Lance Keay
Senior full-stack developer and DevOps engineer. I like systems that are boring to operate. I build the application, the pipeline that ships it, and the monitoring that says when it's unwell.
Profile
I work across the whole delivery path. I write TypeScript and Python services and React front ends, then do the containers, infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD that get them to production and keep them there. Clients usually bring me in when a product has outgrown its first deployment: builds are slow, environments drift, nobody trusts the release process, or the cloud bill has crept up.
Lately a growing share of my work is putting AI tooling into real systems: model gateways, local and hosted LLM serving, agent workflows with proper permissions, and the cost tracking that stops a prototype becoming a surprise invoice. The reviews on this site come out of that work. I test the tools before I recommend them to anyone who's paying me.
Plain over clever
Code and infrastructure the next person can read, change and roll back.
Measured, not guessed
Metrics, logs and cost data before opinions, including mine.
Written down
Runbooks, decision records and handover notes come as part of the job.
Skills
Languages
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Python
- Go
- C#
- SQL
- Bash
Application
- Node.js
- React
- Next.js
- .NET
- FastAPI
- REST & GraphQL
Data
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- SQL Server
- Message queues
DevOps & platform
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Helm
- Terraform
- Ansible
- GitHub Actions
- GitLab CI
Cloud & hosting
- AWS
- Azure
- Proxmox
- Linux
- Nginx / Caddy
Observability & AI
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Loki
- LLM serving
- Agent tooling
- Evals & cost tracking
Experience summary Sample
Placeholder summary to show the layout. Lance's real history is in the downloadable CV.
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Recent years
Contract full-stack & DevOps engineer
Self-employed · remote and on-site
Platform and delivery work for product teams: moving services onto Kubernetes, rebuilding CI/CD so a release is one reviewed merge, cutting cloud spend by right-sizing and removing idle resources, and adding LLM features behind a gateway with logging and budgets.
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Earlier
Senior developer, then lead
Permanent roles · product software
Owned services end to end, from API design to on-call. Introduced infrastructure-as-code and automated test environments, and mentored developers on testing and deployment practice.
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Start
Developer
Web and line-of-business applications
Full-stack web development on SQL-backed systems, where I learned that most incidents are deployment incidents.
Have a system that needs a steady pair of hands?
Send a short note with what you're running and what's hurting. I'll tell you plainly whether I'm the right fit.