Site Reliability Engineer
Hi, I’m Chris Roos.
I build infrastructure that stays up at Fortis.
With 5 years of experience in cloud infrastructure, automation, and CI/CD, I specialize in designing infrastructure-as-code and hardening deployment pipelines, from provisioning through observability to security.
How I think about the work
The opinions I've arrived at after five years of keeping payment infrastructure running, written down with the reasoning and the trade-offs.
Strategy
What I optimize for
Toil, delivery speed, and reliability as a constraint rather than a goal, plus why contract tests beat end-to-end suites.
ReadPlaybooks
How I use the tools
Terraform, containers, pipelines, observability, and Python, with real configuration and the anti-patterns I've had to unwind.
ReadAI Workflow
Working with Claude
Briefs, guardrails, and scheduled agents: how I get real operational work out of AI without letting it near production.
ReadExperience
October 2021 — Current
Site Reliability Engineer / Fortis
- Design and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform and Spacelift across a large multi-account AWS environment.
- Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitLab CI) supporting continuous delivery for production systems.
- Support containerized services on ECS/Fargate, including deployment strategies like blue-green releases.
- Work on cloud cost optimization, database infrastructure (RDS), and right-sizing initiatives.
- Contribute to security and compliance efforts, including credential management, secrets handling, and data encryption practices.
- Use observability tooling (Datadog, CloudWatch, ELK) to monitor system health and support incident response.
- Explore and apply AI-assisted tooling to improve engineering workflows and automation.
January 2021 — October 2021
Marketing Director / OmniFund
- Used Elasticsearch to index and analyze competitor websites, informing market research and strategy.
June 2017 — June 2018
Data Analyst / Stukent
- Performed data analysis and built predictive models to drive business strategy.
- Conducted web scraping projects to collect and analyze market data.
June 2017 — Current
Freelancer / Freelance IT Services
- Built and maintained client websites and custom web apps (Python, HTML/CSS/JS), focused on performance and UX.
- Built web scraping and data collection tools for lead generation and competitor/market analysis, delivered as automated reports for client decision-making.
- Managed Microsoft 365 and AWS accounts for clients.
Tech Stack
Read the playbooks for how I actually use these →
Infrastructure & Cloud
CI/CD & Version Control
Languages & Data
Observability & Tools
Projects
Elasticsearch Observability
Designed and implemented a comprehensive observability stack using Elasticsearch to monitor, log, and trace application performance across multiple environments. This project enhanced the visibility into system health, enabling proactive detection of issues and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Led the initiative from requirements gathering through to deployment and ongoing maintenance, ensuring seamless integration with existing systems.
Spacelift & Terraform
Designed and implemented an automated infrastructure management pipeline using Spacelift and Terraform, enabling efficient provisioning, scaling, and maintenance of cloud resources across multiple environments. This project streamlined infrastructure as code (IaC) practices, improving deployment consistency, reducing manual errors, and speeding up the development lifecycle.
Led the initiative from infrastructure design and IaC implementation through to continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), ensuring secure and scalable deployment processes across AWS and other cloud environments.