El Paso, Texas · Available to talk

steven carrillo

Mainframe Operator

I keep production systems running, and automate the parts that shouldn’t need me.

Now

What I'm doing these days

I work as a mainframe operator for a financial institution. My title still says mainframe; the platform I actually build on is modern Linux. Most of what I do is make sure the things that used to be done by hand aren’t anymore.

  • 01

    Automation

    Writing the scripts that take recurring manual work off a team — mostly PowerShell and Python. Every one of them started as something someone did by hand, off a checklist, at an inconvenient hour.

  • 02

    Internal tools

    Building the dashboards that let people see system state without having to go ask someone. Django on the back, SvelteKit on the front. Turning "let me go check" into a page that was already open.

  • 03

    Standards

    Helping the team settle on shared conventions for alerting and scripting, so the tooling looks the same no matter who wrote it.

Last updated September 2026

Work

Things I've built

Experience

Where I've been

  1. Aug 2026 — Present

    Mainframe Systems Operator II

    Financial institution

    • Build and maintain internal monitoring tooling used day to day by the operations team (Django/DRF backend, SvelteKit frontend).
    • Write production automation in PowerShell and Python that replaces recurring manual processes.
    • Helped standardize the team’s alerting and scripting conventions during a platform transition.
  2. Aug 2025 — Aug 2026

    Mainframe Systems Operator I

    Financial institution

    • Learned mainframe operations end to end: monitoring, job control, and daily processing routines.
    • Identified and automated recurring manual work across the team, including alert routing, reporting pulls, and the daily checklist.
  3. Fall 2024

    CyberPatriot Technical Mentor

    University of Texas at El Paso

    • Mentored high school teams in cybersecurity fundamentals and Linux/Windows systems hardening.
    • Worked with school sponsors across the El Paso area to prepare teams for CyberPatriot competition.
  4. Summer 2024

    SC Start Intern

    Steele Consulting

    • Full-stack development with SQL, C#, .NET, and Angular — database design, backend logic, and frontend work.
    • Shipped features inside an Agile team, participating in Scrum ceremonies with cross-functional partners.

About

How I got here

I graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso in December 2024 with a Computer Science degree and a Software Engineering concentration. Before that I interned at Steele Consulting building full-stack web applications in C#, .NET, and Angular, and mentored high school CyberPatriot teams across El Paso on Linux and Windows hardening — mostly explaining why a thing was broken until the moment it clicked for them.

I started as a mainframe operator in August 2025, learning the environment from the ground up: monitoring, daily processing, the routines that keep things running. What I kept noticing was how much of it was manual. So I started automating — routing alerts somewhere people would actually see them, scripting the reporting pulls, automating the daily checklist itself. None of that was assigned. It just kept being obviously worth doing.

That instinct turned into the job. I build automation and internal tooling now, on a modern Linux stack. Being close to production changes what you care about — you stop thinking about features and start thinking about what happens at 3am when something fails and nobody is watching.

Everything I know how to do, I learned by building it badly first. That’s still the method.

Fuel
A Dunkin’ coffee a day.
Hobby
Mechanical keyboards. Creamy, tactile, linear — just not clicky.
Best game nobody played
Batman Begins on the GBA. Genuinely underrated.
Approach
Not chasing one big thing. I just like building.

Contact

Say hello

Questions, ideas, or you just want to argue about switches — all welcome. I read everything.