About Me

Who the heck is Dan Manners

Dan Manners grew up in Westchester, NY. Between 2010 and 2014, he worked for Production Resource Group as a Systems Administrator I/II locally in their New Jersey, New York, and Los Angeles Offices. While there, he focused on learning and understanding how users need to operate and how to optimize workflows and backend resources to better assist his end users. In addition to this, he learned a great deal about Cisco VoIP, Layer 3 Networking, Desktop and Server deployment, and how to translate "Beep-Boop" to human-speak. While this may sound silly, this allowed Dan to clearly communicate with many of the higher-level executives and managers.

In mid 2014, he left PRG for TOURtech. TOURtech offered a new array of challenges, and he went from supporting several smaller offices and (roughly) 3,000 global users to temporarily supporting networks for events like music festivals, concert tours, corporate tradeshows, and product launches that could handle upwards of 30,000 wired and wireless clients. The networks would be deployed for services like Point-of-Sales systems, Access Control, CCTV, Guest Services, Sponsorship booths, and public and private wifi.

At the beginning of 2017, Dan began working with BrainGu. While it may be considered a radical shift from his experience with PRG and TOURtech, this was a brand new style of challenge. Most of what he has worked on is either under strict NDA or classified, but what he CAN talk about is Structsure. During his work on Structsure, he primarily focused on learning what good and bad DevOps workflows look like.

Then in March of 2019, he re-joined TOURtech as the Senior Network Engineer, specializing in systems and design. He worked on designing and rolling out comprehensive monitoring tools, automated tooling to allow rapid configuration and deployment, and made sure that every TOURtech network ties its management back to the home office for remote support and management. During his time with TOURtech the second time around, his big claim-to-fame was designing the network architecture for a cellular carrier's 4G to WiFi offload for roughly 11,000 concurrent devices at a major sporting event. Unfortunately a year to the day after joining again mid-COVID-19 crisis, he was laid off.

Only a few days later, he was fortunate enough to be introduced to TEKsystems and was hired as a DevOps Engineer for Cisco! As a Cisco contractor, he was working on building automation tooling and pipelines to securely deploy and simplify code and package sharing between several internal services and partner locations in zero-trust environments.

In May 2021, he was converted to a full time employee. Over the next several years as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Dan designed and implemented hyperscale on-premises Kubernetes via OpenStack, Cluster API, and Talos Linux to provide elastic compute for secure build environments. He enabled GitHub Actions for all of Cisco Engineering, built supply-chain security controls and a hardened runner image, and deployed an SSDF-compliant workflow logging solution in under 45 days. He also designed idempotent, GitOps-driven infrastructure in AWS at global scale — cutting new-region provisioning from days to an hour and service upgrades from hours to minutes — while mentoring junior engineers on cloud-native challenges.

In December 2025, Dan left Cisco and joined CentralReach in 2026 as a Principal Architect. There he is the so-called "One Man Army" — the dedicated platform, SRE, DevSecOps, and network engineer for the organization. He designs and operates AWS cloud-native infrastructure and Kubernetes end-to-end, builds AI-friendly and agentic workflows into engineering practices, and mentors the team on security and platform best practices.

Throughout his career spanning nearly two decades, Dan has had one constant motto: "Be good, do others good, and don't be a dick." While a bit forward, it translates well to all facets of life.

What's Dan been working on?

These days Dan is focused on AWS Cloud, Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure, and DevSecOps. He's been building AI-friendly and agentic workflows into engineering practices, and spending a lot of time mentoring engineers on cloud-native architecture and security. He's an active member of the Kubernetes and platform engineering communities — you'll often find him at KubeCon.

In his personal time, he's been homelabbing with baremetal Kubernetes, Talos, and a growing pile of networking gear.