Michael Lehman

Michael Lehman

IT Service and Platform Automation Architect

I design the tooling and automation that keep large managed infrastructure running, and, more and more, the AI agents that work alongside the people who run it.

Read the role in fullExperience

Line drawing of a rocket with the initials ML in its porthole, annotated like an engineering drawing. ML BODY 290 FIN X2 EXHAUST PILOT FIN SPAN 192
Drawn by
M. Lehman
Title
IT Service and Platform Automation Architect
Location
Ohio, USA (remote)
Dwg no.
ML-001
Rev
2026.09
Sheet
1 of 2

About

I decided young that I would work with computers when I grew up, and I did. I started programming at 12, spent late nights through my teens at friends’ houses learning operating systems, web pages and networking, and at 18 we started our own company. I was the CEO. I had no idea how to run a business, but we gave it a good go.

At 20 I moved into IT outsourcing, and I have spent the years since supporting infrastructure for Fortune 500 companies: Windows servers, VMware, storage, and a lot of automation. I went from systems administrator to the person people escalated the hard problems to, then to leading and managing infrastructure teams, and now to architecture.

My title has never said developer, but I have written scripts, services and tools the whole way, and I still love the problem solving. Today my job is to design, not to build: I work with bid teams, clients, and development and infrastructure teams to shape service management, automation, observability and agentic AI solutions, and to make sure they hold up long after go-live.

Outside of work I run a homelab and write about the projects that take more than one try at 4th Try Tech.

Current role

I bridge business strategy and modern service operations. I design service management, automation, agentic AI and observability solutions across the whole client lifecycle, from pursuit and bid support through transition, implementation and post-go-live optimization, and I partner with development and infrastructure teams who build them.

The role covers six areas:

  • Solution architecture and pre-sales
  • Automation and integration
  • Agentic AI architecture and enablement
  • Observability and operational intelligence
  • Transition and delivery
  • Practice and capability development

Read the role in full

Experience

Feb 1999today

  1. Architect

    CapgeminiJul 2020 to present

    • IT service and platform automation architecture for managed infrastructure services: monitoring and observability, AIOps, ITSM, automation, analytics and agentic AI.
    • Solution design for pursuits and RFP responses, including statements of work, responsibility matrices and KPI catalogs.
    • The full scope of the role is on the role page.

  2. Infrastructure Manager

    CapgeminiJan 2016 to Jul 2020

    • Managed the Wintel infrastructure team supporting Honeywell.

  3. Senior IT Consultant

    CapgeminiApr 2013 to Jan 2016

    • Wintel lead for an operations team supporting Fortune 500 accounts, until promotion to Infrastructure Manager.

  4. IT Systems Technician, Senior

    EDS, an HP company (later HPE)2003 to Apr 2013

    • Started on the Marathon account under Analysts International and transferred to EDS in 2004.
    • Set the standards for server naming, time, printing, server builds, VMware ESX, DFS, large file servers and documentation, including a wiki.
    • Ran the Hitachi and Brocade SAN for three to four years before the EDS SAN team took it on: disk configuration, LUN publishing, fabric zoning, cabling and HBA configuration.
    • Subject-matter expert for Active Directory, DNS, Windows, VMware ESX, disaster recovery and server automation, and the escalation point for difficult problems and projects.
    • Designed and built a high-uptime distributed scheduling environment on CA AutoSys, with clustered database, file and web tiers, SAN storage, VMware job servers and a custom web management interface.
    • Wrote the scripts, programs and services that supported it, in several languages.

  5. Systems Administrator

    Analysts InternationalFeb 1999 to Nov 2003

    • Desktop support, and designed and led a desktop imaging solution.
    • Escalation point for difficult tickets and for projects that improved the environment.
    • Networking, Check Point FireWall-1, Cisco routing and switching, Linux VPN, backup and restore, and application support.

Skills

Service management
ITIL practices, ESM and ITSM platforms (incident, problem, change, CMDB, workflow), Service Integration and SIAM
Automation and integration
Workflow and event-driven automation, APIs and web services (REST, SOAP, JSON), scripting across several languages
Agentic AI
RAG and graph retrieval, context engineering, agent harnesses and guardrails, evaluations, agent observability, AI governance
Observability
Monitoring and telemetry architecture, metrics, logs, traces and events, AIOps, dependency mapping
Infrastructure
Windows Server, Active Directory, DNS, VMware, SAN storage and fabrics, disaster recovery, job scheduling
Communication
Executive presentations, storytelling, RFP responses, statements of work, KPI catalogs and responsibility matrices