How I work Services Work Contact
Nicholas Crew Ferguson · Tampa Bay, FL

I modernize the infrastructure your team runs on.

Every company I've walked into had the same problem: legacy infrastructure held together with scripts and tribal knowledge, one person who understood the deploy process, and a team that had stopped complaining because nobody expected it to get better. I fix that. Bare Docker to GitOps. Manual deploys to self-service pipelines. Scattered Terraform to reusable modules. Then I hand it off and it runs without me.

~$60K/mo AWS cost reduction
600+ Pipelines automated
3 companies Same pattern, same result

The pattern is the same at every company. I start on the inside, helping the people around me ship. That gives me an accelerated tour of the organization: where the friction lives, what breaks on Fridays, which systems only one person understands. I work outward from there: customers, business model, competitive landscape. By the time I propose a solution, I've already lived the problem.
01

Absorb

Sit with your engineers. Watch them fight the tooling. Map the pain points, the tribal knowledge, the undocumented dependencies. Understand what's actually broken, not what the ticket says.

02

Rebuild

I don't ask teams to migrate on their own timeline. I do the work for them. Onboard their services to the golden path, all the way through deployment. Eliminate the bottleneck, don't relocate it.

03

Hand off

Everything is built to run without me from day one. Documentation, runbooks, monitoring. At ThreatX, I mentored the SOC team into SRE practitioners who took over the platform entirely.


Modernization

Infrastructure Overhaul

Your CI takes 45 minutes. One person understands the deploy process. Your Terraform is copy-pasted across a dozen repos. I've inherited this exact situation at every company I've worked for and rebuilt it into infrastructure that runs without tribal knowledge. Bare Docker to EKS. Manual deploys to GitOps. Scattered scripts to reusable modules.

Platform

Developer Experience

Build the internal platform your engineers actually use. Golden path modules built by infrastructure, approved by security, monitored by SRE. Self-service pipelines. Shift-left documentation. The goal is your developers stop thinking about infrastructure entirely.

Intelligence

AI Integration

Embed AI into existing products and workflows. Not chatbots: context orchestration, behavioral analysis, LLM-augmented development pipelines, and automated test generation at production scale. The kind of integration that requires understanding your architecture, not just an API key.

Greenfield

New Product

Take an idea from architecture through production deploy. Backend, frontend, infrastructure, design system. Best for seed-stage companies with domain expertise who need the person that makes everything work. I've shipped complete platforms solo that teams of five quoted months for.




Infrastructure

  • Terraform / Terragrunt
  • Kubernetes / EKS / Helm
  • GitOps (Flux, Kustomize)
  • AWS (VPC, Fargate, Lambda, MSK)
  • CI/CD pipeline design
  • Release engineering
  • Linux / systemd / kernel tuning
  • VMware / on-prem / hybrid
  • Ansible / configuration mgmt

Languages & Platforms

  • Python
  • TypeScript / React
  • Rust
  • C# / .NET
  • SQL (Postgres, SQL Server)
  • Bash / PowerShell
  • Kafka / event streaming
  • MongoDB / ClickHouse
  • Prometheus / Grafana / InfluxDB

Also

  • API & web application security
  • Developer experience design
  • Technical writing (Antora, Vale, Diataxis)
  • AI / LLM integration
  • Cross-platform builds (Win, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux)
  • EV code signing & notarization
  • Performance optimization
  • Data visualization & reporting
  • Design systems & branding

Let's talk.

Available for contract and consulting engagements. Remote preferred. On-site in the Tampa Bay area.

[email protected]