Josh Frye
Senior Platform Engineer · Backend & Infrastructure
Summary
Platform engineer with 15 years building developer platforms and cloud infrastructure at Etsy, DigitalOcean, HashiCorp, GitLab, and startups. Founded GitHost, acquired by GitLab.
Experience
Senior DevOps Engineer
May 2024 - Nov 2025Patriot Software, Canton, OH
- Moved core Kubernetes infrastructure across 3+ clusters from manual management to GitOps with Flux, AWS CDK, and GitHub Actions, eliminating configuration drift, reducing upgrade effort, and creating a single auditable configuration path.
- Migrated the data warehouse from AWS Redshift to Snowflake, designing and shipping real-time PostgreSQL logical replication via Snowflake Openflow across 50+ databases, reducing analytics data latency from hours or days to under 5 minutes for multiple downstream teams.
- Built cluster-wide monitoring and alerting with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Alertmanager, and OpenTelemetry and integrated it with on-call incident response so production failures page engineers immediately rather than being discovered by customers.
- Enforced pull-request-gated GitOps as the deployment path to production, producing a complete change audit trail and supporting SOC 2 compliance without additional reviewer burden.
- Maintained legacy revenue-generating services on Azure with IIS in parallel with the Kubernetes platform, keeping both stacks releasable while the org standardized on AWS.
Senior Software Engineer
Feb 2023 - May 2024Frye Consulting, Canton, OH
- Provided DevOps and platform engineering consulting for startups, focused on Kubernetes migrations, CI/CD pipeline optimization, and infrastructure automation.
Senior Platform Engineer
Nov 2020 - Feb 2023Papa Inc, Miami, FL
- Built an Internal Developer Platform from scratch using GitHub Deployments, Slack ChatOps, Helm, and AWS EKS, replacing monthly manual releases with 30+ automated deployments per day.
- Templated service provisioning through the platform, reducing time-to-first-deploy from hours to under 15 minutes and making service pipelines consistent and repeatable.
- Created per-PR review environments on EKS, giving QA isolated, fully functional environments for every pull request and reducing production incidents by 80%.
- Developed an automated data-scrubbing pipeline that produced production-shaped test datasets with sensitive fields removed, giving QA realistic data without exposing PII.
- Built HIPAA controls into the platform (PII filtering, access control, audit logging) and automated a per-deploy audit bundle archived to S3 with what shipped and when, the work-request-to-completion trail, code and QA sign-offs, SAST/DAST and code-scanning results, and full deploy logs.
- Ran observability for the platform and its services on Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry, giving engineering teams shared metrics, logs, and traces for the services they shipped.
Senior Software Engineer
Aug 2016 - Oct 2020StackShare, San Francisco, CA
- Owned backend systems powering StackShare’s product APIs, designing and shipping REST and GraphQL endpoints and introducing GraphQL to reduce over-fetching and unblock frontend development.
- Led performance and scalability work during a high-growth period, profiling and refactoring hot paths and database queries to restore headroom and make performance a team-wide priority.
- Single-handedly owned infrastructure across Heroku, DigitalOcean, AWS, and GCP, containerizing the application, maintaining CI, and running 3 Kubernetes clusters on GCP with a Linkerd2 service mesh, deployed via Helm and a custom deployment chatbot, and supporting SOC 2 compliance.
- Established alerting and on-call practices and handled production incident response, driving platform uptime.
Senior Software Engineer
Jan 2016 - Aug 2016GitLab Inc, San Francisco, CA
- Joined via GitLab’s acquisition of GitHost, a self-hosted GitLab hosting platform I founded and built solo.
- Delivered backend Rails and PostgreSQL performance improvements to critical paths as gitlab.com scaled through rapid growth, while also shipping customer-facing product features.
Founder
Dec 2014 - Dec 2015GitHost, Brooklyn, NY
- Founded and built GitHost, a cloud platform that automated provisioning, upgrades, SSL, and preconfigured CI runners for private self-hosted GitLab instances.
- Ran the business solo across product, infrastructure, billing, and support until GitLab acquired the product in 2015.
Senior Software Engineer
Jul 2014 - Jan 2015HashiCorp, San Francisco, CA
- Built backend REST APIs powering the Atlas cloud offering and collaborated on Docker-integrated products and infrastructure automation tooling during the company’s foundational growth phase.
Senior Software Engineer
Aug 2013 - Jul 2014DigitalOcean, New York, NY
- Automated the golden-master image generation system behind DigitalOcean’s one-click application deployments, making stacks such as WordPress, GitLab, and MySQL deployable in a single click.
- Designed and built the first version of DigitalOcean’s public REST API in Ruby, opening the platform to third-party integrations.
- Worked on the backend VM scheduling and hypervisor layer responsible for placing and provisioning customer servers; previously built the first Android VM-management client as an outside project, which led to being hired.
Senior Software Engineer
Nov 2011 - Aug 2013Etsy, Brooklyn, NY
- Served on the Core team as a performance specialist for a platform serving 95 million users.
- Profiled and refactored critical paths across the stack to bring page response times back within strict internal SLAs, improving user experience and conversion.
Skills
Platform & Infrastructure
- AWS
- GCP
- Azure
- Kubernetes
- Helm
- Linkerd
- Terraform
- CDK
- Flux/GitOps
- CI/CD
- GitHub Actions
- Docker
- Linux
Backend & Data
- Ruby/Rails
- Go
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- Snowflake
- GraphQL
- REST APIs
- Elixir
- PHP
- JavaScript
- SQL
- HCL
Observability & Tools
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Alertmanager
- OpenTelemetry
- Datadog
- Loki
- Nginx
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Bash