I love using technology to be a multiplier of human effort, especially when helping people pursue a cause for social good. I've spent the large majority of my career enabling all kinds of organizations achieve their social purpose, by ensuring that doctors are efficiently communicating, community services can provide accurate and timely help, ensuring developers can iterate and deliver quickly, and helping organizations safeguard the vulnerable people in their care. All of these objectives have been achieved through interesting mixes of both new and "boring" technology. I'd like to continue working to multiply the effectiveness of causes that I believe in through my love of software.
Code Skills
The core skillset that I've been using has been centred around Python, TypeScript, and React. I've also had prior experience with many other languages, and can pick up new frameworks, infrastructure, and languages with ease. Most of my experience lie with both software, and infrastructure back-end specifics of either monolithic, or microservice-based RESTful services. I am also a competent front-end developer, and have created UIs that are in every day use by end-users.
Infrastructure Skills
I am a passionate Linux user, and though I currently use MacOS for my development environment, I am well versed in using Linux for every day desktop tasks as well as using both Docker, and Virtualized Linux almost every day. I always focus on getting security right, and building on top of a solid foundation of infrastructure on any variant of *nix that is required.
Other technologies I've had every-day use of include AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS, CloudFormation, CDK, Lambda and most serverless tools, etc), GitHub Actions, and Kubernetes. I've also had experience with many more infrastructure automation and management tools not listed here; some of these are listed in my employment history below.
Employment History
Highlights
Interchange: Implemented an extremely secure and flexible AWS platform for financial services as the sole infrastructure engineer
Mantel Group: Led many complex projects from migrating applications onto AWS infrastructure, to developing server and Blockchain applications from scratch
dutyof.care: Developed the dutyof.care platform, from scratch into a highly scalable, resilient, fast product
Redbubble: AWS and Docker SME on the team tasked with moving to containers, and AWS
Odecee: Helped implement a PCI-compliant, continuous-deployment environment on AWS
Odecee: Nominated for an internal award for simplicity on a complex project
Infoxchange: Before Docker, implemented a containerised build system using LXC, auFS, and Puppet. I then presented the solution in a talk at Infracoders Melbourne[1]
Untitled Project
April 2025 - Present
Achievements
Built an extremely robust, self-healing data transformation
system that used minimal AI tokens to process large amounts
of often-changing data. For example, hourly ingest of event
data from various ticketing, venue, and other sources
Significant savings in LLM token usage by implementing a
system whereby the LLM is used to construct deterministic
transformation pipelines, including heuristic understanding
of deduplication, understanding when robustness may be
improved, and health checking
The system is able to self-heal when data sources change,
and adapt to new data sources automatically (for example
finding new sources via web search) without invoking the
LLM for every new piece of data, and without requiring human
intervention
Utilized a "blackboard" pattern as a novel solution to the
problems of data enrichment
Plan and build infrastructure for an ever-evolving startup in
a complex fintech environment, ensuring security at every
step without impacting developer experience
Implement many organizational services such as VPN, and
configure shared security infrastructure
Help plan and implement policies and controls for PCI-DSS and
SOC2 compliance
Achievements
The headline achievement of this project is that in a single
year, by myself I was able to implement an AWS platform that
both the developers barely noticed, and was able to function
as a financial services business in the US
All infrastructure was built in a manner that had clear
pathways for how to transition from financial services to
full-blown banking infrastructure with all the regulatory
and security issues that go along with that
Using Tailscale, implemented a company-wide VPN with SSO
linked to GSuite, and security policies for access control to
protected services - both internal and the ability to
transparently route traffic to external services with IP
whitelisting, via a protected internet gateway
Plan complex projects when clients are mostly aware of only
timelines, and high-level requirements
Lead project teams consisting of internal and client staff to
define Agile processes that help build a high functioning team
Solve complex technical problems as they come up - most projects
assigned to me were in new and emerging technologies without
many pre-existing solutions to problems
Achievements
Migrated a high-profile DNS registry (not registrar) from
on-premises infrastructure to AWS. The scope of the change made
this the largest of its kind in the world, which introduced many
unique AWS challenges
Infrastructure engineer for a high profile government initiative
implemented using majority serverless technologies and supporting
a high volume of traffic. This project introduced some novel new
deployment and application patterns combining CDK, TypeScript,
and Rush
Sole developer of a blockchain-based POC for a new startup that
used serverless technologies to ensure the business wasn't spending
money when it wasn't yet funded
Technologies
Great: AWS - General, Lambda(AWS), AppSync(AWS), API Gateway(AWS), CDK(AWS), Kubernetes/EKS(AWS), GitHub Actions, React, TypeScript, Python
Create the dutyof.care platform, associated infrastructure,
user experience, design many and build many product features
Ensure that the dutyof.care platform remains in operation,
at a high level of performance
Collaborate with both technical, and non-technical customers
to help them integrate the platform into their business either
via software integrations, or additional features to aid in
human interaction
Conduct employment interviews, and build a quality development
team
Achievements
The dutyof.care platform produces results to the 99th percentile
of its validation requests, excluding latency of source
databases, in less than 50ms
Stability of the platform is excellent. Very few single points
of failure, and those that are singletons are not time-critical
services, allowing recovery without users seeing downtime
Platform security is excellent; Hashicorp Vault is used across
all services to ensure that secrets are time-limited where
possible, and are at the very least highly controlled, and
access is audited
Create, and manage both software, and infrastructure
solutions for a variety of not-for-profit clients,
mostly with limited budgets
Act as a technical resource to allow other consultants
to design appropriate, achievable solutions
Achievements
Developed a prototype app for the Australian Red Cross
to aid in disaster relief in developing countries. The
end product showed how a light-weight app could sync an
inventory database when offline, and allow search and
update when out of connectivity
Moved a legacy, but important software product from a single
dedicated server, to load-balanced, highly-available AWS
architecture that ended up as good as a cloud-native solution
spruce.sh was a startup that I tried to build right as Docker
was becoming popular. It was a different kind of Docker-focused
CI platform, based on my work at Infoxchange
Product development and strategy for "a new kind of CI"
Software and infrastructure development and management
Achievements
Log latency was significantly faster than many other CI
platforms - not seconds, but near-realtime just like a regular
terminal
First platform to integrate Docker-based support services for
CI such as Redis, PostgreSQL, etc - at the time most people
were testing with SQLite
Focus on low-touch integration into existing pipelines: If
you had a Dockerfile, it was almost no effort to login to
GitHub, build, test, and push
Technologies
Great: Docker, Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, React
Good: RabbitMQ, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, Immutable.js
Competent: Puppet, Ansible, Rollbar
DevOps Engineer - Contract @ Redbubble
September 2015 - March 2016
Responsibilities
As part of the delivery engineering team, it was our job to
"help teams deliver value faster", carefully balancing new
technology and processwith business demands to deliver
features
Acted as the team's AWS, Docker, and general DevOps expert
Built a new Docker-based platform for very fast, and safe
deployment of microservices
Achievements
Reduced deployment time from 40min on the old platform, to
less than 1min on the new
Built many tools for comparison-based testing of refactored services, similar to GitHub scientist[2]
Built an application platform that replaced unhealthy nodes
with zero downtime for deployed services
Implemented a centralized logging stack to help diagnose
issues across many disparate (including legacy) systems
Technologies
Great: AWS, Docker, BuildKite, systemd, Debian
Good: Ruby, Rails, Packer, Logstash, Kibana
DevOps Engineer @ Odecee (Australia Post)
August 2014 - September 2015
Responsibilities
Design, and implement CI, complex third party
applications, and a PCI/DSS platform able to
scale, heal, and deploy consistently in AWS
architecture
Guide the engineering direction of Python
management framework to ease implementation of
complex automation tooling
Achievements
Nominated for an internal award for simplicity
on a very complex project
Selected to work on the "Trusted Services Cloud"
project; A sophisticated build of a PCI compliant,
highly automated AWS environment. My main
achievement was the deployment automation of the
IDP suite that protected every server in the
whole environment
Implemented a fully automated iOS build cluster
using both Ansible, and existing Puppet
manifests to build, and test iOS apps in the
same way as existing RHEL server apps
Develop and debug complex web applications in
environments with both legacy and cutting edge
technology, using agile methods.
Judge and create releases as part of a CI/CD
process, run retrospectives and generally
participate in a highly flexible and free agile
team.
Achievements
Months before Docker was released, I was tasked with building a new CI server for the team. My solution was an LXC-based container system that used AuFS for the root file system and was managed by Puppet in the background. This set Infoxchange on a path to very quickly adopt Docker when it was released. I then did a talk on my solution at Infracoders Melbourne[1]
Played a vital role redeveloping Infoxchange's legacy search application from the ground up using Docker, ElasticSearch and Django. Again, this lead to a talk at the Melbourne Search user's group[3]
More employment history available on request, or at thatpanda.com
Education
Swinburne University of Technology, 2008 - 2009
Bachelor of Science (Computer Science and Software Engineering) / Bachelor of Multimedia (Games and Interactivity) [Incomplete]
This course gave me a stable footing in systems design,
usability design, Java programming, C and C++ programming,
3D modeling and various other facets of the game
development profession. I left to pursue a job offer
to work in professional software development.
References
Damien Whitten
CTO @ Interchange
Damien and I worked together to build dutyof.care, and Interchange
phone Contact for info
email Contact for info
Ross Williamson
Lead Engineer @ Mantel Group
Ross was my people guide at Mantel Group. He was privy to all feedback and performance reviews