Experience

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Cisco, Duo Security

May 2025 - current

Python · AWS · Kubernetes · IAM · Security · Monitoring & Alerting · AI Tooling

• Built an automated cross-account EBS snapshot lifecycle service spanning 12 AWS regions, safely eliminating the vast majority of orphaned build snapshots and a major recurring storage cost
• Hardening the security posture of production: replacing static IAM credentials with IAM roles and IRSA across Kubernetes microservices for short-lived credentials and simpler rotation
• Onboarded the APJC team into Duo-wide vulnerability management: authored documentation, delivered training, and lead the region’s SLA-driven triage
• Built an AI agent skill that researches otherwise-unassignable vulnerability tickets in the live environment (read-only) and recommends an owner with rationale and evidence — adopted by the entire on-call rotation, cutting investigations from a documented two-hour timebox to 5–10 minutes per ticket
• Authored an incident-command review adopted by the team, leading to new documentation, training, and clearer paging expectations
• First-responder on-call for a high-availability security SaaS, triaging and engaging product teams across US/APJC timezones

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Shopify

Jan 2023 - May 2025

Resiliency · Incident Management · Rails · MySQL · GCP · CI/CD · Chaos Engineering

• Incident Manager On Call for the entire platform, commanding scores of production incidents affecting millions of online stores — aligning responders under pressure and driving to resolution
• Built and launched slow-query detection in CI for Shopify’s core monolith, attacking the cause of as many as 1-in-5 merchant-impacting incidents escalated to SRE — co-presented this work at USENIX SREcon25 Americas
• Designed and ran game days: fault injection against internal tooling and its dependencies, including a live failover exercise for a full Slack outage
• Invested directly in service codebases post-incident: circuit breakers, backpressure, alert tuning, and metric/SLO improvements
• Built a second-engineer approval interface for risky operational commands, with audit history and a chat-independent path
• On-call through Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2023 and 2024 — US$11.5B in merchant sales and databases peaking at 45M queries/second in 2024 — kept quiet by design via capacity planning, load testing, and game days

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange

Feb 2022 - Oct 2022

Terraform · Docker · Kubernetes · Nomad · Gitlab CI · Nginx · PHP

• Consolidated and centralised dashboards for the team in Grafana and Splunk
• Created Terraform module and Gitlab repository with CI pipelines to manage on-call shifts in Pagerduty adhering to infrastructure-as code principles
• Led a project to convert homepage and marketing website from Next.js server-side generation to server-side rendering (SSG to SSR), using Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Nomad, Vault, Nginx, and Prometheus

Senior DevOps Engineer at Zendesk, Answer Bot

Mar 2019 – Feb 2022

Ruby · Python · Chef · Kubernetes · AWS · CI/CD · AI/ML

• Hardened and standardised software delivery processes and data pipelines
• Migrated legacy Answer Bot product to modern infrastructure: EC2 instances to Kubernetes, MySQL to Aurora RDS, custom ELK stack to Datadog, custom deployment system to Spinnaker

Software Engineer at Square, Cash App

Nov 2017 – Feb 2019

Ruby · Java · MySQL · Vitess · Cryptocurrency

• Worked on database sharding for the banking ledger, which handles tens of thousands of queries per second, tracking over US$100M of stored value on behalf of over 10M CashApp customers
• Resolved a Visa compliance escalation under threat of fines: traced non-compliant transactions against card-network specifications and fixed billing-address data in the ISO 8583 binary interchange format
• Improved internal tooling for customer support agents and added Bitcoin-related functionality

Infrastructure Engineer at Marketplacer

Nov 2015 – Aug 2017

Ruby · Go · Docker · AWS · Terraform · Automation · Dev tools

• Migrated infrastructure from dedicated servers to AWS using Terraform and Chef, improving reliability
• Migrated from instance backed image uploads to a content-addressable storage backed by S3, improving reliability and implicitly de-duplicating uploads
• Championed best practices among the development team, such as backing CI containers with a Docker registry to simplify updates
• Worked extensively on developer tools such as a command-line interface for common development tasks

Web Developer/DevOps Engineer at 99designs

Aug 2012 - Oct 2015

PHP · Ruby · DevOps · Continuous deployment

• Full-stack web development using PHP, Ruby and Rails, and Python
• Automated standard operating environment using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Babushka
• Became an expert on internationalisation and localisation of legacy web applications
• Conducted review of EC2 instance types in use, improving performance for end-users and reducing cost for the business
• Worked on refactoring a very large, monolithic application into simple, maintainable services

Web developer at Fontis

Nov 2010 – Aug 2012

PHP · Magento · Customer support

• Full-stack e-commerce web development using PHP, Magento, and Laravel
• Successfully completed Magento Certified Developer Plus certification
• Liaised with and occasionally managed remote developers
• Initiated various productivity-improving workflows, including migrating version control from Bazaar to Git, and advocating the use of improved task management tools
• Frequently required to quickly come up-to-speed on new codebases, including conducting audits and preparing reports for clients and internal use

Talks

Tackling Slow Queries: A Practical Approach to Prevention and Correction

USENIX SREcon25 Americas, Santa Clara — March 2025

Co-presented (with Kurni Famili) how Shopify tackles slow database queries from both directions: catching new queries at CI time before they reach production, and mining production slow-query logs to drive corrective work with owning teams.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science with Distinction

Bachelor of Engineering with Honours 1st Class, Computer and Network Engineering

RMIT University

Feb 2005 – Nov 2010