I build the systems
& teams that keep
engineering moving.
I'm an IT leader who turns busy engineering organizations into effective ones — optimizing the Atlassian tools they run on, automating the toil, and growing the people behind them.
For 20+ years I've worked across the stack, from embedded software to enterprise DevSecOps. Today I lead Atlassian platform strategy and CI/CD delivery for a major financial institution: part architect, part builder, part the person who makes the tools behave.
I've spent years solving team problems with the Atlassian platform: inefficiency, friction, lost knowledge. Somewhere along the way I became the person people come to first. Hence the nickname.
What I'm exploring
Lately I've gone deep on Atlassian Forge — building apps that solve enterprise-scale problems other teams would buy a Marketplace tool, or whole consulting engagements, to fix.
And the bigger question I keep pulling at: how do you keep code quality high and vulnerabilities remediated when agentic AI writes more and more of the code? That's where a lot of my tinkering lives right now.
The stack I work in
Selected work
$ git log --oneline --author="sean" --grep="impact"
Owned the migration end-to-end with a two-person technical team: 6,500+ Jira users and 5,500+ Confluence users across 2,400+ spaces (679 Jira, formerly "projects," and 1,726 Confluence), with 3.5M+ work items and ~1.8M pages.
Evaluated 4 candidate strategies across 163 trial runs (111 Jira, 52 Confluence) — varied space sets and configuration permutations — to validate the lowest-risk path before go-live.
A project-aware issue-key reconciliation script handling Cloud's token-based JQL pagination and mid-migration key renames, plus a resumable bulk-archival utility with CSV checkpointing and auto-retry on 502/504 timeouts.
Admin/governance and end-user apps replacing Marketplace equivalents — eliminating ~$120K/yr in licensing — plus a production status & incident-communication app. Built an async self-chaining pattern to beat Forge's FaaS time limits.
Drove resiliency and modernization of the artifact-management stack, and shipped automation for IQ quarantine re-evaluation and streaming component export with continuation-token pagination.
A custom app that connects to any AI model — from locally-hosted LLMs to Claude, ChatGPT and beyond — for in-context issue creation and Confluence summarization. Hardened it with built-in guardrails, then ran penetration testing across models to validate them.
Guided skills that walk users through setup, conventions, and best practices — turning repetitive ramp-up and how-do-I questions into instant, self-serve answers.
$120K/yr from custom Forge apps, $110K from SonarQube consolidation, $100K+ from clustering duplicate instances.
Drove secure, compliant environments with zero incidents — and kept the backlog at zero through automated scanning, policy gates, and quarantine enforcement rather than one-off cleanup sprints.
Experience
I lead Atlassian platform strategy and CI/CD delivery, working at the intersection of engineering, governance, and security. I co-founded an enterprise Jira Council to align teams on shared practices, led a four-person engineering team as Product Owner and Scrum Master, and built the automation that keeps the platform fast and auditable: reporting pipelines, AD provisioning that cut process time by 85%, and installation tooling that cut deploy time by 80%. Along the way I consolidated Jenkins from six instances to two, saved $110K a year by consolidating SonarQube and replacing vendor software with native solutions, and drove vulnerability remediation down to zero open issues with zero security incidents.
I designed and built the high-availability foundation the platform still runs on: clustered Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Bitbucket environments on RHEL, instrumented with AppDynamics, Datadog, and Prometheus. Consolidating multiple instances into those clusters saved the company over $100K a year. I also created the postmortem process for high-impact outages, hosted training classes for internal teams, and did the deep diagnostic work (Splunk, memory analysis, GC tuning) that keeps clustered systems honest.
I served as sustain architect for Agile teams, guiding system implementation and durable processes. This is where my automation instincts took root: REST API integrations in Jira, StatusPage wired to Jira and Jira Service Desk, and monitoring with Datadog feeding automated alerting through OpsGenie. I also ran Salesforce development operations as project manager in a Scrum environment.
My entry point into the Atlassian world: I built and managed the Jira and Confluence environment for the Mortgage organization, designing workflows, documentation, and procedures from scratch while administering Salesforce, Velocify, and DocuSign and running UAT across mortgage systems.
For eight years I ran my own consulting practice, doing whatever clients needed: web and graphic design, hardware and software support, mobile integration, training. It's where the "across the stack" habit comes from. Earlier still, my roots are in embedded software.
What I can provide
Let's connect.
Have a thorny Atlassian problem, an Agile transformation to run, or an idea worth building? I'd love to hear about it.