Aaron Dershem
— Principal Software Engineer
I'm drawn to the problems people have written off, the ones that have been stuck for years because they're a pain and nobody owns them. I dig in, figure out how it actually works, and pin down what's actually required to solve it. Twenty-plus years across systems and software, building things that last.
Two decades of building
Once I'm into something, I tend to go all the way in. I learn it properly, build it to last, and stay with it long after the hard part is done, which is how I've ended up owning systems for years that whole teams came to rely on. For most of my career I've also been the senior engineer other people came to when they were stuck.
I spent nearly 19 years at Blackbaud, the last 11 as a Principal Software Engineer, across three teams: internal tools (2015–2022), internal security automation (2022–2024), and cloud governance / FinOps (2024–2026).
I architected BBMon, an internal ASP.NET Core / Angular URL-monitoring platform that replaced a $200K+/yr commercial tool and grew to 6,000+ URLs checked every five minutes across four products. For seven years I also owned an inherited, engineering-wide access-request platform, a primary source of audit evidence for PCI compliance. When it was finally retired, I ran the four-week, executive-mandated cutover as the single technical point of contact, with zero downtime and no compliance gaps.
More recently, I led a two-year enterprise cloud governance effort spanning roughly 110 Azure subscriptions and 60 AWS accounts. That meant driving a 20-person committee to make tagging the source of truth for security audits and FinOps, and building the Qlik dashboards and gap-analysis tooling that surfaced inconsistencies across Azure, AWS, and the ServiceNow CMDB.
Since the start of 2026 I've focused on agentic AI development. I direct Claude Code to do the implementation and own the scoping, architecture, and validation myself. To run it, I've built a set of plugins, subagents, and hooks, and put them to work on full-stack, geospatial, and developer-tooling projects. Several are in daily use; the rest are still experiments.
Where I've been
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Jun 2015 — May 2026
Principal Software Engineer at Blackbaud, Inc.
Internal tools, then security automation, then cloud governance / FinOps. Three teams across eleven years.
- › Architected BBMon, an internal ASP.NET Core / Angular URL-monitoring platform that replaced a $200K+/yr commercial tool and scaled to 6,000+ URLs checked every 5 minutes across 4 products. Plugin layer for vendor portability and geographically-distributed checkers; failure roll-up into customer-cluster outage groupings for the operations center. Ran ~5 years in production.
- › Owned an inherited engineering-wide ASP.NET Core / Angular access-request platform for ~7 years across three teams, a primary source of audit evidence for PCI compliance. Led the executive-mandated 4-week retirement as single technical point of contact; cutover with zero downtime and no compliance gaps.
- › Built the eWAF tool for placing products behind the enterprise WAF, plus an encrypted-backup solution for customer-requested database backups, while embedded across multiple teams during an enterprise security initiative. Mentored 6 junior and mid-level engineers on PowerShell, .NET microservices, and SPA development.
- › Led a two-year enterprise cloud governance effort across ~110 Azure subscriptions and ~60 AWS accounts; drove a ~20-person cross-functional committee on tag policy, shipped Qlik tag-compliance dashboards over Azure Policy data, and built a gap-analysis tool surfacing CI discovery and tagging inconsistencies across Azure, AWS, and the ServiceNow CMDB.
- › Was the senior technical anchor across all three teams for 10+ years: architectural input, code review, and mentoring from junior through senior. Worked in Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developer roles during the Agile / Scrum rollout.
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Apr 2011 — Jun 2015
Software Engineer III at Blackbaud, Inc.
Owned the enterprise monitoring stack for product engineering across the org.
- › Architected and rolled out enterprise monitoring across 3,000+ Linux and Windows servers supporting 40+ product lines.
- › Led the Linux migration from Nagios to CA/Broadcom DX UIM and stood up SCOM as a new Windows monitoring deployment, both part of broader monitoring and Microsoft licensing consolidation.
- › Designed gateway topology, agent strategy, and alert-routing hierarchies for application support teams; partnered with every product team and the Operations Center on production monitoring strategy.
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Oct 2007 — Apr 2011
Systems Engineer — Linux at Blackbaud (via eTapestry acquisition)
Core of a 3-person team running eTapestry's Linux / Solaris / JVM stack post-acquisition.
- › Led the effort to achieve eTapestry's first-ever PCI DSS compliance for ~200 Linux servers. Built the compliance foundation from the ground up with hardening, centralized logging, IAM, network segmentation, and file-integrity monitoring. Partnered with external auditors to define scope and successfully passed the inaugural audit.
- › Centralized Linux monitoring for ~200 servers on Nagios; stood up centralized logging and implemented LDAP and Kerberos authentication.
- › Replaced manual server buildouts with a virtualization and template-based workflow. Drove enterprise rollout of centralized DataDomain deduplication backups across multiple departments.
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Feb 2004 — Sep 2007
System Administrator at Radley Corporation
Sole IT for a multi-site EDI / SCM SaaS company, reporting directly to the CEO.
- › Sole IT / infrastructure for a 30–50 person multi-site SaaS company (EDI/SCM), reporting directly to the CEO.
- › Researched and built customer-facing SaaS hosting infrastructure (network, storage, HA, backups, firewalls) for the shrink-wrap-to-SaaS transition.
- › Led three datacenter buildouts and managed all vendor contracts for colo / ISP / licensing.
What I'm into
Indy Study Hall
I co-organize indy.sh, a monthly Indianapolis cross-discipline drop-in. Secretly, it's a low-pressure excuse for introverts to get out and find their people. Running since 2016.
Astrophotography
Astrophotography, and really anything worth pointing a camera at the sky for. Always half-waiting on the next eclipse.
Cycling
These days my gravel bike mostly lives on a Tacx trainer, head down and going nowhere fast. It really needs to see the light of day and discover what some of the new trails have to offer.
AV / live production
A portable AV rig I've built up over the years: rack-mounted audio mixing, video switching, projector screen, greenscreen. Built for in-person, hybrid, and livestreamed events, and ready whenever the occasion calls for it.
Let's talk
- Phone
- GitHub github.com/ajdershem
- LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/aarondershem
Email & phone are click-to-reveal to keep scrapers and spammers out.