Aaron Summers

Senior UNIX Engineer & Independent Systems / AI Consultant

Winter Park, FL · $56.00/hr · Top Rated on Upwork

$400K+
Total Earnings
150
Jobs Completed
12,947
Hours Logged
100%
Job Success

Experience

Independent Systems & AI Consultant

April 2009 – Present

High-end cloud architecture, server tuning, critical-incident recovery, and modern data engineering for global clients. 140+ Upwork engagements with a perfect 5.0/5.0 feedback rating.

AI Data Pipeline & Serverless Warehousing (2025–2026)

  • Engineered a serverless data catalog pipeline (Python, BeautifulSoup, requests) to scrape, parse, and clean investigative articles.
  • Structured extracted data into Apache Parquet tables, deployed to Hugging Face Datasets for serverless hosting.
  • Built an interactive search/query dashboard in Gradio, with custom DNS (ALIAS/CNAME) records to serve the app securely on DigitalOcean.

Cloud Infrastructure & Migrations (AWS EC2 / VPS)

  • Architected high-availability Linux cloud servers (WHM/cPanel, Concrete5 CMS, optimized PHP).
  • Migrated legacy dedicated servers to scalable VPS environments (CentOS/RHEL).

Critical System Recovery & Administration

  • Resolved emergency outages: JBOSS crashes, Plesk/cPanel conflicts, RAID recovery on FreeBSD.
  • Configured Snort IDS and hardened network boundaries.

UNIX Engineer — E Solutions Corporation

March 2008 – April 2009

Supported a Tier-1 collocation facility; administered OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux, and Windows daily. Resolved network/host security vulnerabilities and stabilized the bandwidth billing system.

UNIX System Engineer — Hilton Grand Vacations (HGVC)

November 2006 – March 2008

Single onsite operations lead for HP-UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, macOS X, and Linux. Designed a custom Enterprise Data Warehouse (RHEL, IBM Information Server, Sun N1). Built the company's external web presence on Solaris 10 (Sun T2000, Zones, ZFS, hardware RAID). Authored automation tooling in Perl, C, and Bourne shell.

UNIX Administrator — Vortech, Inc.

2004 – 2006

UNIX Administration & Support — Magna Computer Corp

September 2003 – May 2004

UNIX System Administrator & Network Engineer — Independent Consultant

November 2001 – July 2003

Implemented OpenBSD/Linux/Windows servers in colocation centers; built web app servers from scratch (Apache, Perl, PHP, MySQL); wrote terminal utilities in C/ncurses/GTK/X11.

Second Level Support — Jobwarehouse

May 2001 – September 2001

Education

  • Valencia Community College — Computer Science & Systems Study (1996–1998, 2000–2002)
  • Winter Park High School — Gifted Academic Program (1992–1996)

Core Skills

System Administration Apache HTTP Server CentOS System Monitoring Linux Amazon EC2 Snort FreeBSD Unix Shell Iptables Network Security OpenBSD Virtualization Linux System Administration MySQL

Published Portfolio

Cold War Erosion Simulation

Published portfolio project.

ircII Gemma Prompt Sandbox Node

Published portfolio project.

Running a Self-Contained LLM for Less Than $10 a Month

Published portfolio project.

Recent Completed Jobs (sample)

JobRatingEarnedRateHours
System administrator5.0$1,086.17$49.00/hr22 hrs
Build Server to Support ISP system software$12,911.55$49.00/hr264 hrs
Server Administrator5.0$1,500.00$30.00/hr50 hrs
Malware removal from Laravel website and server$130.66$49.00/hr3 hrs
Server move from RackSpace$80,275.00$50.00/hr1,606 hrs
Aruba$2,025.34$49.00/hr41 hrs
Experienced Linux Sysadmin: Update, Security Audit, SSL$375.67$49.00/hr8 hrs
Britnet social network fix5.0$100.00Fixed price
Need DNS expert to track query path5.0$49.00$49.00/hr1 hr
install SSL certificate ssh access5.0$40.83$49.00/hr1 hr

Testimonial

"Aaron is a very good systems engineer for Linux, UNIX and Windows. He has an in depth understanding of system internals. I found him to be an honorable man that stands behind his word and keeps on track of the project. He would make a good supervisor in any company." — Shelton R., Sr. IT Consultant / DB2 DBA Expert, Xtivia (worked directly with Aaron at HGVC)

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