Dave Kerr · hackerrdave
Platform engineer with 10+ years building production-critical fintech infrastructure. Trained as a structural engineer (bridges before backends). Now focused on AI-native developer platforms.
I started in steel and concrete. Five years designing bridges in Philadelphia and New York taught me how forces actually flow, and that the most elegant structures are the ones where every member is doing real work.
Those reflexes still shape how I look at software: hidden load paths, failure modes you can't fully test, redundancy designed in for a system that has to outlive its designer.
Inspection, load rating, and rehabilitation design for 67 bridge structures across the Bronx. The kind of unglamorous, load-bearing work that keeps a city moving.
A decade in fintech across Haven Life, Galileo Health, NYDIG, Engineers Gate, Orum.io (acquired by Stripe), and now OnePay. The work that holds everything else up: developer experience, infrastructure, the unglamorous tooling that lets a team ship ten times faster.
The shape of the work changed from company to company. DevTools at Haven Life, observability and cost work at Galileo, AWS Organizations and CDKTF rollouts at NYDIG, autoscaling for quants at Engineers Gate, API gateway and SOC II at Orum. The through-line was always the same: make the next engineer's job tractable.
At OnePay that translates to platform engineering at a much larger scale: on-call for production payments across an engineering org of 200+, and a database re-encryption system that migrated billions of records to a new schema, cutting AWS KMS costs by over 95% and latency by up to 90% along the way.
Migrated Orum's public API gateway off AWS API Gateway to Traefik. Cut p95 latency by more than 50% and reclaimed full control over routing, validation, and auth.
Researched, prototyped, and rolled out CDK for Terraform across product engineering teams. Turned copy-paste HCL into a typed library of reusable infrastructure constructs.
At OnePay I built and scaled the internal AI developer platform to 300 users (engineers and non-engineers), owning roadmap, adoption, and the docs that turn curiosity into capability.
I'm building for a world where the second user of every system is a model: where docs are read by agents, where APIs are called by autonomous loops, where structure matters because the reader is no longer just human.
This site is built that way on purpose: semantic HTML, a permissive crawler policy, a machine-readable /llms.txt index, structured data on every page. Splashy for humans; legible for the agents that show up next.
Built and scaled the internal AI platform at OnePay to 300 users across engineering and non-engineering teams. Owned the roadmap and drove adoption through self-service tooling and docs.
Migrated billions of records across hundreds of tables to a new encryption schema. Cut AWS KMS costs by >95% and latency by up to 90%.
The whole arc
Senior Platform Engineer · Aug 2025 – Present · Remote
Senior Platform Engineer · Sep 2023 – Aug 2025 · Remote
Systems Engineer · Jun 2023 – Sep 2023 · New York, NY
Lead DevOps Engineer · Jun 2021 – May 2023 · New York, NY
Senior Site Reliability Engineer · Apr 2019 – Jun 2021 · New York, NY
Senior Software Engineer · DevTools Lead · Aug 2015 – Mar 2019 · New York, NY
Software Developer · Aug 2014 – Aug 2015 · New York, NY
Structural Engineer · 2011 – Apr 2014 · New York, NY
Structural Engineer · Sep 2009 – 2011 · Allentown, PA
B.S. Civil Engineering · Aug 2005 – May 2009 · Bethlehem, PA