Sheet 01San Francisco, CA

Jordan Ellis

Kubernetes, Go, Platform Engineering, Terraform, Observability

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

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.

Download CV
Portrait of Jordan Ellis
Fig. 01

02

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.

03

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

04

Experience

2022 — Present

Staff Platform Engineer @ Lumen Payments

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.

2019 — 2022

Senior Site Reliability Engineer @ Harbor Commerce

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.

2016 — 2019

Infrastructure Engineer @ Beacon Data

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.

05

Skills

Infrastructure
KubernetesTerraformAWSGCPPulumi
Languages
GoPythonTypeScriptRustBash
Observability
PrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryThanos
Practices
SREPlatform EngineeringIncident CommandSLOs

06

Projects

01kubecost-liteOpen-source cost attribution for Kubernetes namespaces without the enterprise price tag. 2.4k stars, used in production by around 60 companies.Go · Kubernetes · OSS02pavedAn opinionated scaffolding CLI that generates a service with CI, observability, and deploy config already wired up. Internal tool, later open-sourced.Go · Developer Experience03slo-burnA 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

07

Education

2014 — 2016

University of California, Berkeley

MS Computer Science — Distributed Systems · Distinction

2010 — 2014

Georgia Institute of Technology

BS Computer Science · Highest Honors

08

Certifications

2023

Certified Kubernetes Administrator — CNCF

2022

AWS Solutions Architect — Professional — Amazon Web Services

2021

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate — HashiCorp

All templates