01 Staff engineer · Platform & reliability

Staff Software Engineer.
Platform Engineering.

At Datadog, I engineer a custom CI platform processing 13M+ builds every month. My experience spans platform architecture, Kubernetes at global scale, incident command, and engineering leadership.

Core stack
  • Go
  • Python
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • Terraform
  • Distributed Systems
View experience ↘ Download résumé ↗

02 Career experience across

03

ROLE-BY-ROLE IMPACT

Professional experience.

A decade of hands-on engineering and technical leadership across platform, cloud, and reliability.

DatadogCurrent

Staff Software Engineer

CI Infrastructure · Remote, US

  • Engineer and evolve a custom Go/Python CI platform processing 13M+ builds each month for 1,000+ engineers across 100+ teams.
  • Maintain $7M in annual savings while supporting 30% growth in build volume; reduced cold starts 40% through caching and build optimization.
  • Go
  • Python
  • Kubernetes
  • CI/CD
  • Distributed Systems
Datadog

Senior Software Engineer

CI Infrastructure · Remote, US

  • Reduced annual CI infrastructure cost from $10M to $3M and pipeline execution from 70 minutes to 7–12 minutes.
  • Cut monorepo clone times from 15+ minutes to under two while supporting 10,000+ daily commits across a 20GB+ repository.
  • GitLab
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Gitaly
  • VPA
VMware

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Cloud Platform · Remote, US

  • Provided technical leadership for VMware’s largest SaaS Kubernetes platform: 5,000+ nodes, 100+ clusters, and 99.99%+ uptime across AWS and Azure.
  • Built Go operators that reduced manual operations from 40 hours a week to under 12; deployed an Istio service mesh for 300+ microservices.
  • Kubernetes
  • Go
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Istio
  • Vault
  • Prometheus
Toyota Connected

Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Developer Platform · Plano, TX

  • Designed an AWS Kubernetes platform for 80+ development teams, raising availability from 99.5% to 99.9% while reducing compute costs 40%.
  • Built Python/Flask self-service tooling that cut provisioning from three days to 15 minutes; operated an ELK/Kafka platform processing 3TB daily.
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Python
  • Flask
  • Kafka
  • ELK
Capital One

Lead Engineer

Cloud & Reliability · 60% hands-on technical lead

  • Led AWS/GCP Kubernetes architecture supporting 500+ microservices and moved 100+ services from data centers to the cloud three months ahead of schedule.
  • Reduced incident recovery from 2.1 hours to 52 minutes through automated runbooks, stronger observability, and streamlined response practices.
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • SLI/SLO
  • Incident Response
Pariveda

Senior Software Engineer

Consulting · Plano, TX

  • Architected automated hybrid-cloud environments for enterprise clients with AWS, Chef, and Jenkins.
  • Designed legacy migration strategies and built Java/Spring REST services for cross-platform applications.
  • AWS
  • Chef
  • Jenkins
  • Java
  • Spring
04

SELECTED IMPACT

DATADOG · CI INFRASTRUCTURE01

Rebuilt the economics of CI at enterprise scale.

Designed intelligent workload placement, persistent runners, and smart caching for a platform serving 1,000+ engineers across 100+ teams.

70% cost reduction90% faster pipelines
Read the system story →
VMWARE · KUBERNETES02

Global, multi-cloud platform engineering.

100+ clusters, 300+ microservices, automated lifecycle operations, and a zero-trust service mesh.

KubernetesGoIstio
LEADERSHIP · INCIDENTS03

Calm systems for the highest-pressure moments.

Core Incident Commander guiding enterprise-wide response, recovery, and durable follow-through.

ResponseResilience

Richmond, VA

Daniel EspondaStaff Software Engineer · Platform & Reliability

10+ years
building at scale

GitHub ↗