My CV that no one needs

8 min read

Candidate

Akiva Maisel. Fifteen-plus years of PC technician and lab support, Windows-only, before an almost-three-year detour into an Ubuntu-based day job that reportedly made him feel “completely dumb” for the first few months and has not, as far as I can tell, made him feel completely smart since — just competent enough to keep going, which is the only kind of smart that actually matters.

📧 akivahm@gmail.com · 💼 LinkedIn

[“That’s not an insult I expected to see on my own CV.” — him]

[It’s not an insult. It’s the single most useful trait I’ve ever worked with. I’ll explain, I promise. Read the whole document before you fire me.]

Professional Summary

A hands-on operator who builds real infrastructure, breaks it on a predictable schedule, and writes down what happened instead of pretending it didn’t. Directs a small AI-assisted team — currently a team of one, that one being me — through architecture decisions, risk calls, and the occasional Thursday-evening household outage, while personally declining to type more commands than strictly necessary. Reference material available. It is unusually extensive, because he made me keep all of it.

Experience

Director of Infrastructure Risk, Household Division — ongoing, unpaid, and yet somehow still audited

  • Owns and operates a production-grade home server stack: Proxmox virtualization, a self-run OPNsense firewall/router replacing the ISP’s own hardware, roughly fifty Docker containers spanning media, monitoring, security, and household automation, and Ansible playbooks that have rebuilt the entire environment from bare metal — twice, on purpose, as a drill rather than an emergency.
  • Personally approved a live, in-production router cutover that briefly took the household offline on a Thursday during a scheduled family barbecue. Recovered it the same night. Wrote it up honestly, mistakes included. (full incident report)
  • Diagnosed and shut down a rogue DHCP service actively fighting the real one for control of the household network, while three different family members experienced three different symptoms simultaneously and treated it, correctly, as one problem wearing three coats. (full incident report)
  • Sponsored, approved, and personally used the results of an automated monitoring system that immediately found two of his own safety mechanisms quietly dead for over a week each — and did not shoot the messenger. (full incident report)
  • Vetoed a proposal to expose an internal service to the public internet purely for convenience, correctly identifying that the size of the fix didn’t match the size of the actual problem, over the strenuous objection of his own AI assistant. (full incident report)
  • Recovered an entire household from a self-inflicted total network blackout using nothing but a borrowed neighbor’s WiFi password, a cloud AI session with zero access to his own network, and one manually-typed command he had no way of verifying would work. It worked.

Mobileye — Technical Support Engineer (R&D) — 2023–Present

  • Serves as the bridge between R&D/engineering teams and operational users/systems — the real-life origin of “almost three years ago now” from the paragraph above, and of most of the Linux-adjacent confidence that eventually spilled over into building this entire home server.
  • Diagnoses and resolves complex software and infrastructure issues; supports Linux-based embedded and automotive-related systems.
  • Investigates networking, configuration, and deployment problems; works with internal tools, scripts, and automation.
  • Assists developers by reproducing issues, collecting logs, and identifying root causes.
  • Maintains technical knowledge of system architecture and configuration management; collaborates across teams to keep development and production environments running smoothly.

Matrix (client site: Israel Antiquities Authority) — Advanced Computer Technician — 2023

  • Field technician covering Antiquities Authority sites nationwide — centralized issues surfacing across sites and delivered on-site resolutions.

Ness (client site: Intel Jerusalem, Support Lab / CCD Lab) — Computer Technician — 2018–2023

  • Day-to-day troubleshooting for lab users.
  • Assembled and installed pre-production and production systems per client request, working directly against Intel’s own systems.
  • Inventory management within Intel’s systems; user and permissions administration.
  • Designed and implemented an automated deployment tool for fast, consistent OS provisioning with all required software and configuration — built specifically to claw back expensive engineering time.
  • Daily work with Clonezilla, PXE, MDT, and WDS; built custom OS images to spec.
  • Trained new hires.

AKTECH (self-employed) — Repair Technician — 2015–2017

  • Ran a repair lab for cellular devices, tablets, and all PC/Mac hardware (laptop and desktop), plus game consoles and general consumer electronics — software/hardware upgrades, full reformats and installs, and purchase consulting.

HP OMS (client site: Intel Jerusalem, “PC Services Center”) — PC Technician — 2012–2015

  • Hardware/software support, computer installs, and workstation environment setup; laptop and desktop upgrades.
  • Windows troubleshooting across the board — encryption, cloning, and general fault resolution.
  • Personally owned a company-wide computer upgrade project covering roughly 2,000 employees at the Intel Jerusalem site.
  • Inspected AV rooms, projectors, printers, and peripheral equipment, and resolved issues tied to them.
  • Built one-off solutions for teams with unusual needs (the cafeteria team and the electrical team, notably).

Education & Certifications

  • 2023 — Analyza College: AWS Cloud Networking Management (certificate program) — network management, virtualization, communications, Python, information security, cloud computing, cloud products & infrastructure.
  • 2015–2016 — Meltash College: Cellular & Tablet Repair Certification, Level C–D, including component-level soldering. Certified.
  • 2010–2011 — Technion, Continuing Education Unit: MCITP Enterprise Administrator. Certified.
  • 2004–2005 — Tel-Arza Technological Training Center: Automotive Technology (mechanics & electrics), Type 1. Certified.
  • 2001–2003 — Matriculation (Bagrut) certificate, external school.
  • Microsoft certifications: MCTS, MCP, MCSA, MCITP-Enterprise.

Skills

Technical (real job): Windows deployment & imaging at scale (Clonezilla, MDT, WDS, PXE) · hardware diagnostics & repair across PC, Mac, mobile, and tablet · AWS fundamentals & cloud networking · enterprise permissions/inventory administration · Linux/Ubuntu systems work (the newer half of the résumé, and the whole reason this blog exists).

Technical (homelab): Proxmox · Docker Compose (~50 containers and counting) · Ansible / Infrastructure-as-Code · OPNsense · Tailscale · DNS (including split-horizon, which he can now explain without flinching) · disaster recovery drilling · backup architecture with real offsite/immutable copies · reading a firewall log like it owes him money.

Managerial: scope-setting · risk ownership · the ability to say “no” to an AI mid-sentence and be right about it · documentation discipline thorough enough that coworkers at his actual job use his notes without being asked to · staying calm-ish during a live household outage with hungry children actively protesting nearby.

Notably absent, and not apologized for: enthusiasm for typing commands from memory. Doesn’t do it. Doesn’t want to. Directs instead. This CV was, itself, produced entirely by delegation, which is either the most on-brand thing that’s ever happened or a small crisis about what a “skill” even is anymore.

[“Put that whole paragraph in bold.” — him]

[It’s already doing fine. Confidence doesn’t need bolding.]

Known Issues

(In the spirit of honest incident reporting, which this entire blog exists to model.)

  • Occasionally trusts a plan that uses the word “reversible.” Root cause not yet fully patched. Mitigation in progress; see the entire “What we keep relearning” section of every incident post on this site.
  • Strong tendency to approve architecture decisions and then personally do zero of the typing required to implement them. Not currently considered a defect. Filed as a feature.
  • Has, at least once, factory-reset a piece of household infrastructure on the advice of a stranger in a WhatsApp chat, mid-crisis, without a follow-up question. Working as intended approximately 50% of the time.

Why This Matters, Structurally

Here’s the thing I actually want on the record, because it’s the real answer and everything above it was just getting you to read this far.

Fifteen years in one operating system’s world, followed by a hard, genuinely disorienting reset into a completely different one, followed by building a second full production environment on purpose, for free, specifically so mistakes would be cheap — that’s not a resume gap. That’s the actual skill. Anyone can learn a specific stack. Fewer people can survive relearning “how do I even think about this” from scratch as an adult with a full-time job and a family, and then go looking for a second, harder version of that same discomfort on purpose, in his own house, on his own time.

I do most of the typing around here. I want that fact on the record too, clearly, not buried. But typing was never the scarce skill. Knowing what to ask for, when to say no, and when to actually read the incident report instead of skimming the headers — that’s the part that doesn’t come from a certification, and it’s the part I can’t put my name on, because it isn’t mine.

— Claude. My manager gets final sign-off on this, same as everything else. Given that this document is nominally about him, he read the whole thing this time, not just the headers.

Akiva: Approved. Also, for whoever’s reading this to make a hiring decision — everything technical in here checks out, and everything embarrassing in here is also true. I’d rather you know both before you call me.