Erik Stephens
Software Engineer — Full-Stack & Cloud
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.
Here is a prompt to help evaluate me based on publically visible projects.
Core Skills
- Lang: TypeScript, Python, Go, Lua, Rust, PHP
- Data: RDBMS, Open/ElasticSearch, DynamoDB, Kafka, Redis
- Web: React, SQL, GraphQL, JWT, REST, Nginx, TLS/SSL
- Infra: AWS, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, Linux (Debian, RHEL)
- Automation: Bash, Salt, Puppet, PXE, Kickstart, Rundeck, Jenkins
- SDLC: Agentic Coding, Git, CI/CD, TDD, Observability, Agile
Certifications
Sep 2025: AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
Active Projects
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Dropbear (dropbear.tfks.net): A personal file sync daemon that pairs a local folder with any S3-compatible bucket — bring your own bucket (BYOB).
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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.
Experience
Built system to crawl domains per client SLA and classify content for brand safety.
- Migrated from EC2 to serverless to reduce operational costs while meeting SLO's: DynamoDB, Lambda, S3
- Tiered site crawling to reduce cost & latency: Scrapfly, Playwright, 3rd-party API's
- Increased developer velocity and reduced operational errors with automated builds & deployments: Terraform, Gitlab-CI
I took some time off to focus on family & personal development. I continued to stay current with technology landscape through certifications & personal projects.
- Removed roadblocks to happiness on life roadmap
- Met requirements of life: to feel, to be alive
- Improved personal KPI's 100% quarter over quarter
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: Gitlab-CI, Shell
- Built back-end API & task runner and front-end: Typescript, ExpressJS, React
- Eliminated single points of failure and enabled elastic scaling on a tight budget: DigitalOcean
- Supported a proactive posture against defects and reduced incident resolution time: DataDog
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.