J. Gavin Ray — Principal Engineer

About

Engineer who thrives in operational environments, building infrastructure and integration platforms at scale. I'm passionate about eliminating technical debt, accelerating developer velocity, and building the kind of reliability that lets teams sleep at night.

I've built and led engineering teams from 0→1, hired and grown senior engineers, and partnered with product to define roadmaps — not just executed them. I care as much about the humans in the system as the systems themselves.

Outside of work I design and build production agentic systems — multi-agent pipelines with episodic memory, autonomous task orchestration, and self-hosted inference infrastructure. Harness engineering is the next platform problem.

My approach: Test-driven development, continuous deployment, and obsessive documentation. I've been the person who inherited undocumented systems — I don't do that to my colleagues.

15 min Avg MTTR after incident platform redesign

97% Reduction in CI/CD ship time (6h → 10min)

21 Sites migrated to unified orchestration

Experience

Principal Engineer

Arcadia acquired

Founded Site Reliability Engineering team; built self-service infrastructure platform for product engineering teams
Architected incident management platform across 12 teams → MTTR reduced to avg 15 minutes
Redesigned CI/CD pipelines → ship time from 6 hours to 10 minutes via parallelization and build caching
Eliminated package/library vulnerabilities through dependency modernization, SBOM validation, automated patch pipelines

Senior Staff Engineer

Machinify Inc. acquired

Led migration of core revenue-generating applications from static to dynamic infrastructure
Designed and implemented common infrastructure platform on open source software
Extended platform to automate management of mission-critical revenue-generating applications
Authored HITRUST compliance automation for all covered environments
Core contributor to incident management process (infrastructure, software, security)
Led observability effort across entire software stack

Senior Software Engineer

Packet acquired by Equinix

Standardized deployment model across multiple teams → dramatic release velocity improvement
Coordinated migration of entire production stack across 21 sites from 4 orchestration systems to single platform
Led effort to operationalize and open source internal VPN service Doorman
Served in incident response unit

Software Engineer

Platform9 Systems

Owned roadmap for internal automation and tooling
Lead engineer on HPE OneSphere and Platform9 integration project
Core contributor of lifecycle management tooling for all Platform9 deployments
Implemented security monitoring, remediation, and reporting tooling

Areas of Expertise

Platform Engineering & Self-Service Infrastructure

Designing and operating internal platforms that give product teams the autonomy to ship without needing ops involvement on every deploy.

Site Reliability & Incident Management

Building the systems, processes, and culture that reduce MTTR, improve observability, and make on-call sustainable at scale.

AI Harness & Agentic Systems Architecture

Designing production multi-agent systems with episodic memory, autonomous orchestration, and the infrastructure to run them reliably.

Security, Compliance & Regulatory Frameworks

Hands-on experience authoring and maintaining compliance automation across SOC 1/2, NIST 800, ISO 27001, and HITRUST environments.

Cloud & Bare Metal Infrastructure

Operating infrastructure across AWS, GCP, Azure, and GPU cloud providers — including on-prem bare metal provisioning at scale.

Engineering Leadership & Team Development

Building and growing engineering teams from 0→1, defining technical roadmaps, and partnering with product to deliver real outcomes.

Contact

I'm not actively looking, but I'm always open to interesting conversations about infrastructure, platforms, and engineering culture.

github.com/jgavinray linkedin.com/in/jgavinray hachyderm.io/@jgavinray