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Chris_Roberts_Cover_Letter.md (2219B)

      1 Chris Roberts  
      2 Lowell, AR  
      3 chris.roberts@learningunix.net  
      4 (417) 342-1868  
      5 
      6 Hiring Manager  
      7 Tenstreet  
      8 
      9 Dear Hiring Manager,
     10 
     11 I'm applying for the Infrastructure Engineer position at Tenstreet. The role description caught my
     12 attention because you said you're looking for someone with a demonstrated ability to learn and
     13 implement new technologies, not someone who already knows every tool in your environment. That
     14 framing describes how I approach this work.
     15 
     16 My professional background is in software quality assurance, but infrastructure and systems
     17 administration is where I spend my personal time and where my technical interest actually lives. I
     18 run a Proxmox VE homelab with KVM virtual machines and LXC containers, manage ZFS storage pools
     19 with automated replication, and maintain NFS file services across hosts. I provision and configure
     20 everything with Ansible. I have separate playbook projects for my homelab, my workstations, and
     21 my cloud server. I use OpenTofu for infrastructure provisioning.
     22 
     23 That cloud server is a public-facing Debian instance on Hetzner that I built end-to-end. I used
     24 OpenTofu to provision it, Ansible to configure it, nginx as a reverse proxy and web server, Gitea
     25 running in Docker for self-hosted Git, and fail2ban for intrusion prevention. An automated pipeline
     26 publishes a static site whenever I commit a markdown file. It's running at learningunix.net. The
     27 name reflects what it actually is.
     28 
     29 For firewall administration, I configure pf on OpenBSD hosts and ufw on Linux. I understand
     30 networking concepts including VLANs, though I should mention that my VLAN experience is conceptual.
     31 I have not configured them in a production or complex lab environment. That's a gap
     32 I'm aware of.
     33 
     34 The larger gap is that I don't have a professional title that says "Linux Systems Administrator."
     35 My day job is in QA. What I can offer is evidence that I do this work seriously outside of that
     36 role, and a track record of picking up new tools methodically. My CompTIA A+ and Linux+
     37 certifications reflect that habit, and I'm actively pursuing more.
     38 
     39 I'd welcome a conversation about whether my background fits what you're building. Thank you for
     40 your time.
     41 
     42 Sincerely,  
     43 Chris Roberts