About

Hi, I'm Josh Woolbright — a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer working remotely out of Arizona. I graduated from Cal Poly Pomona in 2021 with a degree in Computer Science and have spent my career since then building and operating cloud infrastructure for engineering teams.

I spent four years in consulting embedded with a large financial institution's big data platform team, where I owned the data lake infrastructure built on AWS. Most of my work there was platform engineering — maintaining EMR-based architectures, improving the developer experience for the teams building on top of the platform, and making sure the infrastructure was reliable enough that data engineers didn't have to think about it. Working inside a large regulated financial institution for that long gave me a strong foundation in operational discipline, compliance-aware design, and the kind of documentation that actually gets read.

Before my current role I spent time as a Systems Engineer in an industrial automation environment — a highly regulated setting where deployments were manual, the systems ran on Windows, and the cost of getting something wrong was unusually high. It reinforced habits around careful change management and operational rigor that translate directly into cloud work.

I'm currently a Senior Cloud Platform Engineer working in fintech — another highly regulated space where security and compliance aren't afterthoughts. Across every role I've held, the environment has demanded that platforms be both secure by design and genuinely easy for engineers to use. That balance is something I've come to think of as a core part of the job, not a constraint on it. It's the same problem I've always cared most about: giving engineering teams infrastructure that's easy to build on and hard to break.