Chris Clewell

Background

About Chris Clewell

I've spent the last 6 years building at the intersection of cloud infrastructure, identity security, and automation — and I'm most energized when those three things have to work together.At Openly, I build and maintain automation pipelines, design CI/CD workflows that eliminate security risks and support scalable resource management. My work centers around developing Python and GCP-based tooling that replaces manual processes at scale while also helping mature our identity security posture. Most recently I designed and deployed a production AI agent for our People & Culture team — a RAG-based Slack chatbot built on n8n, Gemini, and Pinecone that consolidates scattered policy documentation into a single conversational interface, targeting 50%+ deflection of HR tickets by enabling employees to self-serve policy questions before opening one. The system generates AI-optimized Jira tickets for inquiries that do require human follow-up and includes a user-initiated feedback loop to surface edge cases and drive continuous improvement. Security isn't a separate concern in my work — I treat every configuration decision as a potential attack surface and document risk and hardening steps as standard practice. My background in AWS has also allowed me to step in and contribute across cloud environments where needed, giving me flexibility across GCP and AWS ecosystems.Before Openly, I spent four years at Red Canary, a company built around stopping breaches. Working alongside SOC teams, participating in incident response, and leading the company's endpoint hardening initiative using CIS Security Guidelines gave me a perspective most IT engineers don't get — a front-row seat to what happens when infrastructure and security aren't built together from the start.My core expertise spans Terraform, Okta, OIDC, Python, GCP, AWS, Jamf, and SCIM — but what I care about most is building systems that are resilient, scalable, and secure by design. I'm also actively following and building in the AI security space, particularly around identity flows and emerging attack surfaces in agentic systems.I believe the best infrastructure work is invisible — things just work, safely, at scale, without getting in anyone's way.