GREY LATHROP
Principal Engineer • Systems Architect
grey@ember.st plathrop.tertiusfamily.net github.com/plathrop 🌎 Remote, USA
Software and Systems Architect with 20+ years of experience designing, scaling, and optimizing distributed cloud-native systems on AWS. Proven success achieving 99.99% uptime, multi-million-dollar cost savings, and leading architectural transformations for organizations of 150+ engineers. Combines deep expertise in AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, and reliability engineering with broad software development experience in Python, Rust, and Scala. Recognized for mentoring senior engineers and translating complex technical challenges into scalable, business-aligned solutions.
Key Achievements
- Led zero-downtime migration of 200+ services to AWS EKS, achieving 99.99% post-migration uptime.
- Identified and implemented multi-million-dollar savings across compute and observability systems.
- Delivered production software in Python, Go, Rust, Scala, and Java across 15+ years.
- Guided design and rollout of several 500+ node Kubernetes clusters across multi-AZ environments.
- Provided architectural leadership to 50+ teams (180+ engineers), standardizing observability and CI/CD.
- Built and scaled platform/ops teams from 1 → 15 engineers; created patterns later adopted org-wide.
- Provided key mentorship to numerous engineers leading to career growth and increased technical accomplishments.
Technical Expertise
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, EKS, Kinesis, Lambda) • Cloud Cost Optimization • Event-driven architecture • Terraform • Kubernetes • CI/CD pipelines
Software Development: Rust • Python • Go • Scala • Java • Shell Scripting
Reliability & Observability: Observability • OpenTelemetry • SLOs • Monitoring • Logging
Leadership & Strategy: Communication • Technical mentorship • Cross-functional alignment • DevOps culture
Professional Experience
MuleSoft (Salesforce) | Software Engineering Architect | Aug 2021 - Sep 2024
- Led architecture for Production Engineering (180+ engineers), driving operational uplift and modernization initiatives.
- Directed multi-year migration of MuleSoft Control Plane from self-managed Kubernetes to AWS EKS with zero downtime, improving post-migration uptime to 99.99%.
- Drove adoption of safe change practices and blue/green deployment.
- Executed hands-on uplift of an understaffed Tier-0 service team under deadline pressure.
- Led migration from New Relic to Salesforce internal monitoring platforms across production environments.
Spectrum Labs | Senior Architect | Jun 2020 – Aug 2021
- Designed and deployed distributed data processing systems using Spark, Argo, and Kubernetes.
- Developed Terraform modules codifying best practices for EKS autoscaling and node termination.
- Reviewed major code changes for ML pipelines, improving performance and maintainability.
- Improved ingestion performance for on-prem ML classifiers by several orders of magnitude.
Salesforce | Software Engineering Architect / PMTS / LMTS | Nov 2016 - Jun 2020
- Led architecture and implementation of deep observability systems for the Heroku platform.
- Guided hybrid deployment models emphasizing cloud coherence and shared tooling.
- Led development of system for automated provisioning of trusted AWS accounts with verifiable security properties for use across Salesforce.
- Introduced Embedded Platform Engineering model to unify platform and product teams.
- Executed lossless migration of data collection architecture handling hundreds of thousands req/s.
- Led transition from legacy CI to new CI/CD platforms with zero data loss.
Krux Digital | Platform Architect / Sr. Infrastructure Engineer | Mar 2012 - Nov 2016
- Achieved consistent AWS cost controls leading to logarithmic scaling of costs and providing a key differentiator contributing to $800Mn Salesforce acquisition.
- Architected reorganization of DevOps and Platform teams to support scale; introduced patterns adopted org-wide.
- Designed and deployed distributed web services in Scala + Play! handling 13k QPS in production.
- Scaled Kafka clusters 50% while reducing costs 11%.
- Re-architected Java and Python systems for 10× throughput using open-source components.
- Built real-time data collection and websockets services supporting 2k data points/sec per process.
Earlier Roles (2005 - 2012)
Senior / Contract Systems Engineer | Lyft, Zicasso, and others.
Multiple Roles | SimpleGeo, Digg, Yammer, Kapor Enterprises, SquareTrade, and others.
- Built and automated infrastructure at scale using Puppet and FAI.
- Migrated config management systems (Chef→Puppet).
- Introduced CI, incident response, monitoring automation, and multi-datacenter deployments.
Professional Links
- 🐙 GitHub: github.com/plathrop
- 💼 LinkedIn: Grey Lathrop
- ✉️ Email: grey@ember.st