I am a Production Engineer with over 10 years experience architecting and governing complex, distributed systems through dynamic scaling journeys in the highly regulated Energy & Utilities environments.
My work centres on moving from reactive incident response to proactive system discovery and adaptation. Designing Golden Path architectural patterns that balance developer velocity with rigorous enterprise security and governance.
My git history over the last decade in the private organisations of OVO and Kaluza is not accessible
In those orgs, I have:
- Architected Unified Resource Registries: Using
cdktfandcdk8sto reduce environment provisioning from months to days - Governed Mission-Critical Kafka: Managed 70+ broker estates processing 1GB/s, implementing GitOps-based ACL and topic management
- Built Resilience Foundations: Designed hub-and-spoke VPC networking and cloud guardrails for monolith-to-microservices migrations
Deepening expertise
- AI-Accelerated Engineering: Integrating AI agents into workflows to rapidly prototype configurations and validate structural patterns for operational velocity, allowing engineers to focus on core product architecture and resilience.
- Advanced Cloud Governance: Completing the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional cert, with a specific focus on scaling multi-account guardrails and automated lifecycle management.
- Distributed Systems Theory: Studying fault-tolerance patterns to better analyze the failure modes of the large-scale Kafka and K8s ecosystems I manage.
- Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS), cdk8s, Helm, Crossplane
- IaC: Terraform, cdktf, CloudFormation
- Event Streaming: Apache Kafka (Aiven), Schema Registry
- Languages: Python (Validation & Tooling), Bash
- Cloud: AWS - most comfortable, familiar with GCP
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alex-mcardle