Lance Keay

About and CV

Senior full-stack developer and DevOps engineer, working as a contractor. Based in the UK, working remotely or on-site.

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Profile

I build web applications and the systems they run on. Most of my work sits where those meet: an API that needs to scale, a deploy pipeline nobody trusts, a cloud bill that grew faster than the product, or a team that needs both a feature shipped and the on-call fixed.

I like small teams, written decisions and boring infrastructure. I am happiest when I leave a codebase that the people after me can run without calling me.

Outside client work I run a homelab and test AI tools and self-hosted software on it. The posts are the notes from that.

Skills

Application development

TypeScript and Node, Python, Go for small services. React and server-rendered front ends. PostgreSQL, Redis, queue-based workers, REST and GraphQL APIs.

Infrastructure and DevOps

Linux, Docker, Kubernetes and k3s, Terraform, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. AWS and Hetzner, Cloudflare, Prometheus and Grafana, sensible alerting.

AI in production

LLM API integration, model routing, prompt caching and cost control, retrieval over internal documents, evaluating coding agents on real codebases.

Ways of working

Short written proposals before code, pairing with in-house engineers, runbooks and handover as part of the job rather than an extra.

Experience, most recent first

  1. Independent contractor

    Full-stack and platform work for product teams: deploy pipelines, cloud migrations and cost reviews, and LLM features taken from prototype to production.

  2. Lead engineer, platform team, SaaS company

    Led a small team that moved the product from hand-managed servers to containers and infrastructure as code, and owned on-call and incident review.

  3. Full-stack developer, digital agency

    Built and maintained client web applications end to end, from database design to the front end and the servers they ran on.

Experience entries are placeholders written for this build. Dates, employers and references are in the downloadable CV.

Contract, remote or UK on-site

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