Erik Stephens
Senior Software Engineer — Automation Guru
career@tfks.net
Summary
I am a pragmatic full-stack engineer skilled at recognizing when to keep implementations simple and when to introduce greater sophistication for long-term value. Through the development of automated build pipelines and creating release management processes, I have helped teams increase their velocity, reduce errors, and make releases low-stress events. Cloud or on-premises, back-end or front-end, I am comfortable in many environments working on a variety of projects.
Core Skills
- Lang: TypeScript, Python, Go, Lua, Rust, PHP
- Data: RDBMS, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB, Kafka, Redis
- Web: React, SQL, GraphQL, JWT, REST, Nginx, TLS/SSL
- Infra: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Linux (Debian, RHEL), Terraform
- Automation: Bash, Salt, Puppet, PXE, Kickstart, Rundeck, Jenkins
- SDLC: Git, CI/CD, TDD, Observability, Agile
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
Active Projects
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LogBus (logbus.tfks.net): A Swiss Army knife for log processing. Built plugin framework allowing event aggregation, stream fan in & out, and simple but powerful pipeline customization.
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FotoLog (fotolog.tfks.net): A mobile-first SPA for curating & sharing trip activity & photos. Built mapping & sharing features; prototyped as a potential tool for site management / field ops.
Personal Time
Focused on family & personal development. Continued to stay current with technology landscape through certifications & personal projects.
Experience
Scaled a bootstrapped MVP into a full SaaS product supporting thousands of users.
- Partnered with founders to prioritize features, balance velocity with stability, and mentor junior devs.
- Automated product updates using versioned artifacts with smoke tests & rollback capability.
- Built back-end API & task runner and front-end React SPA.
- Eliminated single points of failure and enabled elastic scaling on a minimal budget.
- Integrated DataDog to support a proactive posture against defects and reduce incident resolution time.
Managed 10's of 100-node Elasticsearch clusters processing petabytes of data.
- Automated hardware provisioning with Salt; built custom tools to accelerate ops at scale.
- Scaled clusters reliably across on-prem Kubernetes environments.
- Partnered with product team to ensure search & analytics workloads met SLA's.
Blended SW development & systems engineering for a global VPN provider.
- Reduced server deployments from days to hours using iPXE/Kickstart over HTTPS.
- Built and operated a mid-sized ELK stack for metrics & logs to improve abuse detection & capacity planning.
- Spear-headed an initiative to host GitLab to remove silos and improve build reliability.
Independent venture providing SaaS and DevOps expertise to startups and small teams.
- Built reproducible delivery workflows (Jenkins, Rundeck, Python/Bash tooling).
- Helped clients modernize on AWS: secured VPCs, automated pipelines, and isolated environments.
- Designed observability solutions (ELK, Datadog, Zabbix) that enabled proactive operations.
- Acted as fractional CTO: coached teams, aligned tech choices with business needs.
Held engineering roles across startups and enterprises. Highlights:
- Improved site performance at NewTimes via caching, load balancing, replication.
- Built test framework at DataBill to increase dev productivity and reduce pipeline errors.
- Co-founded Edgeos; grew product through acquisition.