Sean Gatewood

🎓 Education

University of Virginia (May 2020) Rodman Scholar, Raven Society

Notable Courses: Computer Graphics, Algorithms, Introduction to Cybersecurity, Software Testing

(New York, NY / remote) April 2023 - present

Develop and maintain infrastructure and automation around critical kubernetes services, applying SRE practices to ensure reliability and minimize manual operational toil.
Automated the deployment of a new mission-critical service in a dedicated GKE cluster with all supporting cloud infrastructure. Utilized Terraform, Jsonnet, Bash, and Helm to automate deployments and orchestrate complex blockchain migrations. Instrumented monitoring/alerts with DataDog and regularly use it to tune our configuration. Communicated effective designs with partner companies, helping them overcome similar hurdles and accelerating the launch of our blockchain network.
Expanded production monitoring capabilities by authoring a custom metrics exporter in Go, providing a programmatic framework to close critical gaps in observability.
Authored a custom k8s operator in Go to streamline our backup/restore process, eliminating manual operational tasks on a product that was entering maintenance mode.
Developed CI/CD pipelines using Google Cloud Build and CircleCI.

(McLean, VA / remote) August 2020 - April 2023

Worked on a Development Experience team that created and maintained a variety of developer tooling and infrastructure, gaining a unique perspective on usability that continues to shape my tooling designs today.
Contributed to a remote development solution, including a custom Kubernetes service to lease EC2s and a python tool to build/develop/test the product remotely (rather than on your own machine).
Architected and developed a pipeline to create warm builds that developers can take and use instantly rather than waiting to build from source.
Initiated & developed numerous prototypes, many of which shipped (or became real quarter-long features for my team).
Regularly initiated & led architectural design discussions.
Regularly assisted developers in troubleshooting technical issues, both to help unblock them and to find ways to improve our local build stability.
Treasured high code quality standards and contributed to our data-driven goal to lead the department in code quality and component health.
Mentored two interns as a Summer Intern Manager, meeting with them weekly to optimize their internship experience.

(Pittsburgh, PA) May 2019 - August 2019

Developed and benchmarked alternate implementations for a key-value store using various database technologies (e.g. LevelDB, Sqlite3).
Presented results to Uber ATG software engineers.

(Charlottesville, VA) Fall 2017 - May 2020

(Hampton, VA) May 2018 - May 2019

Created data management tools for “airborne atmospheric composition data”
Engineered a full-stack web application (JQuery, AJAX, cgi, C++) for atmospheric researchers to create customized data merges.

(non-comprehensive, in order of proficiency)

Languages: Python, Bash, Go, Java, JavaScript, C++, Kotlin
Other technologies: Kubernetes, GCP, Helm / Helmfile, Terraform / Pulumi, CI/CD pipelines, FluxCD, Istio, MermaidJS, Nix, Feature Flags / LaunchDarkly, Git, Docker, SQL, AWS, Auth0
Also worked with: HTML / CSS, React, Gradle, Django, JQuery, Prometheus, Argo CD, Google chat bots, Chrome Extensions, Intellij Plugins, Autodesk Inventor, LabVIEW

February 2022 - present

I didn’t have Microsoft Word anymore, so I wrote this in YAML and rendered it into the document you are reading. :-)\n- This was just more fun than LaTeX

Summer 2025

Mostly just wanted to get my hands onkubebuilder\n- This could in theory solve a DX problem I had with deploying kubernetes jobs from helm

Spring 2025

Made a go CLI that I wanted for a hyper-specific use case\n- The interesting piece is I can install it through my own homebrew tap!

Spring 2022

Sorta abused an old Jekyll theme I liked to serve as a portfolio site\n- Includes some interesting hacks including dark mode and some MermaidJS magic