01Platform delivery
3 to 6 weeks → 1 to 2 hours
Reduced environment delivery from a multi-week request process to a repeatable internal platform workflow.
Platform engineering • Kubernetes • Developer experience
Based in the UK · Working across EMEA
01 / Introduction
David Collom
I help engineering organisations build platforms their developers can rely on.
I came into platform engineering through software development and still prefer to stay close to the code. Much of my work has been about removing avoidable delivery and operational work across betting and gambling, manufacturing, logistics, defence, security, professional services and e-commerce environments.
02 / Evidence
A few things I've worked on
These are three concrete examples from different points in my career. The project page has more detail on what I owned, built or contributed.
02Operational scale
400+ Award-winning e-commerce sites
Built and supported the infrastructure and automation behind a large, PCI-conscious hosting estate.
03Community contribution
KubeCon + ArgoCon
Spoken at KubeCon, ArgoCon and community events about Kubernetes cost, reliability and lessons from real incidents.
03 / Contexts
Built across demanding contexts
The common thread has been operational pressure: regulated systems, high-traffic platforms, customer-facing delivery and environments where downtime or manual process becomes expensive quickly.
Kubernetes platforms, service reliability and automation for teams working around highly visible production systems.
Public web systems, reporting, ERP, CRM and warehouse-facing integrations backed by production infrastructure.
Cloud-native security, platform architecture and delivery work in environments where assurance and governance matter.
Customer expectation management, success planning, design and implementation, mentoring, tutoring and technical training.
Infrastructure and operations for more than 400 e-commerce sites, including PCI-conscious patching, monitoring and incident response.
04 / Focus
What I tend to work on
Platform engineering
Internal platforms that take recurring delivery work out of tickets and give teams a supported route to production.
Developer experience
Finding the awkward parts of build, delivery and operations, then fixing them with the teams who use them every day.
Reliability & automation
Kubernetes operations, GitOps and automation for systems that need to be understandable when something goes wrong.
Technical leadership
Architecture and technical direction backed by prototypes, code and a clear account of the trade-offs.
05 / Philosophy
"I like finding work that engineers have learned to put up with, then working out whether the platform can remove it. Sometimes that means code; sometimes it means fixing the process around the code."
I still like getting hands-on. Architecture decisions tend to improve when the person making them has recently had to debug the result.
06 / Connect
Working through a difficult platform problem?
If the problem involves Kubernetes, developer platforms or too much manual operational work, I'm always happy to compare notes.