joshdavison.dev

Principal Platform Engineer.
I build, architect, and own
platforms that scale.

I own platform and infrastructure strategy end-to-end. I architect systems, set technical direction, and ship the internal platforms that let engineering organisations scale safely. My scope spans platform engineering, infrastructure architecture, SRE, and security. 9 years across regulated enterprise, government, and high growth tech.

Brisbane, AU · Remote AWS Pro · CKA 9 yrs experience
8 min
deployment time, down from 45 min
$150k+
annual infra cost savings, single engagement
2m to 1wk
release cycle, down from 2 month batches
Capabilities
Kubernetes AWS Terraform / OpenTofu GitHub Actions Python TypeScript Azure
Platform & delivery
Policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel) SAST / DAST pipelines
Infrastructure architecture
Multi-cloud architecture Zero-trust networking
Security & compliance
Modern compliance frameworks IAM design
AI infrastructure
RAG implementation Enterprise AI guardrails

→ Full tooling breakdown available in CV

Selected work

Self-service deployment platform and AI tooling for 50+ engineers in a regulated InsurTech environment

discuss at interview

Inherited significant tech debt consisting of custom pipelines and 45 minute deploy cycles. Migrated to an OpenTofu monorepo with centralised constructs, embedded OPA policy enforcement, automated security scanning, and cost prediction. Non-compliant infrastructure is blocked at build time, not post deploy. Alongside the platform work, built a multi-tenant RAG solution on Amazon Q to reduce manual research time for underwriting and sales from hours to minutes, while enforcing strict data isolation."

OpenTofuGitHub ActionsOPATrivyEKSAmazon QRAG
Deploy time: 45m to 8m. $150k+ infra savings. Research time: hours to minutes.

Eliminating 2-month release batches with zero-downtime trunk-based delivery

discuss at interview

Teams were batching 500+ changes over months due to shared QA environments and GitFlow. Implemented trunk-based development with per developer preview environments and blue/green production deploys with instant rollback capability.

Preview environmentsBlue/greenGitHub ActionsTrunk-based delivery
Release cycle: 2 months to 1 week. Zero downtime production path.

Multi-cloud hybrid foundation for mission-critical government workloads on AWS and Azure

discuss at interview

Government client required sovereign, redundant operations across both clouds with no internet egress. Designed encrypted cross-cloud communication with security controls meeting ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance in a fully restricted network environment.

AWSAzureISO 27001SOC 2
Mission-critical workloads operating across two sovereign clouds with full compliance.
Writing

How I'd actually set up Kubernetes and when it makes sense to use it

available on request

A breakdown of where Kubernetes implementations fail in practice. Networking assumptions, RBAC sprawl, poorly scoped workload identity, and abstraction layers that create more problems than they solve. Includes an opinionated production Kubernetes setup guide with real trade-off reasoning at each decision point.

KubernetesEKSCNIRBACProduction

How I'd design a self-service internal platform from scratch

available on request

A full architecture breakdown of Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Details the core components, rollout sequencing, and build vs buy trade offs, alongside the organisational dynamics and developer experience decisions that actually drive engineering adoption.

Platform engineeringIDPGolden pathsDeveloper experienceArchitecture
Experience
Jan 2024 to present
Principal Platform Engineer
Neos · InsurTech · 300+ employees
current
Feb 2023 to Jan 2024
Lead Cloud Engineer
Versent · AWS Premier Partner
1 yr
May 2020 to Oct 2022
Senior Cloud Engineer
Itoc / ThoughtWorks · NASDAQ: TWKS
2.5 yrs
May 2019 to May 2020
Cloud Engineer
NRI / 1ICT · TYO: 4307
1 yr
Certifications
AWS Solutions Architect Professional AWS DevOps Engineer Professional AWS Security Specialty Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
joshuadavison09@gmail.com · Brisbane, AU · Remote-first