{
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"basics": {
"name": "David Laing",
"label": "Staff Engineer",
"image": "",
"email": "david@davidlaing.com",
"url": "https://davidlaing.com",
"summary": "Iterative problem solver & team leader specializing in data reliability engineering and platform SRE. Experienced in building SRE practices, data pipeline engineering, and leading cross-functional teams across global R&D organizations.",
"location": {
"city": "Dublin, Ireland",
"countryCode": "IE"
},
"profiles": [
{
"network": "GitHub",
"username": "mrdavidlaing",
"url": "https://github.com/mrdavidlaing"
},
{
"network": "LinkedIn",
"username": "mrdavidlaing",
"url": "https://linkedin.com/in/mrdavidlaing"
}
]
},
"work": [
{
"company": "Make Time Together Ltd",
"position": "Co-founder",
"url": "https://maketime.ie",
"startDate": "2025-03",
"summary": "Co-founded investment company focused on small business finance applications.",
"highlights": [
"Decision Copilot",
"Make Time Finance"
],
"name": "Make Time Together Ltd",
"location": "Dublin, Ireland"
},
{
"company": "Mechanical Orchard",
"position": "Staff Engineer",
"url": "https://mechanical-orchard.com",
"startDate": "2023-09",
"summary": "Platform Engineering team member responsible for building and maintaining cloud infrastructure (GCP/AWS) for Mechanical Orchard's Imogen mainframe modernization platform. Recently evolved into engineering management role for AI Agents, focusing on Kubernetes/Terraform DevOps automation and full-stack web development.",
"highlights": [
"Built and maintained cloud infrastructure on GCP and AWS for Imogen modernization platform",
"Engineering manager for AI Agents with focus on Kubernetes and Terraform DevOps automation",
"Developed full-stack web applications using NextJS, React, and TypeScript",
"Contributed to legacy system modernization using behavior-driven transformation methodology"
],
"name": "Mechanical Orchard",
"location": "San Francisco, CA"
},
{
"company": "Well Maintained",
"position": "Founder",
"url": "https://github.com/wellmaintained",
"startDate": "2023-08",
"summary": "Founded online platform development community focused on sustainable software practices and maintainable codebases.",
"highlights": [
"Decision Copilot, an open-source decision-making tool for teams"
],
"name": "Well Maintained"
},
{
"company": "Shopify Ltd",
"position": "Senior Staff Reliability Engineer",
"url": "https://shopify.com",
"startDate": "2022-05",
"endDate": "2023-07",
"summary": "Joined to launch Data Reliability Practice for Shopify's Data Platform (PySpark, Trino, GCS). Following platform deprecation, transferred to central SRE team responsible for 'keeping commerce flowing' for 3 million merchants.",
"highlights": [
"Maintained platform reliability during peak traffic of $3.5M/minute during BFCM",
"Led data reliability engineering practices for large-scale data lake infrastructure",
"Transitioned from data platform to core commerce SRE during strategic platform migration"
],
"name": "Shopify Ltd"
},
{
"company": "VMware Ltd",
"position": "Staff 2 Software Engineer (Data)",
"url": "https://tanzu.vmware.com",
"startDate": "2020-05",
"endDate": "2022-04",
"summary": "R&D Portfolio Insights team member focused on telemetry gathering, data curation via dagster.io pipelines, and providing data-driven insights to business unit leadership.",
"highlights": [
"Built and maintained dagster.io data pipelines for R&D portfolio analytics",
"Curated usage datasets from telemetry across VMware's product portfolio",
"Delivered data-driven insights to support strategic business decisions"
],
"name": "VMWare Ltd"
},
{
"company": "Pivotal Software Ltd",
"position": "Director of Engineering/SRE",
"startDate": "2015-12",
"endDate": "2020-04",
"summary": "Engineering Lead for portfolio of initiatives across 6 global R&D offices. Built SRE team and led company-wide efforts to reduce version gap between customer deployments and current releases.",
"highlights": [
"Led programme balanced leadership team driving outcomes across ~80 R&D teams",
"Built SRE team to dogfood Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes platforms",
"Hosted pivotaltracker.com (1M users) and UK Comic/Sports Relief donation sites (£1B+ donations)",
"Developed data-driven understanding of enterprise customer upgrade challenges",
"Managed cross-office portfolio of teams and policy initiatives"
],
"name": "Pivotal"
},
{
"company": "StayUp.io Ltd",
"position": "Co-founder",
"startDate": "2015-03",
"endDate": "2015-12",
"summary": "Co-founded company creating log search solutions. Acquired by Pivotal after 7 months to form basis of PCF Log Search product.",
"highlights": [
"Created open-source ELK distribution (cloudfoundry-community/logsearch)",
"Successfully acquired by Pivotal to enhance their platform logging capabilities"
],
"name": "StayUp.io Ltd"
},
{
"company": "City Index Ltd",
"position": "R&D Team Leader",
"startDate": "2008-12",
"endDate": "2015-03",
"summary": "Financial spread-betting & CFD market maker. Led R&D team and spearheaded adoption of TDD, Agile practices, open-source software, and public cloud migration.",
"highlights": [
"Trained development teams in TDD & Agile programming techniques",
"Led organizational transition to open-source software adoption",
"Spearheaded migration of workloads to public cloud infrastructure"
],
"name": "City Index",
"location": "London, UK"
},
{
"company": "BBC Worldwide",
"position": "Agile Developer",
"startDate": "2008-05",
"endDate": "2008-10",
"summary": "Member of Agile Development team building BBC's Kangaroo digital media platform. First exposure to XP, TDD and pair programming methodologies.",
"highlights": [
"Contributed to BBC's digital media platform development",
"Learned foundational XP, TDD, and pair programming practices"
],
"name": "BBC Worldwide",
"location": "London, UK"
},
{
"company": "Lucid Communications Ltd",
"position": "Senior Developer",
"startDate": "2003-08",
"endDate": "2007-04",
"summary": "Senior development role in communications technology company.",
"highlights": [],
"name": "Lucid Communications",
"location": "London, UK"
},
{
"company": "Vardus Internet Solutions",
"position": "Developer",
"startDate": "2001-01",
"endDate": "2002-08",
"summary": "Early career development role in Cape Town-based internet solutions company.",
"highlights": [],
"name": "Vardus Internet Solutions",
"location": "Cape Town, SA"
}
],
"education": [
{
"institution": "University of Cape Town",
"url": "https://www.uct.ac.za",
"area": "Information Systems",
"studyType": "Bachelor of Business Science (Honours)",
"startDate": "1997-01",
"endDate": "2000-12",
"score": "Dean's Merit List",
"courses": [
"Information Systems",
"Statistics"
],
"summary": "Majored in Information Systems and Statistics. Active in student council securing internet access for Smuts Hall residence."
}
],
"publications": [
{
"name": "Staying up-to-date with Kubernetes",
"publisher": "Web Publication",
"summary": "Explorable model for understanding why enterprises fall behind on patching and staying up-to-date with OSS software"
},
{
"name": "SRE & the Vulnerability Budget",
"publisher": "SRECon AMER",
"releaseDate": "2019-03",
"summary": "Using the Error Budget model to prioritize security patching and feature freshness"
},
{
"name": "Tracker's Journey Through the Cloud",
"releaseDate": "2017",
"summary": "Documentation of pivotaltracker.com migration to GCP with Google SRE collaboration"
}
],
"skills": [
{
"name": "Data Engineering & Visualization",
"level": "Expert",
"keywords": [
"Python",
"dagster.io",
"Plotly",
"Impala",
"Athena",
"BigQuery"
]
},
{
"name": "Site Reliability Engineering",
"level": "Expert",
"keywords": [
"Kubernetes",
"AWS",
"GCP",
"Platform Engineering",
"Error Budgets",
"SLI/SLO Design"
]
},
{
"name": "Programming Languages",
"level": "Advanced",
"keywords": [
"Python",
"SQL",
"Golang",
".NET",
"Ruby"
]
},
{
"name": "Leadership & Methodology",
"level": "Expert",
"keywords": [
"Agile",
"XP",
"TDD",
"Team Leadership",
"Cross-functional Collaboration"
]
},
{
"name": "Personal",
"level": "Expert",
"keywords": [
"Father",
"Roblox",
"Minecraft",
"Dad-jokes"
]
}
],
"languages": [
{
"language": "English",
"fluency": "Native speaker"
}
],
"interests": [
{
"name": "Gaming & Family",
"keywords": [
"Roblox",
"Minecraft",
"Family time"
]
},
{
"name": "Technology",
"keywords": [
"Open Source",
"Data Engineering",
"Platform Engineering"
]
}
],
"references": [],
"projects": [
{
"name": "Data Reliability Engineering Process Upgrades",
"description": "Senior Data Engineer for Tanzu Portfolio Insights team, responsible for upleveling data reliability engineering and statistical analysis practices",
"highlights": [
"Introduced software engineering processes like testing, CI/CD to R&D telemetry team",
"Pioneered automated data defect detection tooling",
"Implemented OSS data pipeline tools like dagster.io",
"Helped recruit data analysts and introduce Statistical Process Control analysis"
],
"keywords": [
"Data Engineering",
"dagster.io",
"Statistical Analysis",
"CI/CD"
],
"startDate": "2021",
"endDate": "2022",
"roles": [
"Senior Data Engineer"
],
"entity": "VMware Tanzu",
"type": "application"
},
{
"name": "Upgrades & Extended Support Portfolio",
"description": "Engineering Lead in Pivotal's first 'programme balanced leadership team' driving shared outcomes across ~80 R&D teams",
"highlights": [
"Developed data-driven understanding of enterprise customer upgrade challenges",
"Created high-level company outcomes with associated measurements",
"Managed portfolio of teams across 6 R&D offices in North America and Europe",
"Implemented series of strategic bets to improve customer outcomes"
],
"keywords": [
"Leadership",
"Data-driven Strategy",
"Enterprise",
"Cloud Foundry",
"Kubernetes"
],
"startDate": "2018",
"endDate": "2020",
"roles": [
"Engineering Lead"
],
"entity": "Pivotal Software",
"type": "management"
},
{
"name": "Migrating pivotaltracker.com to GCP",
"description": "First EMEA CRE engagement with Google SRE engineers to define multi-level SLIs and error budgets",
"highlights": [
"Collaborated with Google SRE engineers on SLI/SLO design",
"Defined error budgets for Pivotal Tracker on Cloud Foundry/GCP",
"Recruited and mentored Pivotal's SRE teams",
"Successfully migrated high-traffic product management platform"
],
"keywords": [
"SRE",
"Google Cloud Platform",
"SLI/SLO",
"Error Budgets",
"Migration"
],
"startDate": "2017",
"endDate": "2017",
"roles": [
"SRE Lead"
],
"entity": "Pivotal Software",
"type": "application"
}
],
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