· Senior engineer
· Available for contracts
Full-stack developer · DevOps engineer
Lance Keay
I'm a senior engineer who is comfortable at every layer: the database schema, the API, the front end, and the pipeline and servers that ship it. I like systems that are easy to reason about at 3 a.m., and I write things down so the next person doesn't have to guess.
Profile
Most of my work is in the gap between "it works on my machine" and "it works for the customer": building the feature, and then making it deployable, observable and cheap to run. I'm happiest with small teams that want someone to own a problem end to end.
For the last few years a growing share of that work has been putting language models into real products, and deciding when not to. That's what the reviews on this site come from: I test tools the way I'd test them for a client, and write up what I'd tell that client.
How I work: remote or hybrid, written updates by default, short feedback loops, and documentation the team can keep using after I've gone.
· grouped by area
Skills
Back end
TypeScript and Node.js, Python, Go. REST and GraphQL APIs, PostgreSQL, Redis, queues and background jobs.
Front end
React and server-rendered HTML, accessible forms, design systems, and performance work that users actually notice.
DevOps & infrastructure
Docker, Kubernetes and k3s, Terraform, GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, Linux administration, reverse proxies, TLS.
Cloud & self-hosted
AWS and Azure basics done properly, cost reviews, and on-prem and homelab-scale hosting when the data shouldn't leave.
Reliability
Monitoring and alerting with Prometheus and Grafana, logs people can search, tested backups, incident write-ups.
Applied AI
LLM features in products, retrieval, evaluation sets, agent tooling, local model serving, and token cost modelling.
· summary
Experience summary
Summary by type of engagement · full history, dates and references are in the CV
Contract full-stack & DevOps
I build product features end to end and take on the infrastructure behind them: CI/CD pipelines, containerised deployments, environments the team can recreate, and the monitoring to know when something's wrong.
Platform & migration work
I move ageing applications onto containers and modern pipelines one step at a time, without a big-bang rewrite, and leave a runbook behind for each change.
Applied AI integration
I add language-model features to existing products, with an evaluation set, a cost model and a fallback plan written before launch, and I self-host models where privacy requires it.
Senior / lead developer roles
Code review, mentoring, technical design documents, and being the person who says "let's measure that first".
Get the CV
Two pages: profile, skills, full employment history and education. The Word version is there for agencies that need to reformat it.