name: Sean Gatewood
summary: Senior-leaning DevOps / Platform Engineer with a focus on the <code>dev</code> side of DevOps. I build scalable, reproducible, and reliable production environments with Kubernetes ecosystems, Infrastructure as Code, and CI/CD pipelines. I bring strong development skills to the infra world, elevating production environments with seamless automation, custom microservices, proactive application-level fixes, and spikes that push the boundaries of what is possible.
contact:
email: hello@sgatewood.dev
linkedin:
link: https://linkedin.com/in/sean-t-gatewood
handle: sean-t-gatewood
icon: linkedin-icon.png
github:
link: https://github.com/sgatewood
handle: sgatewood
icon: github-icon.png
education:
school: University of Virginia
school titles:
- Rodman Scholar
- Raven Society
degree: B.S. Computer Science
gpa: 3.95
graduation: May 2020
notable courses:
- Computer Graphics
- Algorithms
- Introduction to Cybersecurity
- Software Testing
experience:
- title: DevOps Engineer
company: Digital Asset
location: New York, NY / remote
dates: April 2023 - present
notes:
- Developed infrastructure and automation around critical kubernetes services, applying SRE practices to ensure reliability and minimize operational toil.
- Played an instrumental role in the launch of our blockchain network by owning the greenfield deployment and management of a core validator node.
- Utilized Terraform, Jsonnet, Bash, and Helm to automate deployments in a flexible manner, enabling the success of more than 70 weekly upgrades.
- Orchestrated a complex blockchain migration process in the deployment automation, reducing required live-on-zoom code changes down to 0.
- Migrated our node's cluster across GCP regions with less than 2 minutes of downtime.
- Instrumented monitoring/alerts with DataDog to maintain 99.5% uptime and tune our configuration to minimize cloud costs.
- Communicated deployment designs with partner companies, helping them overcome similar hurdles and accelerating the launch of our blockchain network.
- Mentored 2 teammates on how the validator deployment worked so they could contribute to the codebase and participate in support rotations.
- Authored a Prometheus metrics exporter in Go, providing a programmatic framework for custom metrics. Closed 8 critical gaps in production observability.
- Authored a Kubernetes operator in Go to streamline our backup/restore process, eliminating operational tasks on a product entering maintenance mode.
- Migrated Kubernetes manifests from a legacy system to public helm charts, allowing external customers to deploy our product.
- Orchestrated our internal helm installations using Helmfile to reduce our deployment process from 35 commands to 1 and pave the way for using GitOps.
- Built isolated blockchain test environments in both k3d (for local dev) and vClusters, allowing developers to effortlessly spin up fully independent networks.
- Developed CI/CD pipelines using Google Cloud Build and CircleCI.
- Participated in on-call rotations, triaging a multitude of production alerts and maintaining the reliability of our services.
- title: Software Engineer II
company: Appian Corporation
location: McLean, VA / remote
dates: August 2020 - April 2023
notes:
- Worked on a Development Experience team that owned a variety of tooling and infrastructure to accelerate and modernize development workflows.
- Contributed to a remote development platform allowing devs to build/develop/test on dedicated EC2s, improving cycle time and stability by at least 50%.
- Built a Gitlab pipeline to precook warm builds that devs could take and use instantly, reducing setup time from ~12m to ~5s for many common test cases.
- 'Architected a separate mode using <a href="https://mutagen.io/documentation/synchronization/">Mutagen</a> to enable bi-directional file syncing and enhance stability.'
- Deployed a LaunchDarkly <a href="https://launchdarkly.com/docs/sdk/relay-proxy">relay proxy</a> in Kubernetes, satisfying a FedRAMP security requirement for our modern feature toggles initiative.
- Contributed to a team effort to integrate LaunchDarkly with a legacy product, including developing our own Java client.
- Regularly initiated & led architectural design discussions, and spiked a wide variety of prototypes.
- Regularly unblocked developers by assisting in troubleshooting technical issues, improving our local build stability.
- Utilized an ELK stack to collect diagnostics from our development tool, greatly enhancing visibility into command utilization and user flows.
- Enhanced our documentation by injecting Matplotlib graphs (refreshed daily via Gitlab deployment pipeline) to show metrics on our codebase over time.
- Treasured high code quality standards and contributed to our data-driven goal to lead the department in code quality.
- Mentored two interns as a Summer Intern Manager, meeting with them weekly to optimize their internship experience.
- Gained a high standard for usability that continues to shape my tooling designs today.
- title: Software Engineering Intern
company: Uber Advanced Technologies Group
hide-from-pdf: true
location: Pittsburgh, PA
dates: May 2019 - August 2019
notes:
- Developed and benchmarked alternate implementations for a key-value store using various database technologies.
- Presented results to Uber ATG software engineers.
- title: Teaching Assistant - Introduction to Programming
company: University of Virginia
location: Charlottesville, VA
dates: Fall 2017 - May 2020
notes:
- Assisted hundreds of students with introductory programming concepts in Python.
- Created <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeih3T8PoRaYXpRwCVUmCEQqzZ51qyAmD">review videos</a> that have received over 13,000 views.
- Helped manage the course as one of four "Head TAs."
- title: Software Engineering Intern
company: NASA Langley Research Center
hide-from-pdf: true
location: Hampton, VA
dates: May 2018 - May 2019
notes:
- Created data management tools for "airborne atmospheric composition data"
- Engineered a <a href="https://www-air.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Driver.cgi?platform=KORUSAQ/DC8_AIRCRAFT">full-stack web application</a> (JQuery, AJAX, cgi, C++) for researchers to create customized data merges.
skills:
main languages:
- Python
- Bash
- Go
- Java
- TypeScript
- C++
cloud platforms:
- GCP
- AWS
cloud infra:
- Compute (GKE Cluster, Node Pools, Persistent Disks, Snapshot Schedules, VMs)
- Networking (VPC, Subnet, Cloud NAT, L7 Application Load Balancer, MCI, Cloud DNS, Google-Managed Certificates)
- Security (IAM, RBAC, Secrets Manager, Cloud Armor, Service Accounts, Workload Identity)
main other technologies:
- Docker
- Docker Compose
- SQL
- LaunchDarkly
- MermaidJS
- Nix
- Jsonnet
- Auth0
- Kotlin
- Gradle
- Linux
- jq
- Justfile
- Git
- GitHub
kubernetes:
- Helm
- Helmfile
- FluxCD
- Istio
- Custom Operators
monitoring:
- Grafana
- Prometheus
- Datadog
iac:
- Terraform
- Pulumi
ci/cd:
- GitLab
- Github Actions
- CircleCI
- GCB
- Jenkins
also worked with:
- HTML / CSS
- React
- Gradle
- Django
- JQuery
- Argo CD
- Google chat bots
- Chrome Extensions
- Intellij Plugins
- Autodesk Inventor
- LabVIEW
books:
- Clean Code
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- The Unicorn project
projects:
- name: This Resume
dates: February 2022 - present
link: "https://github.com/sgatewood/resume"
description: 'Written in YAML and templated into the document you are reading. :-)'
- name: JobDeployment controller
dates: Summer 2025
link: https://github.com/sgatewood/job-deployment
description: 'Spiked an idea I had using <a href="https://book.kubebuilder.io/">kubebuilder</a> to solve a DX problem with deploying Job objects in helm charts.'
- name: gcloud-fzf
dates: Spring 2025
link: https://github.com/sgatewood/gcloud-fzf
description: Wrote a Go CLI I wanted. The interesting part is I actually distributed it via homebrew.
- name: Portfolio site
dates: Spring 2022
link: https://sgatewood.github.io
description: Used an old Jekyll theme I liked to serve as my website. Includes some interesting dark mode & MermaidJS hacks.