Hey, I’m James Duffy (he/him). I have been building reliable, scalable platforms for high-traffic applications professionally since 2015.

I’m based in San Francisco and work remotely as a Director of Site Reliability Engineering. My title says SRE, but the work is platform engineering: building the paved roads that make reliability the default and infrastructure easy for every engineer to use. Platform engineering, SRE, and DevOps overlap so much that I’ve stopped worrying about the label. I still stay close to the technical work, from Kubernetes and Terraform to how we run incidents.

My current focus includes:

• Building self-service platforms that democratize infrastructure for non-DevOps engineers
• Building and growing platform engineering, SRE, and DevOps teams
• Setting reliability strategy: SLOs, observability, and capacity planning
• Running incident response that doesn’t break the team and blameless postmortems

#What I’m Into

• Cloud Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Istio, ArgoCD, Consul, Vault
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Cloudformation, Troposphere
• Reliability & Observability: Improving uptime and performance monitoring
• Team Mentorship: Helping non-DevOps engineers get comfortable with infrastructure

I didn’t start out in platform engineering. In high school, I joined the Fire Explorer program and seriously considered becoming a firefighter. I spent years training alongside real crews and learning how to stay calm when everything around you is going wrong.

I didn’t end up going down that path, but more of it stuck with me than I expected. The way firefighters run incident command — clear roles, structured communication, fast triage — maps directly to how I approach incident response in engineering today. Staying composed under pressure, coordinating across teams, and running blameless postmortems all trace back to those early lessons on the fireground.

After graduating, I landed my first job as a backend engineer but found myself drawn to DevOps. I shifted my focus, and over the years, I have specialized in making complex infrastructure easier for teams to manage. A highlight of my career was scaling a telehealth company during the pandemic to operate in multiple AWS regions seamlessly.

When I am not working, I am likely out on a bike ride or behind a camera. I am passionate about photography and even bring my lightboxes to work sometimes to offer free headshots for colleagues.

#Things I Use

• Languages/Frameworks: Python, Django, Flask, PHP, Laravel
• Tech Stack: AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Istio, Docker, ArgoCD
• Hardware: MacBook Pro, Google Pixel 8 Pro, Macbook Air 2013 (running Linux)
• Software: 1Password, Firefox, SublimeText, Tower, Todoist

#Camera Gear

• Ricoh GR IIIx
• Fujifilm XT-4
• Fujifilm XF 23mm F1.4 R
• Fujifilm XF 35mm f/2 R WR
• Fujifilm XF 55-200mm f/3.5-4.8 R LM OIS
• Fujifilm XF 18-55mm f/2.8-4 R LM OIS

#Archived Projects

• Bluesky Feed Builder: A Python Django app for building custom feeds on the Bluesky Social Network using the At Protocol. It consumed post data in real-time and could filter based on post content, author, or metadata.
• Analytics-App.net: A PHP site that ingested AppDotNet’s firehose to find trending posts and track historical data. It shut down when AppDotNet ended its developer program.
• Turlock City Booze: A happy hour finder for Turlock, California. I retired it after graduating college and moving away.

Feel free to check out my GitHub for more of what I’ve been working on.