Kip Hamiltons

Kip Hamiltons Resume (Feb 2025)

Software Developer

GitHub LinkedIn

Keywords

GCP, AWS, Terraform, C++20, Python, Java, Bazel, Bash, Kubernetes, Docker, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, CMake, Atlassian Bamboo, GitHub Actions, Finance, Agile, Scrum, Linux

Experience

EngFlow

APAC Lead, Customer Success

Dec 2024 – Present

Developer Support Engineer

April 2024 – Dec 2024

  • Wearing many hats, splitting time between DevOps, SRE, infrastructure engineering, software engineering, incident mitigation and management, customer success/technical account management, code migrations, security analysis, system administration, solutions/sales engineering, project management, hiring, and more.
  • Writing and debugging Java applications running distributed systems with 1,000s of instances, using Terraform-provisioned Infrastructure-as-Code on AWS and GCP.
  • Key achievements include:
    • Managing customers with millions of ARR, leading them through migration onto remote build execution.
    • Implementing a RAID cache for distributed workers for our biggest customer, improving end-to-end action times 15%, then a TMPFS cache, improving them a further 30%.
    • Adding support for application endpoint probers to GCP.
    • Implementing a proof-of-concept internal cluster UI to address a gap in our tooling that I identified, creating a central view of all customer clusters and internal operations.
    • Handling more than twice the incident volume of the next closest colleague, covering ~30% of all on-call for the company. Each incident response required me to mitigate, root-cause, and write a post-mortem, creating and implementing action items to prevent future issues.
    • Instituting IAM structure on remote cache to prevent bad actors from poisoning it, among other security hardening measures.

Macquarie Group

C++ Developer & Build Engineer

June 2022 – March 2024

  • On the core platform team for Commodities and Global Markets trading risk platform. Working on C++20 features, such as a telemetry suite, compiler upgrades, and modularisation of the core C++ platform.
  • Upgraded our Bazel fork from v4 to v5, then to v6. I was a subject matter expert on the build ecosystem, assisting developers across the business.
  • Accrued the highest reputation in Commodities and Global Markets on the internal Stack Overflow.
  • Worked on the cloud migration of our risk platform to AWS’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). The migration delivered a 30% improvement in performance and major cost savings. My contributions included:
    • Migrating a major trading application to our EKS platform.
    • Creating release processes which integrated existing business processes and approval mechanisms into automated workflows.
    • Analysing and removing dependencies on legacy file delivery system, transitioning to Argo CD based delivery.
  • Supervised an intern project that delivered a cost attribution solution for business use of the risk platform. That project prompted the creation of a cost attribution team to standardise our solution and maintain it, solving a 25 year old problem.
  • Operated in strict, strongly audited regulatory environment of investment banking.

Defence Science and Technology Group, Australia

Cyber Research Cadet

Feb 2020 – June 2022

  • Conducting cyber related research.
  • Self-directed projects, often using Java, C++, and Python.

NUbots, University of Newcastle, NSW

DevOps Team Lead & QA Team Lead

Sep 2019 – Dec 2021

  • Conceived and spearheaded a testing initiative, creating the QA team and mandating the introduction of unit tests for new features.
  • Wrote a C++ testing API using Catch2, which allowed us to unit test previously untestable modules, comprising ~80% of the code.
  • Migrated CI from Buildkite to GitHub Actions.
  • Mentored nine students, formulating projects for them, and meeting with them regularly.

Education

The University of Newcastle

2018–2021

  • B. Computer Science (Distinction), majoring in Computer Systems and Robotics.
  • B. Mathematics (Distinction), majoring in Studies in Mathematics and Statistics.
  • Selected as graduate speaker for my cohort’s graduation ceremony.
  • Awarded College Medal from the College of Engineering, Science and Environment.
  • Placed on the Faculty Commendation List every year of my degree.

References

Available on request.