About me

I'm a passionate software developer that loves learning and solving hard problems. I have a varied skill-set across cloud infrastructure, software development, product management and people leadership. I'm a strong communicator and naturally curious, and I enjoy sharing my learnings and experience with anyone who will listen.

Github
niksko
Blog
www.skouf.com
LinkedIn
profile
Email
[email protected]

Work history

SEEK

Senior staff engineer

2020-04 - Present

https://seek.com.au

Drove product direction and delivery of an organisation-wide internal developer platform

  • Radically reduced the time and knowledge required to deploy new applications to production by leading design and implementation of an EKS-based Kubernetes platform and a Typescript CLI for deploying services
  • Consolidated documentation and catalogued services by implementing Backstage organisation-wide, including upstream contributions to the open-source Backstage project in Typescript
  • Set roadmap and product metrics, aligned team goals to developer pain points, and uncovered user needs through research and interviews
  • Helped to grow graduates through to senior engineers with technical and social mentorship via formal mentoring programs, line management and informally
  • Seconded as an engineering manager for four months as part of parental leave back-fill

Myob

Software developer

2018-04 - 2020-04

https://myob.com.au

Ran a large multi-tenant Kubernetes cluster in AWS, delivered Kubernetes training and education, interviewed and mentored graduates

  • Delivered a greenfields fullstack project in Nodejs and React, running on Kubernetes
  • Ran and maintained a large, multi-tenant AWS-based Kubernetes cluster running hundreds of applications and thousands of containers
  • Developed innovative Kubernetes operators to increase developer velocity and productivity, using bash scripting, Golang and Python
  • Delivered Kubernetes training and educated developers on Kubernetes architecture and best practice
  • Mentored and taught graduates in software design and devops best practice

Deloitte Digital

Software developer

2016-07 - 2018-04

https://www.deloittedigital.com.au

Delivered multiple websites for large clients, developed widely-used internal tooling, and pioneered continuous integration and cloud infrastructure patterns

  • Developed high quality websites for large clients using ASP.NET MVC5 and the Sitecore CMS
  • Designed and implemented new patterns for devops configuration-as-code utilising Bamboo Specs and Kotlin, greatly improving developer productivity and reducing continuous integration pains for component-based development workflows
  • Created reliable and widely-used internal tooling for building, packaging and deploying code, leveraging Gulp.js, Powershell and Octopus Deploy
  • Managed infrastructure-as-code solutions using Hashicorp Terraform and Packer for large cloud infrastructure deployments

sensiLab

Casual software developer

2015-10 - 2016-02

https://sensilab.monash.edu

Developed innovative software for exciting research, collaborating closely with researchers in the fields of user interaction design and hardware design

  • Designed a Node.js based messaging server for managing communication between bluetooth devices
  • Translated functional requirements into a web visualisation frontend for realtime data presentation using standard web technologies and Rickshaw.js
  • Developed multitasking Arduino code for controlling and monitoring hardware peripherals in real time
  • Developed an open source video presentation application with web frontend for advertising using a Raspberry Pi and Node.js

Education

Monash University

2010-03 - 2013-11

Bachelor of Science Advanced with Honours (Applied mathematics)

Monash University

2014-03 - 2017-11

Bachelor of Computer Science

Skills

Kubernetes

  • EKS
  • Istio
  • ArgoCD
  • Golang
  • Operators
  • Kustomize
  • Prometheus

Infrastructure

  • AWS
  • CloudFormation
  • Cloudflare
  • Terraform
  • Buildkite
  • Datadog
  • Backstage

Web

  • Typescript
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • Webpack
  • React
  • TailwindCSS
  • Zod

Product management

  • User research
  • Product roadmaps
  • Feature prioritisation
  • Journey mapping
  • Product vision and strategy

Interests

  • fermentation
  • photography
  • arduino
  • cooking
  • mechanical keyboards