Nicolas R. Dufour

Senior Staff Platform Engineer

Geophysicist turned engineer, building and running software since 1998, on premise and in the cloud. Today that means SRE and platform engineering: Kubernetes, GitOps, observability, and the people who use them. Before it, air traffic simulation systems, content management platforms and a lot of Java.

  • Expert in Linux since 1994, SRE since 2016.
  • Team leader with a hands-on approach ("player/coach"); good at drawing out what a customer actually needs and turning it into meaningful use cases.
  • Builds from scratch to understand what is underneath: a bare-metal OS in Rust and a web browser.
  • Runs his own infrastructure: a 14-host NixOS and Kubernetes homelab with Forgejo, Kanidm and ArgoCD.

Career

  1. 2023 - now

    Senior Staff Platform Engineer, Nav Technologies

    Leading SRE practices. ArgoCD-based GitOps pipeline, automated Kubernetes cluster creation for ephemeral and production environments, cluster migrations, Grafana and Prometheus next to Splunk, the DR process, and the move from GitLab to GitHub.

  2. 2021 - 2023

    Senior SRE, Sectigo

    Certificate Transparency services and automated certificate issuance workflows. Kubernetes with Flux v2, Kustomize and Helm; Proxmox and VMware; Ansible, Terraform and Puppet.

  3. 2016 - 2021

    Senior DevOps Architect, Rivet Logic

    Cloud migrations for Marriott, SAML authentication systems, CloudFormation, Terraform and Ansible automation. Introduced Kubernetes to the company (Kops, then EKS). Co-led the Managed Services team.

  4. 2010 - 2016

    Software Architect, Rivet Logic

    Alfresco and Liferay platforms for MasterCard, the NFL, IEEE and Noridian; led three MasterCard marketing sites.

  5. 2007 - 2009

    Senior Software Architect, Time Inc

    Designed a new CMS for Real Simple, Southern Living, Cooking Light and other magazine sites, and led its team to version 3.

  6. 2006 - 2010

    R&D Engineer, IPsoft

    Key developer on IPcenter, IPsoft's ITSM platform: AS400 monitoring, an event correlation engine, eBonding integrations. Java, Groovy, Netty, Esper, ActiveMQ.

  7. 2004 - 2006

    Linux Team Leader, NeoMetSys, Paris

    Air traffic simulation for the European Commission, NASA and the FAA with Metron Aviation, and the South African aviation authority. Led the Linux team.

  8. 1999 - 2004

    Consultant, NeoSys, Paris

    Ran the primary air traffic flow simulation tool of the TACT research team at Eurocontrol for three years.