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August 2026 - Present
DevOps Engineer
Team RH Fitness
Unit 5, Queen's Court North, Team Valley, Newcastle upon Tyne, England
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July 2025 - August 2026
DevOps Engineer
Tombola Ltd
Wylam Wharf, Low Street, Sunderland, England
Key contributor to Tombola’s cloud modernisation, migrating legacy EC2 systems and arcade engines to ECS Fargate for improved scalability, reliability and cost efficiency.
Designed and supported a serverless Arcade Tournaments platform using Lambda, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS FIFO, DynamoDB, ElastiCache Serverless and Terraform, reducing idle compute costs by 50-70% and supporting up to 5x higher tournament traffic.
Developed a serverless Game Event Streamer using ECS Fargate, SQS FIFO, DynamoDB, Lambda and Terraform, improving event reliability while reducing unnecessary SQL load by 40-60%.
Implemented blue/green and canary deployments using Cloudflare, enabling safe production testing without impacting live customers.
Modernised arcade infrastructure with ECS Fargate, reducing scaling times from around 10 minutes to 1 minute and delivering up to 10x faster scaling response.
Standardised CI/CD pipelines across teams, accounts and environments using AWS CodePipeline and TeamCity, reducing deployment overhead by 25-50%.
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November 2022 - July 2025
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Tombola Ltd
Wylam Wharf, Low Street, Sunderland, England
Built and improved CI/CD pipelines across engine, game, and client teams, replacing manual deployment processes and reducing deployment overhead by up to 50%.
Developed canary testing systems that allowed experimental features to be deployed safely into production environments without impacting customers.
Contributed to infrastructure standardisation across multiple AWS accounts and environments, improving consistency and operational efficiency.
Supported production systems through on-call rotations, resolving incidents and maintaining platform stability. -
November 2021 - November 2022
Graduate Cloud Infrastructure Engineer
Tombola Ltd
Wylam Wharf, Low Street, Sunderland, England
Supported live AWS-based production systems, maintaining performance, availability, and reliability across critical services.
Assisted with migrating infrastructure from CloudFormation to Terraform, improving consistency, maintainability, and infrastructure management across environments.
Contributed to server optimisation initiatives, reducing system overload and improving overall platform stability and uptime.
Developed automation scripts and enhanced deployment and operational tooling to improve efficiency and reduce manual processes.
about me
Hello! I'm Colby Smith, AWS-focused DevOps engineer with nearly 5 years of experience in building, modernising, and supporting production cloud platforms. Expertise in CI/CD engineering, infrastructure as code, and serverless architecture. Proficient in implementing serverless architecture solutions, enhancing observability, and ensuring operational reliability through automation.
I currently work on designing and evolving cloud platforms, with experience in CI/CD pipeline engineering, infrastructure-as-code, and modern deployment strategies, with a focus on servless architecture solutions. I’ve contributed to migrating legacy systems from EC2-based infrastructure to containerised platforms using ECS Fargate, improving scalability, reliability, and operational efficiency.
My work also includes standardising deployment pipelines across multiple teams, improving observability with tools such as Dynatrace and CloudWatch, and enhancing system reliability through automation and monitoring. I regularly collaborate across teams to deliver infrastructure improvements that support continuous delivery and reduce operational overhead.
