I'm a hands-on Cloud, Software & Platform engineer who gets called in when infrastructure becomes expensive, fragile, or blocks delivery. With 7 years across AWS, GCP, and Azure, I specialise in untangling real-world systems, not just greenfield demos. I work across Kubernetes, VMs, Serverless and all public clouds helping teams stabilise production, reduce cloud spend, and build platforms that engineers actually enjoy using. **I'm most useful when:** - "It works, but nobody understands it anymore" - Costs keep climbing without a clear reason - Deployments are risky, slow, or held together with tribal knowledge - You need senior infrastructure judgment now, not after a 3-month hiring loop If that sounds familiar, I can help. --- **Track Record** - Saved $200K/year USD in cloud spend through right-sizing, Spot instances, and CUDs (Google Cloud) - Led client-facing infrastructure modernisation across 12+ AWS accounts and hundreds of instances for enterprise clients - Designed and delivered critical software upgrades for electricity distribution networks serving 200,000+ homes - Led a complete overhaul of legacy data infrastructure, building real-time ETL pipelines processing multi-source weather data with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake (Azure) - Delivered Landing Zone migrations for enterprise AWS customers - Migrated WordPress to ARM-based autoscaling, achieving 30% cost reduction and 25% performance improvement **What I'm Currently Working On** - Building and implementing GCP Landing Zone architectures (Shared VPC, centralised logging, compliance guardrails) - Designing and delivering a self-service GitOps platform that removes deployment bottlenecks (Argo CD, Kubernetes, Kargo, GitHub Actions, Terraform) - Creating multi-environment Kubernetes workflows that safely promote code from dev → prod **What I Can Do for You** - **Reduce cloud spend by 20–50%** — I'll find the waste and show you exactly where the money is going - **Help your team ship faster with fewer failures** — Deployment pipelines that just work, every time - **Kubernetes expertise** — New clusters, fixing existing ones, or figuring out why it's broken - **Build scalable infrastructure** — Cloud architecture, Terraform, and landing zones designed correctly the first time and aligned with cloud provider best practices - **Automate the tedious stuff** — Ansible, scripting, configuration management — whatever's slowing your team down - **Linux & systems engineering** — Configuration, hardening, troubleshooting, and migrations - **Break/fix work** — If something's broken, I'll diagnose it and get you back online fast --- Red Hat Certified Engineer Based in New Zealand (UTC+12) Primarily taking on smaller, short-term engagements Message me with what you're dealing with and I'll tell you if I can help.…

Joel Freeman

I'm a hands-on Cloud, Software & Platform engineer who gets called in when infrastructure becomes expensive, fragile, or blocks delivery. With 7 years across AWS, GCP, and Azure, I specialise in untangling real-world systems, not just greenfield demos. I work across Kubernetes, VMs, Serverless and all public clouds helping teams stabilise production, reduce cloud spend, and build platforms that engineers actually enjoy using. **I'm most useful when:** - "It works, but nobody understands it anymore" - Costs keep climbing without a clear reason - Deployments are risky, slow, or held together with tribal knowledge - You need senior infrastructure judgment now, not after a 3-month hiring loop If that sounds familiar, I can help. --- **Track Record** - Saved $200K/year USD in cloud spend through right-sizing, Spot instances, and CUDs (Google Cloud) - Led client-facing infrastructure modernisation across 12+ AWS accounts and hundreds of instances for enterprise clients - Designed and delivered critical software upgrades for electricity distribution networks serving 200,000+ homes - Led a complete overhaul of legacy data infrastructure, building real-time ETL pipelines processing multi-source weather data with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake (Azure) - Delivered Landing Zone migrations for enterprise AWS customers - Migrated WordPress to ARM-based autoscaling, achieving 30% cost reduction and 25% performance improvement **What I'm Currently Working On** - Building and implementing GCP Landing Zone architectures (Shared VPC, centralised logging, compliance guardrails) - Designing and delivering a self-service GitOps platform that removes deployment bottlenecks (Argo CD, Kubernetes, Kargo, GitHub Actions, Terraform) - Creating multi-environment Kubernetes workflows that safely promote code from dev → prod **What I Can Do for You** - **Reduce cloud spend by 20–50%** — I'll find the waste and show you exactly where the money is going - **Help your team ship faster with fewer failures** — Deployment pipelines that just work, every time - **Kubernetes expertise** — New clusters, fixing existing ones, or figuring out why it's broken - **Build scalable infrastructure** — Cloud architecture, Terraform, and landing zones designed correctly the first time and aligned with cloud provider best practices - **Automate the tedious stuff** — Ansible, scripting, configuration management — whatever's slowing your team down - **Linux & systems engineering** — Configuration, hardening, troubleshooting, and migrations - **Break/fix work** — If something's broken, I'll diagnose it and get you back online fast --- Red Hat Certified Engineer Based in New Zealand (UTC+12) Primarily taking on smaller, short-term engagements Message me with what you're dealing with and I'll tell you if I can help.…

Available to hire

I’m a hands-on Cloud, Software & Platform engineer who gets called in when infrastructure becomes expensive, fragile, or blocks delivery.

With 7 years across AWS, GCP, and Azure, I specialise in untangling real-world systems, not just greenfield demos. I work across Kubernetes, VMs, Serverless and all public clouds helping teams stabilise production, reduce cloud spend, and build platforms that engineers actually enjoy using.

I’m most useful when:

  • “It works, but nobody understands it anymore”
  • Costs keep climbing without a clear reason
  • Deployments are risky, slow, or held together with tribal knowledge
  • You need senior infrastructure judgment now, not after a 3-month hiring loop

If that sounds familiar, I can help.

Track Record

  • Saved $200K/year USD in cloud spend through right-sizing, Spot instances, and CUDs (Google Cloud)
  • Led client-facing infrastructure modernisation across 12+ AWS accounts and hundreds of instances for enterprise clients
  • Designed and delivered critical software upgrades for electricity distribution networks serving 200,000+ homes
  • Led a complete overhaul of legacy data infrastructure, building real-time ETL pipelines processing multi-source weather data with Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake (Azure)
  • Delivered Landing Zone migrations for enterprise AWS customers
  • Migrated WordPress to ARM-based autoscaling, achieving 30% cost reduction and 25% performance improvement

What I’m Currently Working On

  • Building and implementing GCP Landing Zone architectures (Shared VPC, centralised logging, compliance guardrails)
  • Designing and delivering a self-service GitOps platform that removes deployment bottlenecks (Argo CD, Kubernetes, Kargo, GitHub Actions, Terraform)
  • Creating multi-environment Kubernetes workflows that safely promote code from dev → prod

What I Can Do for You

  • Reduce cloud spend by 20–50% — I’ll find the waste and show you exactly where the money is going
  • Help your team ship faster with fewer failures — Deployment pipelines that just work, every time
  • Kubernetes expertise — New clusters, fixing existing ones, or figuring out why it’s broken
  • Build scalable infrastructure — Cloud architecture, Terraform, and landing zones designed correctly the first time and aligned with cloud provider best practices
  • Automate the tedious stuff — Ansible, scripting, configuration management — whatever’s slowing your team down
  • Linux & systems engineering — Configuration, hardening, troubleshooting, and migrations
  • Break/fix work — If something’s broken, I’ll diagnose it and get you back online fast

Red Hat Certified Engineer
Based in New Zealand (UTC+12)
Primarily taking on smaller, short-term engagements

Message me with what you’re dealing with and I’ll tell you if I can help.

See more

Skills

Experience Level

Kubernetes
Expert
Google Cloud
Expert
Github
Expert
AWS
Expert
Golang
Intermediate
Python
Intermediate
PostgreSQL
Intermediate

Language

English
Fluent

Work Experience

Senior Cloud & Platform Engineer at Starboard
June 1, 2025 - Present
Re-architected Google Cloud into a secure landing zone with Shared VPC, centralized logging, and guardrails - building foundations to scale from 10 to 25 to 50+ engineers while maintaining compliance - Built a self-service GitOps platform for 25+ engineers, eliminating manual deployment bottlenecks and accelerating release velocity. - Designed multi-environment Kubernetes workflows (dev, UAT, staging, prod) with namespace isolation and safe promotion paths, reducing failures and downtime while enabling rapid iteration. - Automated security enforcement with policy-as-code (Kyverno), ensuring resource limits, network policies, and image checks run automatically, preventing mistakes and lowering operational risk. - Implemented observability and structured logging across all environments, enabling faster debugging and proactive incident response. - Standardized Terraform + CI/CD practices, separating platform from team resources, making infrastructure changes repeatable, auditable, and safe at scale. - Introduced just-in-time production access, removing standing privileges, reducing blast radius, and giving engineers secure, time-bound access when needed.
DevOps Engineer (Azure+AWS) at MetService
January 12, 2026 - June 1, 2024
Led a team revamping legacy data processing using the medallion architecture, building real-time ETL pipelines with Azure Databricks, Spark, Jupyter, Terraform, GitHub Actions, CosmosDB, and Delta Tables. Enabled high-throughput weather data ingestion from multiple sources via Azure Functions. Standardized Databricks workflows, automated deployments with GitHub Actions, and implemented GitOps-style Terraform deployments to Azure and AWS. Built workflows to deploy/test Azure Function and Container Apps, designed secure REST APIs for Delta Lakes, and developed internal tools for Delta Table management, data cleaning, and legacy system comparisons
DevOps Engineer (Azure+AWS) at AC3
February 1, 2022 - September 1, 2023
Delivered DevOps management services to large clients, optimizing cloud infrastructure and application platforms (EC2, RDS, EKS, ECS, CodePipeline, Config, SecurityHub, SNS) using AWS CDK, Terraform, and CloudFormation. Led initiatives aligning client image configurations with global security standards (CIS 1.5.0), resolving 100+ tickets via JIRA, Azure VM Image Builder, and ARM. Integrated Azure Sentinel with Microsoft Teams for real-time security alerts. Managed large-scale infrastructure modernization across 12+ AWS accounts and hundreds of instances. Migrated a WordPress site to an ARM-based autoscaling group, reducing costs by 30%, improving performance by 25%, and enhancing stability. Mentored junior engineers and guided best practices in cloud and DevOps solutions.

Education

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Qualifications

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Industry Experience

Media & Entertainment
    paper High-Availability Kubernetes Platform | CI/CD, ArgoCD, Terraform

    Built a scalable Kubernetes platform with Helm, ArgoCD, and Terraform, enabling fully automated CI/CD pipelines, autoscaling, and secure preview environments. Developers can deploy new app instances entirely via Git, reducing deployment time from hours to minutes and improving reliability and developer productivity.