About
I'm a platform engineer with 10+ years of experience building cloud-native platforms and enabling engineering organizations to adopt transformative technologies. I've spent my career in regulated industries — banking, fintech, and now healthcare — where platforms have to be reliable, auditable, and secure by default. Most recently, I've focused on enterprise AI adoption: evaluation, governance, and organizational knowledge systems.
I believe the future of enterprise software in regulated spaces is open: systems you can inspect, audit, and run on your own infrastructure.
Experience
- Principal technical advisor to the CEO on technology direction, AI adoption, and engineering priorities following the CTO's departure.
- Led the organization's AI adoption strategy: governance, security, and operational patterns for AI-assisted development and production AI systems.
- Designed and built an enterprise LLM evaluation platform standardizing offline evaluation for prompts, tools, and agentic workflows.
- Designed and delivered the company's business continuity and disaster recovery strategy.
- Built developer platforms spanning Kubernetes controllers, CLI tooling, internal applications, and automation.
- Led modernization of CI/CD infrastructure across the engineering organization, improving deployment safety and developer productivity.
- Partnered with engineering leadership to define a multi-year platform strategy centered on developer experience and scalable software delivery.
- Designed and deployed a Kubernetes-based continuous delivery platform supporting cloud-native application deployment across multiple engineering organizations.
- Championed infrastructure-as-code practices through Terraform, improving deployment consistency and operational efficiency.
- Led cross-functional initiatives modernizing cloud infrastructure and deployment systems supporting customer-facing applications serving millions of users.
- Architected GitOps-based deployment platforms that accelerated software delivery while maintaining enterprise security and compliance.
- Introduced Kubernetes and cloud-native engineering practices through technical leadership, mentoring, and organizational enablement.
Earlier: Associate Pastor (2007 – 2012) — leadership, education, and community programs.
Skills
Golang · Kubernetes · AWS · Docker · Terraform · GitOps · CI/CD · JavaScript · TypeScript · Python · Distributed Systems · Cloud-Native Architecture
Patents, Open Source & Certifications
- Provisional patent — Harbor, a semantic cloud resource provisioning engine (Application #63/808034)
- Contributor to Kubernetes Flagger, extending progressive delivery capabilities
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Education
- University of Edinburgh — Master of Theology, Theology in History
- William Jessup University — Bachelor of Arts, Theology
Contact
SF Bay Area · forrestbthomas@gmail.com · LinkedIn · Blog