Jacob Laverty is the Director of Platform Engineering at Dragonfly Financial Technologies. Specializing in cultivating great organizations and better leaders.
Hey, I’m Jake and this is where I share my opinions and experience on engineering leadership with…well everyone I suppose. I'm committed to cultivating better working environments for engineering teams. I specialize in crafting cutting-edge global platforms on AWS, leveraging the latest technologies. However, my approach extends beyond code and the latest tools; I focus on teaching principles beyond development teams to foster efficiency and collaboration that ripple throughout an organization.
(you can see those hot opinions in my blog)
My goal doesn’t stop with innovation—rather it's about cultivating successful, dynamic teams and growing better leaders.
Dragonfly Fin Tech
Director of Platform Services
Sep 2022 – Current
Dragonfly Financial Technologies is a startup in the financial API marketplace. As Director, my primary responsibility can succinctly be summarized as “build the Dragonfly products on AWS“. In order to accomplish this goal, I expanded Dragonfly’s cloud engineering practice from myself to an orgnization of roughly 50 engineers across disciplines such as Platform Engineering, SRE, Networking, DevSecOps, and Developer Efficiency. This organization then became the driving force that built out all of Dragonfly’s AWS footprint from Product infrastructure to DR to the company’s release process. Oh and we did the whole thing with the Terraform CDK which was amazing.
Moogsoft
Sre Manager
Jan 2021 – Aug 2022
Aura Inc
Lead Platform Engineer
August 2017 – Jan 2021
At Moogsoft I was a manager of 20 engineers responsible for SRE and Developer efficiency supporting Moogsoft’s AI Ops product. The product was built on a suite of Kubernetes clusters backed by RDS, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch, using Kafka for message streaming and Prometheus / Grafana for Ops. In addition to supporting this platform on AWS, I also led the introduction of an automated infrastructure release process to transition this organization from manual deploys initiated from personal machines to automated testing and a git-centric release process. This transition was supported by the additional hiring of managers and developers reporting to me while rewriting the IaC codebase from static copy-and-paste duplication to be dynamically responsive to variable inputs.
As the Lead Platform Engineer for Aura (formally Intersections) I was responsible for Aura’s migration from Waterfall delivery processes in a datacenter to Lean / Agile development on AWS. This included upskilling the entire software organization on general concepts such as AWS, Terraform, and CICD while leading the development of Aura’s cloud infrastructure. At Aura we broke up the old monolith running on prem into distributed microservices. These were a mix of Lambda and Fargate services using SQS, SNS, and Kinesis for event streams between services. We redesigned how Aura handles PII and User data to consolidate and improve visibility into access claims in order to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and PCI. We took the time to reduce infrastructure overhead from the on-prem site by moving scalable services to serverless products which reduced costs and improved performance for Aura. All of these initiatives culminated in the creation of an internal developer platform that allowed our software teams to quickly and easily deploy microservices into our AWS ecosystem that were consistent and compliant.
Etc.
2012–2017
From 2012-2014 I worked with Lockheed Martin developing a data processing service that aggregated image and text data from various sources and used techniques to predict the likelihood of that information being correlated to real time events. This service was built on top of Twitter’s Storm (now Apache Storm) for stream processing and used various NLP and OCR libraries to parse data. Visualizations of data correlation were built on Node, Angular and D3js. After this time I was employed with a startup in my area, Zaius (now acquired by Optimizely), to help build their marketing data platform. With Zaius I acted as a full stack engineer, working on everything from Front end development in React and Coffeescript to query optimazation on Redshift and Snowflake, to backend server development in Ruby and Rails, to finally iterating on their data stream platform which was also Apache Storm and Java.