Lance Keay

About / CV

Full-stack by trade, on call by habit.

Senior full-stack developer and DevOps engineer. I build the application and the path it takes to production, and I stay around long enough to see how both behave.

Download the CV Email Lance

01Profile

I work across the whole stack: TypeScript and Python services, the databases under them, and the CI/CD, containers and cloud they run on. Most of my contracts start with "the app works, but shipping it is slow and scary", and end with a pipeline the team trusts.

Lately that includes AI tooling: putting model gateways, coding assistants and agents into a team's workflow with budgets, logs and an off switch. I review those tools on this site because I would rather tell a client what I have run than what I have read.

02CV download

CV as PDF1 page · for reading CV as Word.docx · for agencies to edit

Both files carry the same content. The downloads included with this design are sample documents with placeholder experience.

03Skills

Application

  • TypeScript
  • Node.js
  • Python
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Django
  • FastAPI
  • REST & GraphQL APIs

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • SQLite
  • Message queues
  • Schema migrations

Delivery & ops

  • Docker
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Linux
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • Prometheus & Grafana

AI tooling

  • Model gateways
  • Coding assistants
  • Agent frameworks
  • Self-hosted LLMs
  • Cost tracking

Outlined in blue: what I would put at the centre of a contract.

04Experience

Sample entries. The shape of the experience summary. Roles and dates are placeholders until replaced with Lance's real history; client names are withheld by design.

  1. 2022 — now

    Independent contractor · full-stack & DevOps

    Contracts that pair feature work with the delivery path: moving teams from hand-run deploys to reviewed pipelines, containerising services, and setting up monitoring that pages the right person.

  2. 2018 — 2022

    Senior engineer · product team

    Owned a customer-facing web app and its API end to end, and the build and release tooling the rest of the team used.

  3. 2013 — 2018

    Developer, then platform engineer

    Started on the application, moved to the servers under it, and learned why both sides need to understand each other.

05How I work

Written down

Decisions, runbooks and handover notes go in the repo, so the team keeps them when I leave.

Small and reversible

Changes ship in pieces that can be rolled back. Big-bang migrations are planned as many small ones.

Plain about trade-offs

If a tool is the wrong fit, including an AI one, I say so early, with the reason.

06Get in touch

Tell me what you are building, what is slowing it down, and when you would like someone to start.

[email protected]