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Zane Williamson
Lead Software Engineer · Platform & Infrastructure
AI-Velocity HUD · agentic delivery, measured snapshot …
Tokens · 7d
Tokens · 30d
Tool calls · 30d
Cache read · lifetime

Capability-tier mix · 30d

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Daily token volume · 30d

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Summary

Platform engineer building infrastructure since 2007 — deep Kubernetes, Terraform, and observability. The work is always the same shape: take an opaque infrastructure surface, instrument it, turn that instrumentation into an API, then build the developer tooling that makes it useful. The HUD above is the receipt for how I ship now: a tuned agent workflow that lets one experienced engineer move at near-team cadence — 165 merged PRs and ~2,000 commits in 17 months. Next bet: LLM inference performance (vLLM, CUDA, serving internals).

Experience

Lead Software Engineer — Salesforce (Falcon TIDE)
2024 — present
  • Built a custom Terraform HTTP backend capturing state metadata in-flight during apply → DynamoDB, across millions of state files.
  • Fronted it with an LLM query interface exposed as REST + an MCP server, so engineers query the Terraform footprint in natural language.
  • Leading consolidation of a sprawled EKS fleet into a smaller, centralized set — sharper SLOs, less operator toil.
Senior Staff SRE — Varo Bank
2022 — 2024
  • Owned platform reliability: Grafana Loki + Tempo + OpenTelemetry Operator; SLOs/SLIs across multiple platforms.
  • Migrated org off Helm → ArgoCD; K8s auth kube2iam → AWS client auth; cluster autoscaling; Kafka outbox → data-lake pipeline; team Go CLI.
Senior Staff Engineer — Flexport
2021 — 2022
  • Led greenfield Kubernetes platform: Terraform AWS + Helm-provider EKS, GitOps, Teleport-secured access, Python CLI entrypoint, reusable modules — spread via deliberate senior-engineer pairing.
Principal Engineer — Zillow
2015 — 2021
  • Open-sourced cidr-house-rules (Lambda + DynamoDB + API Gateway) auditing VPC/CIDR/EIP/NAT across dozens of AWS accounts → data-driven Terraform.
  • Drove Kubernetes-on-AWS rollout, Istio sidecar (tracing + mTLS), Envoy fronting Varnish. Lead contributor to apache/solr-operator.
Platform Engineering Consultant — Geniuslink
2013 — present · concurrent
  • Own a multi-cloud K8s platform across EKS, Linode LKE, DigitalOcean — ArgoCD GitOps, Loki/Mimir/OTel observability, Helmfile with per-PR dynamic dev envs, Terraform, Teleport, Fastly. Full-team cadence alongside a full-time role.

Technical Skills

Orchestration
Kubernetes (EKS · LKE · DigitalOcean), ArgoCD, Helm / Helmfile, Istio, Envoy
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform (custom backends, modules), GitOps
Observability
Grafana Loki / Mimir / Tempo, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, SLOs / SLIs
Cloud & Data
AWS (Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway, EKS), Linode, DigitalOcean, Kafka, Postgres
Languages
Go, Python, Terraform HCL, Monkey C; Java / Node instrumentation
AI / Platform tooling
LLM query interfaces, MCP servers, agentic developer workflows

Focus

LLM inference performance — vLLM, CUDA, and serving internals — toward contributing upstream and tuning large-scale inference.

Stats are a point-in-time snapshot from my live AI-velocity dashboard · zane.srebench.com/hud.html