Rowan Adeyemi  /  Platform & Reliability Résumé  ·  Rev. Oct 2026

Staff Platform Engineer

RowanAdeyemi

Builds the dependable layer underneath product teams — clusters, delivery pipelines, paging rotas, and the documentation that makes all three survivable at 3am.

Target role
Principal Platform Engineer or SRE Lead
Based
Lisbon · remote within CET ±3
Focus
Kubernetes · observability · delivery
Contact
rowan.adeyemi@cloudcrest.dev

01

Profile

Eleven years spent making infrastructure boring

Most of that time has gone into turning fragile, hand-tended environments into platforms other engineers can use without asking permission first. Comfortable owning the whole path from a commit to a running workload: build, artifact, rollout, alert, rollback, and the write-up afterwards.

Work usually starts with the on-call log rather than the architecture diagram. Prefers removing a system to adding one, treats runbooks as part of the deliverable instead of follow-up work, and would rather hand a team a paved road than a ticket queue.

02

Capabilities

What I am hands-on with

Orchestration
Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, Karpenter, Istio and Linkerd service meshes
Cloud
AWS (EKS, IAM, VPC, RDS, S3), GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub), multi-account landing zones
Delivery
GitHub Actions, Buildkite, progressive delivery, trunk-based release trains, artifact signing
Infrastructure as code
Terraform, Terragrunt, Pulumi, policy as code with OPA and Conftest
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki, SLO design and error-budget policy
Languages
Go and Python for services and tooling, Bash where it belongs, a working amount of Rust
Reliability practice
Incident command, blameless review, capacity planning, game days, on-call design
Working with people
On-call onboarding, platform office hours, internal engineering guides, design review

03

Selected work

Three projects worth describing

Chosen because the constraints were interesting, not because they were the largest.

01

Multi-tenant delivery platform

Northfield Logistics

Kubernetes · Argo CD · Terraform · OpenTelemetry

  • Consolidated nine team-owned clusters into three shared environments with namespace isolation, resource quotas and a self-service onboarding path that takes a new service from repository to staging in an afternoon.
  • Replaced a hand-written release checklist with a signed, auditable pipeline, so a bad deploy became a single revert instead of a war room.
02

Observability rebuild

Alder & Pike

Metrics · traces · SLOs · error budgets

  • Instrumented the twelve busiest services with OpenTelemetry and retired three overlapping monitoring vendors in favour of one Prometheus and Grafana stack the team could actually reason about.
  • Wrote the first service objectives the business agreed with, then tied paging to error budgets so an alert corresponds to customer-visible harm rather than a noisy host.
03

Capacity and cost programme

Harbour Grain Co.

Karpenter · right-sizing · spot capacity · chargeback

  • Gave each team visibility into its own spend, then shut idle staging capacity down outside working hours without anyone noticing it had gone.
  • Moved nightly batch workloads onto interruptible capacity with checkpointing, keeping reporting deadlines intact while avoiding long reservation commitments.

04

Experience

Where the time went

2023 — Present 3 yrs

Staff Platform Engineer

Northfield Logistics — Lisbon / remote

Technical owner of the internal platform used by six product teams.

  • Set the platform roadmap with staff engineers from each product group and published it alongside the trade-offs, so teams could plan against it.
  • Runs the on-call rota and the review process after every significant incident, including the unglamorous follow-up work.

2020 — 2023 3 yrs

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Alder & Pike — remote

Reliability for a payments-adjacent product with a narrow maintenance window.

  • Led the observability rebuild and the migration from nightly batch reconciliation to event-driven ingestion.
  • Introduced regular game days and wrote the first runbooks that new engineers could follow unsupervised.

2017 — 2020 3 yrs

Infrastructure Engineer

Harbour Grain Co. — Porto

Moved a warehouse and logistics estate from two colocated racks into managed cloud.

  • Rebuilt provisioning in Terraform, replacing a decade of manual changes with reviewable modules.
  • Kept the legacy scheduling system running during the migration and decommissioned it without a cutover outage.

2015 — 2017 2 yrs

Systems Administrator

Meridian Press — Lisbon

First infrastructure hire at a small publishing group.

  • Automated backups, patching and print-deadline monitoring for the editorial toolchain.
  • Learned, the hard way, why restores matter more than backups.

05

Education & certification

Formal and ongoing

BSc, Computer Systems Engineering

Tagus Polytechnic Institute · 2011 — 2015

Final project on scheduling batch workloads across unreliable commodity hardware, which turned out to be useful preparation for spot instances.

Certification

  • CKA
  • CKS
  • AWS Solutions Architect — Professional
  • Terraform Associate

Currently reading

Queueing theory for capacity work, incident analysis literature from outside software, and anything well written about the economics of running other people’s workloads.

06

Contact

Happy to talk about platform work

A short note about the problem you are trying to solve is more useful than a role description.

Email
rowan.adeyemi@cloudcrest.dev
Base & timezone
Lisbon, Portugal — WET/WEST, overlapping CET ±3
Availability
Open to conversations from November 2026, one month notice
References
Former managers and platform peers available on request

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