As the Staff Engineer on Rocket Money’s Infrastructure Team, I drive the architecture, development, and evolution of the platform that supports millions of users and scales to well over 1,000 RPS, while maintaining a 99.99% uptime SLA. My focus spans core infrastructure, developer experience, security, and technical strategy.

Highlights include:

• Ownership of AWS & GCP architecture: enhanced security posture, enabled Terraform adoption, and ensured compliance with industry standards.

• Architected a robust Continuous Delivery system: reduced mean time to production from days to under 1 hour, ranking #1 in internal DX surveys.

• Led full migration to ARM infrastructure: improved API latency by 30% and significantly cut compute costs, with zero downtime.

• Management of numerous cloud services, including Postgres databases, Redis caches, AI tooling.

• Design and management of both ECS and Kubernetes platforms, with reusable, scalable deployment pipelines.

• Designed and implemented AWS Inspector integration: accelerated detection and remediation of critical vulnerabilities across all services.

• Built foundational Disaster Recovery planning and led implementation aligned with both technical constraints and business continuity goals.

• Launched and scaled HackerOne bug bounty and SOC2.

• Created a Slack-based “ChatOps” deployment system: enabling fast, safe, transparent deploys and database migrations.

• Built custom automations for database migrations and app deployment tools: reduced risk in critical deployments and improved operational safety.

• Leveraging AI, built a custom LLM/RAG tool to enable a "chat with your code" solution.

• Mentored engineers on system design, scaling strategies, and platform ownership.

• Delivered key technical presentations and onboarding material adopted across teams.

• Promoted transparent engineering culture through RFCs, planning documents, and cross-functional collaboration.

• Support & implementation of various AI/agent services

• Joined this Y Combinator (W16) startup at an early stage (the first infrastructure hire), and worked through a high growth-period. Notably providing over 2.8m users a reliable, high-performing, and secure platform.

• Assumed responsibility for building, scaling and securing the infrastructure for our personal finance app, Truebill.

• Fulfilled a central role in seamlessly integrating company systems and processes into the larger enterprise framework following the acquisition by Rocket Money.

• Spearheaded the management and continual enhancement of AWS and GCP infrastructure, encompassing container platforms, RDS Postgres databases, WAFs, message queues, and more.

• Lead the implementation of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Packer.

• Elevated infrastructure maturity through a mindset of continuous feedback and improvement, prioritizing a "security-first" approach.

• Recognized for successfully achieving SOC2 (Type 1 and Type 2) certification.

• Engineered and refined CI/CD and release pipelines, with a migration to webapp.io and then GitHub Actions

• Developed various scripts to streamline developers' workflows, conduct security scans, and automate routine tasks.

• Leveraged serverless stacks like AWS Lambda and Fargate to optimize efficiency.

• Expanded Datadog to fulfill our monitoring, logging, APM, and observability needs.

• Designed and implemented a staging environment

I joined this startup during its inception phase to spearhead infrastructure development and establish a platform we could deploy this latency-sensitive in-memory database application to.

• Excelled in the design and build of platforms on which the company ran its SaaS application, catering to over 100k concurrent users.

• Enabled various DevOps practices and services for our high-speed database, instantlabs.io.

• Championed the design and implementation of the SaaS platform

• Constructed multiple Kubernetes clusters, prioritizing self-healing mechanisms and routing traffic based on latency.

• Designed and deployed various AWS cloud services to support our infrastructure.

• Implemented "GitOps" and infrastructure-as-code methodologies using kops, Terraform, and Ansible.

• Provisioned network infrastructure to facilitate global deployments, incorporating load balancers, firewalls, and VPNs.

• Automated CI/CD pipelines to streamline development workflows.

• Conducted system stress-testing, benchmarking, and performance tuning, ensuring exceptional uptime and minimal mean time to recovery (MTTR).

• Devised comprehensive security policies and procedures, including incident response plans, anomaly detection systems, and secrets management.

Highlights following my relocation to our California office:

• Managing operation of both on-prem datacenters and a hybrid, multi-cloud environment featuring AWS, Azure and GCP

• Management of our local networks (Cisco)

• Consolidation of multiple, geographically dispersed datacenters

• Development of cloud strategy, including TCO and ROI analysis for various options

• Continuous development and implementation of BC & DR strategies

• Migrated email & calendaring from our legacy platform (Zimbra) to Microsoft Office 365

• Nessus Security Center vulnerability scanning platform implemented

• Led various digital transformation projects

• Built processes for integrating IT following mergers and acquisitions

• Responsible for designing and supporting networks to connect our offices and services around the world

• Designed and implemented high-performance SilverPeak software defined networking solution

• Supervising, mentoring and coaching our sysadmin and helpdesk teams

• Removed various single points of failure and replaced with highly-available solutions

• Phone system IVR design and roll out on both Cisco and AWS Connect platforms

• Migration from legacy PSTN voice providers to SIP solutions

• Built a network to support 400 wireless users during our 3-day user conference in San Francisco

• Unified End user VPN remote access systems

• Standardization of wireless networks across offices

• Cisco Prime Infrastructure deployed including configuration management and backup processes

• Implemented SSL Certificate process

• Deployed LastPass Enterprise, both internally with IT and to other business functions

• Deployment of MFA for various applications

• Budgeting and capacity planning

Key achievements during my time at Perforce UK:

• Managed IT services, both UK and Globally, reporting to director level

• Developed global infrastructure - LAN/WAN/Firewalls/Inter-office routing

• Supported Cisco VoIP/switches/routers/Palo Alto Networks/FibreChannel Storage/VMware clusters

• Designed and rolled out a large variety of services

• Rebuilt our UK datacenter

• Ran multiple projects to bring legacy applications up to date and virtualise them

• Technical lead on many core services including corporate email, instant messaging and VPN

• Supported customer-facing applications, including web servers and FTP sites

• Multi-platform system administration, Ubuntu/RedHat/FreeBSD/Windows Server

• vCloud Air and Azure cloud management

• Responsible for security of Perforce network and systems

• Mentorship and training of team members. Both locally and internationally

• Transitioned corporate IT into new leadership following a 2-month secondment to our California office, including initiatives to simplify and standardise our environment

• Developed processes for change management

• Management of relationships and support agreements with vendors/service providers

• Regular meetings with other business units to provide updates on IT and work on new requirements

• Ownership of UK IT budget

In June 2016 I was happy to be offered the position at our HQ in Alameda, California and moved across the pond!