Lance Keay

About Lance

I'm a senior full-stack developer and DevOps engineer. I like the whole path from a pull request to a running service, and I'm usually brought in when that path has become slow, fragile or expensive.

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One page, updated November 2026. Same content in both formats.

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Profile

Most of my work sits between application code and infrastructure. I write the TypeScript, Python or Go, and I also write the Terraform, the pipeline and the runbook, so the people who inherit it can change it without calling me.

I work as a contractor, usually embedded in a product team for three to twelve months. I'm comfortable leading a small group, and just as comfortable being the person who quietly fixes the build on day two.

The reviews on this site come from the same habit: try the thing properly, write down what happened, and say plainly whether I would use it again.

Skills

Application development
TypeScript, Node.js, React, Python (Django, FastAPI), Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, REST and GraphQL APIs
Infrastructure and platforms
Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Ansible, Proxmox, Nginx and Caddy
Delivery
GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, trunk-based development, blue-green and canary releases, infrastructure as code reviews
Cloud
AWS and Azure day-to-day; Hetzner and on-premises hardware for cost-sensitive workloads
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, on-call runbooks that people actually read
AI tooling
Running local models, LLM gateways and cost controls, coding agents in real codebases, evaluating vendors on price and data handling

Experience

Sample entries for layout, to be replaced with Lance's own history
  1. 2023 to now

    Contract DevOps and platform engineer

    Container platform migrations, CI/CD rebuilds and cloud cost reviews for product teams, typically three to twelve months per engagement.

  2. 2019 to 2023

    Lead full-stack developer

    Led a small team building a customer-facing web platform in TypeScript and Python, and owned its move from hand-built servers to Kubernetes.

  3. 2015 to 2019

    Full-stack developer

    Web applications and internal tools; picked up the deployment pipeline because nobody else wanted it, and kept it.

  4. Before 2015

    Developer and systems administrator

    Linux servers, PHP and the first automated deploys of my career.

Get in touch

Tell me what you're building, what's in the way, and roughly when you need help.