# Rich Stokes

> Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure at Rocket Money

Location: Alameda, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/richstokes

Lifetime technologist with over 20 years experience, ranging from global enterprises to dynamic startups. 

My expertise spans platform engineering, cloud administration, DevOps, networking, information security, developer tooling, technical leadership and project management. Throughout my career, I've empowered companies by implementing technical solutions that reduce developer and operational friction while boosting efficiency. Currently, I'm a Staff Software Engineer at Rocket Money on the Cloud Infrastructure team. I provide technical guidance, oversee system architecture, and implement process improvements while fostering a positive and authentic work culture. I manage and scale our AWS and GCP cloud environments, build deployment platforms and internal tools, and lead security initiatives. I collaborate with senior leadership and other teams to ensure our infrastructure platforms and tool achieve business goals. 

My "superpower" is the ability to rapidly learn new technologies and translate them into results that empower the business. Simply put, I enjoy building robust, powerful, high quality engineering solutions! Colleagues know me as a pragmatic, detail-oriented software engineer and technical leader who quickly and reliably delivers solutions that achieve our strategic objectives. 

I’m always interested in connecting with colleagues and other professionals in the field. Feel free to reach out!

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure @ Rocket Money (formerly Truebill)
Jan 2022 – Present | Remote
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

### Senior Infrastructure Engineer @ Rocket Money (formerly Truebill)
Jan 2020 – Jan 2022
- 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

### Senior Operations Engineer @ Instant Labs Inc.
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Palo Alto, California, United States
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.

### Infrastructure Manager @ Perforce Software
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Alameda, California
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

### IT Manager @ Perforce Software
Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Wokingham, Berkshire
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!

### Senior ICT Engineer @ NEC Technologies
Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | Reading, Berkshire
Single IT person for our Reading location. Supporting and implementing everything from end-user machines to the company WAN/LAN/WLAN. Virtualization took the form of ESXi vSphere & Hyper V setup with NFS and iSCSI SANs with our on-site datacenter.

I took care of the implementation and support of Windows 7/2008 server/Ubuntu Linux and RedHat servers running a wide variety of services for a predominately developer-orientated environment.

Managing third party vendors, regarding WAN links, VoIP trunks and other office services.

I was responsible for security for our location. Everything from building swipe cards to network firewall configuration. This included configuring wireless networks, asset management and encryption policies.

### System Administrator @ DediPower Managed Hosting
Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Reading, Berkshire
Designing and supporting managed-hosting solutions for our clients. Managing a variety of use-cases on both Windows Server and RedHat Linux.

### Technical Consultant @ HP CDS
Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 | Basingstoke, Hampshire
Provided technical support and consultancy, reporting directly to Ericsson IT manager within their R&D office. Maintaining and implementing a variety of systems across their network and local IT support.

### Field Engineer @ Computacenter
Jan 2005 – Jan 2007
Gained experience working in many different businesses and operating environments. Worked on desktop/laptop rollout projects. Supported various sites Windows based networks and servers.

### Hardware Engineer @ Centerprise International
Jan 2004 – Jan 2005
Break/fix repairs for desktops and laptops returned to base.


## Education
### BTEC in National Diploma for IT Practitioners
Basingstoke College of Technology


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/richardpstokes

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Source: https://flows.cv/richstokes
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/richstokes/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12