next all-hands, team offsite, conference, or special event.

  • People-first leadership
  • Distributed management
  • …or a topic of your choosing
Email me