About

About Me #

Conor Avatar

Conor

Platform Engineer & Architect based in Melbourne, Australia.

🎓 Master of Cybersecurity Candidate

🔐 Interests in Applied Cryptography, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, and Platform Security.

What I Do #

I work across platform engineering, cloud architecture, and security. My focus is on building resilient systems, smooth deployment pipelines, and practical security controls:

  • Cloud & Kubernetes: Production Kubernetes (cloud & on-prem), container orchestration, and multi-environment networking.
  • GitOps & Automation: Declarative delivery via Argo CD, automated CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code with OpenTofu / Terraform.
  • Zero Trust & Edge Security: Identity-aware access via Cloudflare Tunnels, SSO policies, and least-privilege RBAC boundaries.
  • Systems & Self-Hosting: Virtualization on Proxmox VE (LXC/KVM), UniFi networking, and declarative setups with NixOS.

Approach & Philosophy #

  • Simplicity over complexity: Choose the simplest tool that reliably solves the problem without unnecessary operational overhead.
  • Reproducibility: Automate configs with IaC and reproducible dev shells so environments can be spun up in minutes without toolchain drift.
  • Security as an enabler: Build guardrails and Zero Trust boundaries that make doing the secure thing the easiest path for developers.

My postgraduate research into privacy-preserving cloud compliance explores how third-party assessors might verify bounded claims using zero-knowledge proofs without receiving the underlying sensitive cloud configuration.

💼 Selected Project Experience #

A high-level look at platform, security, and cloud initiatives I’ve delivered:

  • Enterprise Microservice Accelerator: Designed a Java and Kubernetes service accelerator that substantially reduced onboarding effort, paired with adoption reporting and automated base-image patching.
  • Fine-Grained Authorisation & Devcontainers: Implemented Open Policy Agent (OPA) authorisers on AWS API Gateway, standardised multi-environment CI/CD pipelines, and introduced reusable devcontainers across engineering teams.
  • Cloud Tooling & Cost Optimisation: Replaced separate commercial infrastructure and secrets tooling with a configuration-driven cloud workflow, significantly reducing recurring licensing costs. Read the generalised case study.
  • Enterprise Landing Zones & Hardened Kubernetes: Built reusable Terraform accelerators for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and AWS Landing Zones with automated compliance guardrails and golden image pipelines.

For a longer breakdown, have a look at Projects & Things I’ve Built.

Connect #