John Kelly

Production Engineer · Infrastructure & Distributed Systems
Production Engineer focused on datacenter operations and fleet management at scale. Eight years across Meta, Zalando, and Proofpoint building workflow engines, deployment tooling, and observability systems. Equally at home designing distributed backends and the operator-facing UIs that sit on top of them.
Experience
Production Engineer · Meta
Dublin, Ireland
  • Designed and built a workflow engine from the ground up to orchestrate rack turn-up, coordinating multi-step provisioning of new hardware from initial receipt through validation to serving production traffic; used by on-site datacenter teams across multiple regions
  • Built tooling covering the full rack lifecycle: receipt, turn-up, in-place moves for power and redundancy optimisation, and decommissioning
  • Developed logistics and planning tooling for rack operations ("rack touches"), enabling forward-looking staffing and execution scheduling for on-site teams
  • Designed and implemented integrations reconciling vendor-supplied hardware data with internal source-of-truth metadata, resolving long-standing divergences across procurement, deployment, and operational systems
  • Defined processes for new hardware introduction and on-site execution, partnering with field teams across regions to reduce coordination overhead and improve consistency
  • Instrumented the workflow stack end-to-end with metrics, structured logs, and tracing to surface stuck workflows, vendor-data drift, and execution bottlenecks early
Software Engineer · Zalando SE
Dublin, Ireland
  • Built an internal developer portal consolidating tooling and service metadata previously scattered across team-owned wikis and dashboards
  • Developed tooling for customer data export to support GDPR subject access requests
DevOps Engineer · Proofpoint
Dublin, Ireland
  • Developed internal tooling for deployment and configuration management across the fleet
  • Contributed to a code modernisation effort across a number of internal services, migrating legacy Perl and PHP code to more modern implementations in Python
Operations Engineer · Proofpoint
Belfast, United Kingdom
  • Built deployment and configuration tooling for the production fleet during a summer internship
STEP Intern · Google
Dublin, Ireland
  • Built internal tooling supporting new-hire onboarding during the STEP summer internship programme
Education
Trinity College Dublin
BSc Computer Science · 2.1 Honours · 2014 – 2018
Projects
Self-hosted CI/CD platform· 2024-2026

End-to-end build, artifact, and deployment platform running on self-hosted Kubernetes. Covers pipeline orchestration, artifact management, secrets, structured logging, metrics collection and service deployment

Sandboxed AI agent runtime· Spring 2026

Platform for deploying and orchestrating AI coding agents in VM-isolated sandboxes on Kubernetes. Supporting the full lifecycle and safe execution of agentic-driven workflows

Skills
Languages:
JavaScript / Node.js, Go, SQL, Python
Infrastructure:
Kubernetes, AWS, Docker, Linux, Grafana, Ansible
Datastores & Messaging:
PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ
Frontend/UI:
React