Sam Begin

CS & Economics @ RPI | SRE Intern @ Cisco Meraki

About

Computer Science and Economics student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Class of 2026) with experience in site reliability engineering, distributed systems, and cloud-native infrastructure. Skilled in Python, C++, Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability tools, with a passion for building scalable systems and contributing to open-source projects.

Work Experience

Cisco Meraki
SRE
Distributed Systems
Cloud

Jun. - Aug. 2025

Site Reliability Engineer Intern

Developed async generative AI tool to improve on-call shift handovers, decreasing time by 80%.

Built scalable backend infrastructure supporting 10B+ daily requests
Engineered monitoring, deployment, and reliability systems
Collaborated across teams on post-mortems and root-cause analysis

SRE
Distributed Systems
Cloud

Linux Foundation – Istio Service Mesh
Open Source
JavaScript
Hugo

Mar. - May 2025

Software Engineer Intern

Redesigned istio.io using JavaScript and Hugo to separate evergreen and versioned content.

Archived full site releases for clean version switching
Improved clarity and maintainability for developers worldwide

Open Source
JavaScript
Hugo

Rensselaer Center for Open Source
Mentorship
Cloud Native
Cilium

Jan. - Dec. 2024

Student Mentor

Mentored students on open-source projects and contributed to Cilium CNI.

Reviewed and graded 30+ projects, guided 20+ students
Developed CNI Test Suite for optimization and testing
Spoke at Cloud Native Security Con 2024

Mentorship
Cloud Native
Cilium

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

2022 - 2026

B.S. Computer Science, Economics

Skills

Python
C++
C
Java
Bash
Kubernetes
Terraform
AWS
Grafana
Prometheus
Helm
ElasticStack
CI/CD
Linux/Unix

Side projects

eBPF Anomaly Detection in Encrypted Traffic

Researched detecting anomalies in high-volume encrypted network traffic using eBPF. Compared with conventional IDS (Snort, Suricata, Zeek).

C
Python
Ubuntu
IDS Tools

Cilium Container Network Interface

Led team contributing to Cilium CNI, developing a Test Suite for optimization and testing of networking parameters.

Kubernetes
Azure
Terraform
Prometheus
Grafana

Sam Begin's Resume