Platform engineering that ships in production — not slideware.
25+ years building and leading developer platforms across regulated finance, global media, and publishing — with prior IT leadership ownership including a $2M budget and 16-person international team as Global IT Director at V2 Music Group London. Most recently at an international equities financial firm, Northwestern Mutual, Penguin Random House, and A&E Networks. The three case studies below are live, automated, and documented end-to-end. Click in and look at the architecture, the tests, the cost model, the lessons learned.
Three production builds. One coherent story.
Each project is live, fully documented, and built to demonstrate the kind of platform work I'd lead in a Director-level role: GitOps-first infrastructure, internal developer experience, and the strategic architecture that ties them together.
🚀Enterprise GitOps on AWS EKS
A multi-cluster, production-grade Kubernetes platform on AWS — DEV and PROD with full blast-radius isolation, Karpenter for sub-minute node provisioning, KEDA for event-driven scaling, Calico for network policy enforcement, and Grafana Cloud for hosted observability. Six live applications running today.
Highlights
Stack
🏗️Backstage IDP — Self-Service Platform
A Backstage-powered Internal Developer Platform built on the GitOps foundation. Developers fill out one form and get a scaffolded Node.js service, GitLab CI pipeline, ArgoCD-managed deployment, observability dashboards, and a live HTTPS endpoint — in about five minutes. Spec-driven development, property-based tests, documented break-even at 14 services.
Highlights
Stack
🧭Platform Evolution — Crossplane, Temporal & AI-Augmented DevEx
The forward-looking architecture that closes the remaining gaps: Crossplane Compositions so developers self-serve cloud resources alongside applications, Temporal for durable workflows in regulated domains, and an AI-augmented developer experience built on guardrails and measurement. The operating model behind the builds — platform-as-product, DORA + SPACE measurement, and the funding model that makes it sustainable.
Highlights
Concepts
A quarter-century of platform work.
Across regulated industries that don't tolerate hand-waving — financial services, insurance, global publishing, network television — and across the technical generations from data center to cloud to platform engineering.
💼 Career Arc
- Intl. Equities Financial Firm
- Northwestern Mutual
- Penguin Random House
- A&E Networks
- V2 Music Group · London
- V2 Records · NYC
🌍 Leadership & P&L
Global IT Director, V2 Music Group (London, 1999–2002): owned a $2M annual budget and led a 16-person international team across 10 offices. Streaming-media pioneer through partnership with Globix — quoted in V2's 2001 streaming announcement. Earlier, IT Director at V2 Records NYC (1996–1999) building the North American technology operation from the ground up. The same operating discipline — budget ownership, vendor strategy, distributed team leadership — carries directly into Director-level platform roles.
🎓 Certifications
Linux Foundation: KEDA, GitOps, DevOps/SRE. AWS: Cloud Practitioner, Architecting, ECS. Datadog: Core Skills, Monitoring & Observability. Other: Zero Trust, CyberArk Conjur, OpenTelemetry, n8n AI Agents, GitLab Remote.
🤖 AI & ML Infrastructure
AWS Q Developer beta partner since December 2022. Hands-on AWS GenAI labs across Bedrock, SageMaker, Strands, Nova, and Kiro. EKS GenAI workshop covering GPU inference with Mistral 7B via Ray Serve and vLLM, EKS Auto Mode, and Karpenter GPU node pools.
🏆 Signature Wins
HashiCorp Vault rolled out across 2,500 GitLab repos — became the org-wide go-to for secrets engineering. PCI-compliant ECS→Azure pipeline running flawlessly since 2019. Vault JWT auth saving $40K annually. Quality framework adopted across 14+ engineering teams, cutting assessment time from 90 to 45 minutes.
🛠️ Core Skills
Kubernetes & EKS, GitOps with ArgoCD, Terraform & Crossplane, GitLab/GitHub CI, HashiCorp Vault & CyberArk, observability with Datadog, Grafana Cloud, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and developer-platform tooling — Backstage, scaffolders, golden paths, policy-as-code with Kyverno.
📚 Currently Reading
Genesis (Kissinger & Schmidt) on AI geopolitics. Rewired (McKinsey) on digital transformation operating models. Running Vault in Production. The reading list reflects how I think about the next five years of platform work — strategic context, organizational design, and the technical depth to back it up.
Let's talk platform.
Currently exploring Director-level Platform Engineering, Head of Developer Experience, and Head of Engineering Productivity roles at firms that take platform work seriously — especially in regulated industries. The fastest way to reach me is email or LinkedIn.