San Francisco, CA

Jordan Ellis

Staff Platform Engineer — Kubernetes, Go, and developer experience at scale

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I build the platforms other engineers build on. Ten years across infrastructure and developer tooling, most recently cutting deploy times from 40 minutes to under 4 for a 300-engineer org.

Kubernetes · Go · Platform Engineering · Terraform · Observability

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01

About

I care about the gap between 'it works on my machine' and 'it works for three hundred engineers on a Friday afternoon'. Most of my work is unglamorous: build caching, golden paths, paved roads, and the kind of observability that means nobody has to guess at 3am. I have shipped internal developer platforms at two scale-ups and one enterprise, and I have opinions about all three.

02

Impact

40m → 4m

Deploy time

Rebuilt CI topology and cache layer

$1.4M

Annual cloud savings

Right-sizing plus spot migration

99.98%

Platform uptime

Sustained across 18 months

300+

Engineers served

Internal developer platform

03

Experience

Lumen Payments

2022 — Present

Staff Platform Engineer · San Francisco, CA

  • Led the migration of 140 services from bespoke Jenkins pipelines to a shared Tekton platform, cutting median deploy time from 40 minutes to 3m 50s.
  • Designed the multi-tenant Kubernetes topology now running production traffic across four regions.
  • Built the internal CLI that 300+ engineers use daily; adoption reached 94% without a mandate.

Harbor Commerce

2019 — 2022

Senior Site Reliability Engineer · San Francisco, CA

  • Owned the observability stack — Prometheus, Thanos, and a Grafana estate covering 2,000 services.
  • Cut alert volume 71% by replacing threshold alerts with SLO burn-rate alerting, which measurably reduced on-call burnout.
  • Ran incident command for Tier-1 outages and rewrote the postmortem process around blameless review.

Beacon Data

2016 — 2019

Infrastructure Engineer · Remote

  • Automated cluster provisioning with Terraform and Ansible across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
  • Contributed to the Beacon Cloud control plane, focusing on rolling-upgrade safety.
04

Skills

Infrastructure

Kubernetes, Terraform, AWS, GCP, Pulumi

Languages

Go, Python, TypeScript, Rust, Bash

Observability

Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Thanos

Practices

SRE, Platform Engineering, Incident Command, SLOs

05

Projects

kubecost-lite

Open-source cost attribution for Kubernetes namespaces without the enterprise price tag. 2.4k stars, used in production by around 60 companies.

Go · Kubernetes · OSS

paved

An opinionated scaffolding CLI that generates a service with CI, observability, and deploy config already wired up. Internal tool, later open-sourced.

Go · Developer Experience

slo-burn

A Prometheus rule generator that turns a plain-English SLO into multi-window burn-rate alerts. Grew out of the Harbor Commerce alerting rewrite.

Prometheus · Python · SRE

06

Education

University of California, Berkeley

MS Computer Science — Distributed Systems — Distinction

2014 — 2016

Georgia Institute of Technology

BS Computer Science — Highest Honors

2010 — 2014
07

Certifications

Certified Kubernetes Administrator — CNCF

2023

AWS Solutions Architect — Professional — Amazon Web Services

2022

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate — HashiCorp

2021
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