Lance Keay

About Lance

I'm a senior full-stack developer and DevOps engineer. I work on the whole path from a pull request to a running service: the application code, the pipeline that ships it, and the infrastructure it lands on.

Get the CV

Two pages: profile, skills and recent contracts. The Word version is there for agencies that need to edit it.

Download PDF Download Word

Profile

Most of my work sits where product development meets operations. I'm comfortable building a feature across the front end, API and database, and just as comfortable working out why its deploy takes forty minutes or why the bill doubled.

As a contractor I'm usually brought in for one of three things: to ship a piece of product work that needs someone senior across the whole stack, to sort out build and deployment so a team can release without fear, or to move services onto infrastructure the team can actually run. I leave documentation and a team that doesn't need me.

Outside client work I run a homelab and test AI tools and self-hosted software on real tasks. What I learn ends up on this site, and a good deal of it ends up in client work.

Skills

Application

  • TypeScript and Node.js
  • React and server-rendered front ends
  • Python for services and tooling
  • PostgreSQL and Redis
  • REST and event-driven APIs

Platform

  • Docker and Kubernetes
  • Terraform and Ansible
  • AWS and smaller VPS providers
  • Linux administration
  • Reverse proxies, TLS and SSO

Delivery

  • CI/CD with GitHub Actions and GitLab CI
  • Monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana
  • Logging and alerting that people read
  • Incident review and runbooks

AI tooling

  • Self-hosted models with Ollama
  • LLM APIs in production features
  • Retrieval over internal documents
  • Coding agents in team workflows

Experience

Sample outline for this design build. Lance's confirmed roles and dates go here; client names are left out until they are confirmed.

  1. Recent

    Contract platform engineer, software company

    Moved a set of services from hand-managed servers to containers with infrastructure as code, and rebuilt the release pipeline so any engineer could deploy.

  2. Before that

    Contract full-stack developer, product team

    Built customer-facing features across a React front end, Node.js API and PostgreSQL, and added the monitoring the team used to catch problems before customers did.

  3. Earlier

    Developer to senior developer, permanent roles

    Web application development, then a growing share of build, deployment and operations work, which became the DevOps half of the job.

Contact

The quickest way to reach me is email. Tell me what you're building, what's in the way, and roughly when you need help.