Principal-level cloud and serverless architecture consultant with around 20 years of experience across backend engineering, AWS/serverless systems, developer tools, customer-facing technical leadership, and Developer Relations.
I've been building web and backend systems since the early 2000s - starting with PHP and Symfony, moving through high-volume RESTful APIs, integration platforms, internal tools, and consumer web applications. My career has spanned work across multiple teams in South Africa before relocating to Portugal, where I'm now based.
I hold a BSc from the University of the Witwatersrand, where I studied Computer Science alongside Geology and Chemistry. The academic mix taught me to reason about complex systems from multiple angles - a habit that shapes how I approach architecture today.
I discovered serverless in 2016 and it fundamentally changed how I think about building applications. Since then, I've worked extensively with AWS Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS, DynamoDB, Step Functions, and the broader serverless ecosystem.
I spent several years at Serverless Inc. - the company behind the open-source Serverless Framework - where I worked as a Solutions Architect, Customer Success Engineer, and Developer Advocate. In those roles I helped hundreds of teams plan, build, and debug serverless architectures, from startups shipping their first Lambda function to enterprises migrating complex production workloads.
I'm a strong advocate for developing directly against the cloud rather than relying on local emulation - a position I've written and spoken about extensively. My keynote "Why local development for serverless is an anti-pattern" captured this perspective and has been widely referenced in the serverless community.
Much of my career has been spent at the intersection of engineering and customer-facing work. At Serverless Inc., I didn't just build - I helped customers design their architectures, troubleshoot production issues, plan migrations, and make technology decisions. This combination of hands-on engineering and customer empathy is core to how I consult.
I've published 18+ articles on serverless.com covering topics from architecture guides to CI/CD for monorepos to secrets management. I've spoken at the Serverless Architecture Conference in Berlin, appeared on the Serverless Chats podcast, and given talks at events like Node.TLV and Conf42.
I believe that clear writing and teaching are as important as technical skill. Good architecture doesn't help if the team can't understand or execute on it.
I work best where technical ambiguity, architecture debt, and team execution overlap. My role is to help teams make better architecture decisions, avoid avoidable failure modes, and turn cloud-native systems into something engineers can actually reason about.
Most teams don't need another full-time principal architect. They need someone who can come in with fresh eyes, assess what's working and what's risky, and leave them with a clear plan they can execute. That's what I do.