Orchestration, systems integration, and software tooling.
I'm a generalist with a focus on orchestration and systems integration, and an interest in usability in software tooling and API design. Based in Sydney, with two decades of experience designing and building distributed backend services, I'm a polyglot engineer who is comfortable working across Java, Python, and TypeScript, and I thrive in environments that demand both technical depth and cross-functional collaboration.
Recent Work History
April 2025 – Present
Planned Career Break
December 2024 – April 2025
Canva
Senior Backend Engineer
- Bootstrapped the backend for an internal feature catalog, used by internal Canva product owners for analytics on the performance of various features of the core Canva product.
September 2018 – November 2024
Amazon Web Services
Senior Software Engineer
- Key contributor to Amazon's internal deployment system targeting Amazon's network routers globally, scaling workflows to larger and larger networks.
- Designed and built a framework for control path testing of deployment procedures, allowing network engineers to inject failures at specific points to verify rollback behavior — reducing reliance on highly-contended lab devices or production testing.
- Designed and coordinated work for a sandboxed architecture for running customer-defined deployment workflows via containers, removing operational burden and allowing greater customer flexibility.
- Designed and built a mechanism for asserting structural invariants for network deployment workflows, preventing incorrectly-defined workflows from acting on the network.
- Proposed and led a general safety initiative for the network deployment system, which led to the formation of a deployment safety program.
- Built a mechanism for adding metadata to the provided primitives of the network deployment system, unifying ad-hoc metadata spread across multiple microservices to a central point.
February 2016 – April 2018
Freelance Software Developer
- Created a microservices-style backend system for Ayannah, enabling more visibility into their transaction data. System utilized Kafka for transaction logging at different granularities, Thrift for RPC between microservices, and Docker for service hosting/deployment.
- Audited the performance of the booking webapp for a small gym providing spin bike classes. Identified and corrected issues with their existing app and stack, including load-related write contention issues with their MongoDB backend, which led to a drop in missed bookings and an improvement to customer satisfaction
- Took up maintenance and feature development for a hotel booking web application built on top of GWT and Java. As part of the contract, modernised the implementation to run on at least Java 10, and migrated the adhoc use of currency tracking to use JSR 354 (JavaMoney). Additionally, the codebase was modularized to allow partial building, and I introduced CI/CD through Jenkins.
February 2015 – February 2016
Codeflux Inc.
Chief Technology Officer
- Drove technology direction for the entire company, particularly Kagami, a web-based ERP system for small businesses.
- Supported the company's system infrastructure and internal services, including issue tracking (Redmine) and build/CI services (Jenkins).
September 2010 – February 2015
Codeflux Inc.
Software Architect
- Designed and built web applications for various consulting clients.
- Implemented custom CIMD2 and SMPP endpoints for integration with a Spring Integration-based system for a service provided by a major Philippine telco.
- Worked on an asynchronous batch processing daemon for a large entertainment and broadcasting conglomerate's payroll system; the daemon received tasks from the main web app through a Java JMS queue. Batch processing was necessary in the design of the payroll system, since column values were encrypted, which prevented the use of direct SQL or stored procedures.
- Managed a team which helped complete features and reports for the backend infrastructure for a point-of-sale system.
- Built a digital signage system for a client. Design and implementation included both the signage player built on top of Firefox/XULRunner, and a small scale content distribution architecture that supported low Internet connectivity reetail environments. Digital signage system was successfully rolled out across several Metro Manila storefronts of a large Philippine baked goods retail company.
- Supported the company's system infrastructure and internal services, including issue tracking (Redmine) and build services (Jenkins).
Skills
Languages
APIs & Frameworks
Operations
Databases
Other
References
References and more information available upon request.