# Owen Collier-Ridge > Senior Software Engineer at Curative Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/owencollierridge About I am a driven software professional with nearly a decade of experience in systems design and full-stack engineering, spanning CDNs, edge computing, and application servers. My career has been defined by a passion for scaling complex systems and a relentless focus on developer velocity. What I’m Doing Now Currently, as a Senior Software Engineer at Curative, I focus on building resilient infrastructure and leveraging AI to solve operational bottlenecks. Some of my recent highlights include: AI & Automation: Architected and deployed AI agents (Sierra) that fully automated a provider call center, converting 5,000 hours of talk time into autonomous service. Developer Experience: Drastically improved organizational efficiency by migrating to GitHub Merge Queues and Buildkite, reducing time-to-merge from several hours to under 15 minutes. Scalable Infrastructure: Deployed zero-downtime strategies across ECS/EKS and empowered engineering teams to manage their own IaC via Atlantis. My Background Before Curative, I was a founding member of the Recreation.gov project team at Booz Allen Hamilton. I specialized in AWS CloudFormation and security, where I designed real-time bot detection systems and built PCI-compliant isolated environments for sensitive workloads. Beyond the Office I’m a firm believer in knowledge sharing and the intersection of technology and strategy. Whether it’s creating AWS tutorials for the community or developing Game Theory algorithms used by top-tier professional esports teams to predict the Hearthstone metagame, I love exploring how code can solve real-world puzzles. Core Tech: Python, Kotlin, AWS (Lambda, CloudFormation, DynamoDB), Terraform, Kubernetes, AI Agents (Sierra), and CI/CD optimization. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Curative Jan 2021 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Joined Curative to scale its multi-billion dollar COVID-19 testing business (35M tests and 2M+ vaccines). Later built the health insurance business from 0 to 190K members in 3 years. Currently building Sierra Agents to automate call center operations, saving Curative significant administrative overhead, and improving response times for members and providers. Mentored and cross-trained engineers. Established guilds and built social cohesion across the engineering organization. ### Software Infrastructure Engineer @ Curative Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 ### Tech Blog @ Unknown Jan 2020 – Present | https://blog.owen.dev I maintain a technical blog where I write about cloud engineering and my other interests. ### Fellow (Performative Speaking) @ On Deck Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 ### Site Reliability Engineer @ Booz Allen Hamilton Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | Herndon, Virginia, United States After joining Booz Allen I became a founding member of the project team for Recreation.gov, a greenfield ecommerce project for national parks. I initially served as a Cloudformation SME responsible for Infrastructure as Code work before transitioning those responsibilities to focus on AWS Lambda and security-related tasks. Highlights: • Wrote one-off deployments and progressed to writing abstractions in Cloudformation for others to manage. Translated concepts of inheritance from Java to Cloudformation by writing interface templates. • Pioneered use of Cloudformation and Lambda across project teams and trained teams in standards for creating AWS resources. • Built self-contained PCI compliant isolated environment for sensitive workload in three months. Created a Lambda Function trigger for when EC2 instances were created that reads Tags on the instance and creates Alarms and DNS records, enabling health check alarms to monitor resource usage (CPU/Memory/IO) • Designed automated solutions to prevent bots from hitting recreation.gov. Initial solution was built to read streaming CDN logs parsed to a database in real-time, with the database scanned for offenders and updates sent to WAF to block IP address. Designed a more scalable solution using a push model with CDN logs stored in a SIEM with alerts pushing a webhook to trigger a Lambda workflow to block the IP address at WAF for a period of time. ### Educational Technical Content @ Gumroad Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 I love helping and teaching people. To that end, I've created a number of well documented AWS tutorials for others to consume. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science Canisius University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/owen-collier-ridge - Portfolio: https://owen.dev - Portfolio: https://blog.owen.dev --- Source: https://flows.cv/owencollierridge JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/owencollierridge/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-29