Software engineer
Nine years building payments infrastructure and developer platforms — the kind that move billions quietly. Open to staff roles and selective consulting.
Operating principle
Reliability is a feature you ship.
At a glance
Work
Full-time engineering on distributed systems, payments, or platform teams — happiest owning a hairy system end to end.
A structured review of your system's failure modes, scaling ceilings, and migration paths — delivered as a written report your team keeps.
Short engagements to stand up SLOs, on-call that doesn't burn people out, and incident reviews that produce fixes instead of blame.
Engineering assessments for investors and acquirers: what's real, what's duct tape, and what it costs to fix.
Method
First the invariants, the failure modes, and the constraint that actually binds — written down, agreed on, kept.
Short design docs with real trade-offs, reviewed by the people who'll live with the result.
Migrations run alongside the old path until the numbers prove them; nothing cuts over on faith.
Runbooks, dashboards, and a handover session — systems should outlive their author's memory.
On the record
“Devon rebuilt our settlement pipeline while it was running — zero missed windows across the whole migration. The design doc is still the onboarding bible.”
“The architecture review paid for itself in the first finding: a queue configuration that would have fallen over at exactly our Black Friday load.”
“Rare engineer who makes everyone around them faster. Three of my seniors cite Devon's mentorship as the reason they made the level.”
FAQ
Staff-level IC roles on infrastructure, payments, or platform teams — remote or Chicago. In parallel I take one consulting engagement a quarter.
Mostly Go, Rust, and TypeScript over Postgres, Kafka, and Kubernetes — but I optimize for the failure model, not the logo list. The stack is a detail; the invariants aren't.
Yes — a few hours a month advising early teams on architecture and hiring. It's the cheapest way to avoid the expensive rewrite later.
Most of my work lives in private repos, but the writing is public: design-doc templates, incident-review guides, and a few open-source tools are linked from my profiles below.
Next step
Either way, the first conversation is thirty minutes and free. Bring the org chart or the architecture diagram — ideally both.
Contact