J. Gavin Ray

Principal Engineer ยท Platform & Infrastructure

J. Gavin Ray

I build platforms that let engineering teams
move fast without breaking things.

๐Ÿ“ Seattle area, WA

Engineer who thrives in operational environments, building infrastructure and integration platforms at scale. I'm passionate about eliminating technical debt, accelerating developer velocity, and building the kind of reliability that lets teams sleep at night.

I've built and led engineering teams from 0โ†’1, hired and grown senior engineers, and partnered with product to define roadmaps โ€” not just executed them. I care as much about the humans in the system as the systems themselves.

My approach: Test-driven development, continuous deployment, and obsessive documentation. I've been the person who inherited undocumented systems โ€” I don't do that to my colleagues.

15 min Avg MTTR after incident platform redesign
97% Reduction in CI/CD ship time (6h โ†’ 10min)
21 Sites migrated to unified orchestration

Principal Engineer

  • Founded Site Reliability Engineering team; built self-service infrastructure platform for product engineering teams
  • Architected incident management platform across 12 teams โ†’ MTTR reduced to avg 15 minutes
  • Redesigned CI/CD pipelines โ†’ ship time from 6 hours to 10 minutes via parallelization and build caching
  • Eliminated package/library vulnerabilities through dependency modernization, SBOM validation, automated patch pipelines

Senior Staff Engineer

  • Led migration of core revenue-generating applications from static to dynamic infrastructure
  • Designed and implemented common infrastructure platform on open source software
  • Extended platform to automate management of mission-critical revenue-generating applications
  • Authored HiTrust compliance automation for all covered environments
  • Core contributor to incident management process (infrastructure, software, security)
  • Led observability effort across entire software stack

Senior Software Engineer

  • Standardized deployment model across multiple teams โ†’ dramatic release velocity improvement
  • Coordinated migration of entire production stack across 21 sites from 4 orchestration systems to single platform
  • Led effort to operationalize and open source internal VPN service Doorman
  • Served in incident response unit

Software Engineer

  • Owned roadmap for internal automation and tooling
  • Lead engineer on HPE OneSphere and Platform9 integration project
  • Core contributor of lifecycle management tooling for all Platform9 deployments
  • Implemented security monitoring, remediation, and reporting tooling

Infrastructure

Kubernetes Terraform Ansible Helm Docker

Cloud

AWS GCP Azure Crusoe CoreWeave

CI/CD

GitHub Actions Jenkins ArgoCD Flux

Languages

Go Python Bash

Observability

Prometheus Grafana Mimir Loki OpenTelemetry

Practices

SRE Platform Engineering Agentic Systems HiTrust SBOM

I'm not actively looking, but I'm always open to interesting conversations about infrastructure, platforms, and engineering culture.