James H. Nguyen
Building scalable, resilient infrastructure and cloud-native solutions. Enabling development teams to ship better code faster through platform engineering excellence.
Crafting Cloud Excellence
Passionate about building infrastructure that scales and teams that thrive.
I'm a Principal Cloud Platform Engineer with deep expertise in building scalable, resilient infrastructure and cloud-native solutions. I specialize in implementing platform engineering best practices to enable development teams to ship better code faster.
My focus includes cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, DevOps methodologies, and building secure, automated systems that improve developer productivity and operational excellence.
When I'm not designing cloud systems, I'm constantly learning about new technologies and contributing to open-source projects. I'm passionate about sharing knowledge and helping others grow in the field of cloud engineering.
Technologies I Work With
Hover to see proficiency
Google Cloud
Terraform
Kubernetes
Docker
GitHub
Go
Python
Linux
Professional Journey
Building and scaling cloud infrastructure for enterprise organizations.
Principal Cloud Platform Engineer at FLYR, Inc.
2024 — Present- Drive complex cross-engineering initiatives — requirements, design, milestones, and delegation to staff and senior engineers
- Designed and implemented new company SDLC including build pipelines, code quality standards, and operational excellence practices
- Achieved 20-30% cost reduction on Google Cloud Spanner through utilization optimization while maintaining SLAs
- Refactored Terraform modules to decouple core cloud infrastructure from application infrastructure, enabling product engineers to own their stack
Director, Cloud Infrastructure at FLYR, Inc.
2021 — 2024- Built and led DevOps, SRE, and Security & Compliance organization from 2 to ~20 engineers through hiring and M&A integration
- Reduced annual cloud spend by $9.4M — cleaned stale resources (~$8M) and optimized BigQuery slot utilization ($1.4M)
- Pivoted DevOps/SRE into a Developer Platform team chartered to empower product engineers with platform safeguards and blueprints
- Established 24/7 US & EU on-call, incident management processes, and company-wide performance competency matrix
Principal Site Reliability Engineer at EZ Texting (CallFire)
2020 — 2021- Led the SRE transformation from DevOps — served as product owner, scrum master, and architect for the operations group
- Delivered data center migration strategy one month ahead of schedule, aligning with rapid company growth initiatives
- Architected capacity projections for 2020 presidential election voice traffic — achieved 100% uptime with zero incidents
- Designed and implemented cloud-native, serverless-first CI/CD pipelines for microservices architecture
VP Operations & Chief Systems Architect at CallFire, Inc.
2010 — 2020- Managed COGS, OPEX, and G&A — built fiscally responsible budgets and forecasts while protecting gross margins across a decade of growth
- Designed and single-handedly implemented a hybrid cloud solution scaling the company from datacenter into Google Cloud Platform during peak seasons
- Saved 37% on cloud expenses in FY2019 through static vs. on-demand workload cost analysis and committed-use discounts
- Company's first systems administrator — bootstrapped centralized auth, CI/CD, config management, and datacenter operations from the ground up
Programmer Analyst III at UC Irvine — School of ICS
2006 — 2010- Designed and managed Sun Grid Engine distributed compute clusters integrated across the UC Regents system
- Replaced legacy build tooling with Puppet configuration management across heterogeneous hardware and software architectures
- Deployed and operated high-availability mail services (SMTP/IMAP) for the School of Information & Computer Science
Advisory IT Specialist at IBM Global Services
2000 — 2006- Lead software architect on a SWAT team rescuing a troubled government project — reverse-engineered architecture and led team to fix critical defects
- Advisory consultant deploying a global intranet for a major automotive company using WebSphere Portal, Vignette CMS, and DB2
- Led multiple Java development teams delivering dealer order management and CICS mainframe supply-chain applications
- Recovered a failing project behind on milestones — assembled team, delivered ahead of schedule with full test coverage
Open Source Projects
Contributing to the cloud-native ecosystem through open source.
BlueCentre/monorepo
A structured approach to organizing monorepo architecture with best practices for scalability, maintainability, and developer workflow optimization.
terraform-example-foundation
Shows how the CFT modules can be composed to build a secure cloud foundation. Enterprise-grade infrastructure patterns for Google Cloud deployments.
Let's Build Together
Find me on GitHub or reach out to discuss cloud architecture and platform engineering.
GitHub Achievements
Get in Touch
I'm always interested in discussing cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, and platform engineering topics. Feel free to reach out!
Technical Blog
Sharing knowledge about cloud architecture, AI agents, and platform engineering.