About
I lead platform engineering, reliability, security, and AI first engineering across multicloud SaaS environments. Over the past decade I've scaled engineering organizations from early foundations to high performing teams of 40+, inside companies growing from 80 to 200+ engineers. That work has unlocked millions in revenue, delivered millions in operational efficiencies, and held enterprise grade reliability across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
My specialty is growth stage SaaS at the moment it has to grow up: taking products multicloud, making reliability a competitive advantage instead of a tax, embedding AI into how engineering actually works, and building the operating model that keeps a scaling org fast.
I've stayed technical the whole way. I came up through hardware, networking, and infrastructure, and I still work close to the metal: reviewing architecture, getting into Kubernetes and Terraform when it matters, and building with AI coding agents daily. I lead from in front of the work, not above it.
Focus areas
- Platform engineering
- Multicloud SaaS (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Kubernetes and Terraform
- Reliability and SRE
- AI first engineering
- Security and compliance
- Snowflake and data platforms
- Organizational design
- Engineering leadership
Experience
Babylist Director of Platform Engineering
2025 to 2026
Cut build and deploy times from 38 minutes to 4 and increased deployment frequency 6x for an organization of 100 engineers, reporting directly to the CTO and holding 99.99% uptime. Built the platform team into a product minded partner embedded with product engineering, owning infrastructure, CI/CD, security, and developer experience. Drove AI first engineering across my org as part of a company wide push, making AI part of how engineers work daily; work that had taken months began shipping in days. Built an AI agent that joins incidents, correlates data across the stack, and proposes root cause, cutting on call burden from hours a week to minutes. Helped take incident culture beyond engineering to the rest of the company.
dbt Labs Director of Engineering, Infrastructure & Platform
2023 to 2025
Customers outside AWS faced egress costs that priced dbt Cloud out, so I took it from a single cloud to full availability across AWS, Azure, and GCP, unlocking millions in revenue and partnering directly with Microsoft, Google, Snowflake, and Databricks along the way. Served on the Senior Leadership Team while scaling my organization from 15 to 40+ across Platform, Infrastructure, SRE, Release Engineering, and Software, sustaining high retention by strengthening the management layer and developing leaders. Led the team through the multicloud shift, reskilling AWS specialists across three clouds. Raised uptime from under 99% to 99.99% by building observability and incident culture from near zero, and authored the IC and management career ladders, junior through VP, adopted across the company.
ArisGlobal Director of Site Reliability Engineering
2022 to 2023
Hired to run a small SRE team at a pharmacovigilance company whose drug safety software serves big pharma; within a year I owned a global organization of 80 engineers spanning Cloud Engineering, DevOps, SRE, Database Reliability, and Data Warehousing, with a $20M budget. Brought a Snowflake data warehousing product to market end to end, from architecture to customer delivery, opening millions in new revenue opportunities while operating under HIPAA and GDPR at 99.95% uptime.
Aptiv Production Support Leader · Director level (SRE, DevOps, Data, Cloud & Infrastructure)
2018 to 2022
Hired to lead a division assembled from four acquired startups and run like a startup inside a global automotive supplier. Helped put one of the world's first commercial autonomous ride hailing fleets on the road with Lyft: 100,000+ paid rides in Las Vegas on a platform my teams ran. Owned the real time data platform behind the fleet, processing 20M+ telemetry events a day with latency under a second, and rebuilt the platform from AWS to Azure to win a major customer, expanding the team across four continents. Predictive maintenance systems my teams built cut vehicle downtime 30% and delivered millions in operational efficiencies. The autonomous driving program later became Motional, Aptiv's joint venture with Hyundai.
Foundations 2004 to 2018
I've been doing this for twenty years, from the bottom of the stack up. At Best Buy I ran IT across Michigan stores and the district office, leading teams that ranged from 12 to 40: hardware, operating systems, networking, budgets. At Tower International I was an infrastructure architect for global manufacturing, deep in Linux, databases, and virtualization, supporting ERP and financial systems around the world. At Meridian I built DevOps and SRE practices from scratch in regulated healthcare, personally architected the Hadoop data lake behind fraud detection that saved millions, and drove cloud bursting from VMware to AWS when that was still a novel idea. By the time I was leading platform organizations, I'd personally operated every layer they're built on.
How I operate
- High say do ratio. We do what we say we will. Over time that becomes the organization's reputation, and reputation is the currency that buys autonomy, budget, and the benefit of the doubt.
- Say hard things nicely. Feedback is a working norm, not an annual event. It moves in every direction, and senior people go first.
- One first team. We debate hard at the leadership table, then speak with one voice. My team never hears me question another team's plan. They hear that I helped shape it, I stand behind it, and here is how we support it.
- Grow the leaders, not just the org. Organizations scale when judgment scales. I build leaders deliberately, and the best evidence of my work is the people it produced.
- Write it down. Strategy, standards, career ladders, postmortems. Organizations remember what is written and relitigate what is not. The playbooks below are public versions of that discipline.
- Platforms are products. Engineers are customers, not ticket submitters. Roadmaps, adoption, and developer experience carry the same rigor as anything revenue facing.
- Simple beats clever. Complexity is a tax paid monthly. Fewer moving parts, owned end to end. This site is plain HTML in a repo I deploy myself.
- Go to bed smarter than you woke up. Twenty years in, and I still refuse to manage from memory. New tools, new research, a deeper layer of the stack, every day.
Playbooks
Frameworks I use, written down and public.
career_ladder
A practical engineering career ladder from IC to VP: the levels, the calibration process, and the failure modes that kill ladders.
ai_first_engineering
The playbook for taking an engineering org to AI as the default way work gets done, from the first tools to AI in the deploy pipeline.
Get in touch
The fastest way to reach me is email at rob@onebk.io or a message on LinkedIn.