Profile

About

I'm an electrical engineer working in infrastructure and distributed systems. My career has moved from hardware — servicing electronics in the Royal Australian Air Force — through full-stack operations and observability work, to building low-level cloud infrastructure from bare metal up.

Currently at Mulga, working on Spinifex: an AWS-compatible cloud for bare metal, edge and on-premise deployments. The work spans storage engines, virtual networking, hypervisors, and Kubernetes control planes.

Service record

04

  1. Infrastructure EngineerMulga

    Mar 2025 — present· 1 yr

    Building Spinifex, an AWS-compatible cloud for bare metal, edge and on-premise deployments — recreating the EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, IAM, ECS and EKS service surface on hardware you own, so software written for AWS runs unchanged.

    • Implemented the EKS control-plane API surface against the AWS contract — OIDC key seeding, ACTIVE gated on verified JWKS, token webhook and AccessEntry authorisation, add-on lifecycle, and HA control-plane recovery across multiple members.
    • Root-caused and fixed a class of resource leaks in the control plane's teardown path — NAT-gateway and failed-launch elastic IP leaks, orphaned security groups, and billable control-plane VMs — then wrote the idempotency invariants down so the fixes held.
    • Built a measurement rig to attribute storage growth per volume and per object, which disproved the team's own write-amplification hypothesis and redirected the investigation.
    • Made Elasticsearch the single point of root-cause analysis for CI and live environments — indexed CI run summaries, scoped telemetry by cell and job, and pulled NATS JetStream metrics in through OpenTelemetry.
    • Rebalanced the end-to-end test suite after finding that suites were silently skipping, distinguishing tests absent from CI from behaviour genuinely uncovered.
    • Replaced ad-hoc machine image builds with a layered mkosi pipeline running unprivileged in CI, including NVIDIA and ROCm GPU profiles.
    • Go
    • Kubernetes
    • QEMU/KVM
    • OVN
    • Elasticsearch
    • OpenTelemetry
    • Ansible
    • Terraform

  2. Software EngineerKestra

    July 2024 — Mar 2026· 2 yr

    Built and maintained end-to-end Elasticsearch-based platforms for data collection, analytics and observability, working as a search engineer across the full application stack. SRE across Linux and Windows: systems administration, application maintenance, and infrastructure. Certified Elasticsearch Engineer. Security and compliance engineering alongside operational responsibilities.

    • Elasticsearch
    • Linux
    • Windows Server
  3. Royal Australian Air Force

    1. Electrical Engineering OfficerRoyal Australian Air Force

      July 2017 — Oct 2024· 7 yr
      1. Pilot Officer
      2. Flying Officer
      3. Flight Lieutenant

      Commissioned as an Electrical Engineering Officer after Officer Training School, then read Electrical Engineering full-time at the Australian Defence Force Academy on an Air Force scholarship, graduating with honours in 2021. Followed with project and capability roles across Defence.

      • Provided RAAF subject-matter expertise to Defence minor ICT projects alongside general Project Officer duties.
      • At Air Force Headquarters, managed network and communications capability across the Integrated Investment Plan — maintaining oversight of risk, milestones, scope and interdependencies for every project Air Force network capability depends on.
      • Electrical Engineering
      • Capability Management
      • Project Delivery

    2. Electronics TechnicianRoyal Australian Air Force

      Nov 2008 — July 2017· 9 yr
      1. Aircraftman
      2. Leading Aircraftman
      3. Corporal

      Enlisted as an electronics technician, trade-qualifying in 2013. Specialised in deployable satellite communications — from VSATs to 2.4 m dishes and their RF and aggregation systems — then in the network and security appliances that carry secure traffic from remote sites back to core networks over satellite bearers.

      • Deployed on Operation Slipper (Afghanistan, 2011–12) as a network and satellite shift technician, and Operation Okra (Middle East, 2015–16) as the NCO in charge of deployed server operations.
      • Planned and installed the CTF-150 network extension in Bahrain — restricted and secret networks, end to end — ahead of Australia's command of the task force; awarded a Commander Joint Operations Silver Commendation.
      • Administered and maintained deployable classified ICT systems before accepting a commission as an officer.
      • Satellite Comms
      • Cisco
      • RF Systems
      • Network Security

Capabilities

Focus areas
  • Storage engines
  • Virtual networking
  • Hypervisors
  • Kubernetes control planes
  • Observability
  • Site reliability
Tools & technologies
  • Go
  • Kubernetes
  • QEMU/KVM
  • OVN
  • Elasticsearch
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Ansible
  • Terraform
  • Linux
  • Windows Server
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Capability Management
  • Project Delivery
  • Satellite Comms
  • Cisco
  • RF Systems
  • Network Security

Education & credentials

03

Beyond work

Away from the terminal I print things, chase clear skies, and have lately been pointing a camera at them. The starfield behind this site is a live sky for my own location — a small tribute to that.

  • 3D printing
  • Astronomy
  • Astrophotography
The Orion Nebula (Messier 42), with the Running Man Nebula alongside — photographed by Josh Siviour.
PlateThe Orion Nebula (M42) — shot from my backyard.