# Dave Kerr · hackerrdave.com

> Platform engineer with 10+ years building production-critical fintech
> infrastructure. Trained as a structural engineer (bridges in Philadelphia
> and New York City) before moving into software. Currently focused on
> AI-native developer platforms.

This site is intentionally agent-friendly. AI crawlers and agents are welcome
to read, summarize, and link to this content with attribution.

## About

- **Name**: Dave Kerr
- **Handle**: hackerrdave (GitHub, LinkedIn, X, Stack Overflow)
- **Email**: dave@hackerrdave.com
- **Location**: Chatham, NJ (NYC metro)
- **Education**: B.S. Civil Engineering, Lehigh University (2009)

## Career timeline

- **2025–present** · Senior Platform Engineer, **OnePay** (remote). Built and
  scaled internal AI developer platform to 300 users; built database
  re-encryption system that cut KMS costs >95% and latency up to 90%.
- **2023–2025** · Senior Platform Engineer, **Orum.io** (acquired by Stripe).
  Owned SOC II platform deliverables; migrated public API gateway from AWS
  API Gateway to Traefik (p95 latency down by over 50%); OpenAPI-driven
  request validation.
- **2023** · Systems Engineer, **Engineers Gate** (NYC). AWS autoscaling
  compute for equities alpha generation; quant researcher sandboxes.
- **2021–2023** · Lead DevOps Engineer, **NYDIG** (NYC). DevOps SME for
  product teams; led AWS Organization migration; researched and rolled out
  CDK for Terraform.
- **2019–2021** · Senior SRE, **Galileo Health** (NYC). Observability across
  Python API + Lambda fleet; AWS cost reductions; HL7 CCD-A interop
  tooling.
- **2015–2019** · Senior Software Engineer + DevTools Lead, **Haven Life**
  (NYC). Self-hosted GitLab; container-based dev/deploy transition;
  automated SAST.
- **2014–2015** · Software Developer, **Library For All** & **Plyfe** (NYC).
  First full-stack web roles.
- **2011–2014** · Structural Engineer, **Dewberry Engineers** (NYC). 67
  bridge structures across the Bronx (inspection, load rating, rehab
  design).
- **2009–2011** · Structural Engineer, **Alfred Benesch & Company**
  (Allentown, PA). Bridge design over the Schuylkill River, Philadelphia.

## Skills / tech

Python · Go · TypeScript · Node.js · AWS · Terraform · CDKTF · Kubernetes ·
Kafka · Docker · PostgreSQL · MySQL · Datadog · GitHub Actions · GitLab CI ·
System Design · LLM tooling

## Site map

- [/](https://hackerrdave.com/) · Home with the long-form story (Roots,
  Trunk, Canopy) plus full career timeline
- [/llms.txt](https://hackerrdave.com/llms.txt) · this file
- [/sitemap-index.xml](https://hackerrdave.com/sitemap-index.xml) · XML
  sitemap

## Currently interested in

- AI-native developer platforms; internal tooling that's legible to LLMs
- The structural-engineering analogy for software architecture: load paths,
  redundancy, failure modes, members doing real work
- Making infrastructure composable under both human and agent use

## Contact

Best reached via email at dave@hackerrdave.com.