READING, UK         +44 07426 086709                 craig@saxton.cloud

CRAIG SAXTON

Cloud & Software Engineer with 20+ years building resilient, event-driven systems across enterprise environments (Finance, Healthcare, Defence, Media, Insurance, Manufacturing).

Currently focused on agentic engineering and cloud infrastructure/architecture  — applying deep platform experience to the next generation of intelligent, autonomous systems.

Passionate about delivering secure, observable, testable, resilient, performant and cost-effective solutions with the communication skills to work across all levels of an organisation.

SKILLS

CERTIFICATIONS

EXPERIENCE

LegitScript, Portland OR, USA — Lead Engineer

May 2024 - January 2026

LegitScript provides merchant monitoring, certification, and risk intelligence services.

[TypeScript, Python, AWS (Batch, Lambda, SQS, EventBridge, Kinesis Firehose, DynamoDB, S3, VPC, Identity Center), Terraform/Terragrunt, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, PagerDuty]

• Strengthened security posture for a recently acquired team (~10 engineers) by migrating from long-lived AWS access keys to AWS Identity Center (SSO), with user and permission management fully codified in Terraform and auto-deployed via GitHub Actions on merge to main
• Productionised a GenAI merchant risk classification system from undocumented Python scripts into a dual-purpose tool: a CLI for analysts to experiment with prompt refinements, dataset creation, and scoring evaluation, plus an AWS-native service (Lambda, SQS, EventBridge, Kinesis Firehose) integrated into both the acquired company’s flagship product and LegitScript’s core merchant monitoring platform
• Led a team of 7 engineers to design and deliver a v3 web crawler/scraper, replacing an unreliable and poorly instrumented predecessor. Introduced AWS best practices including full observability, VPC-level bulkheading with dedicated VPC endpoints, migrated from ECS Fargate to AWS Batch for scaling, and replaced an oversized RDS cluster with DynamoDB single-table design. V3 crawled 40K additional sites per day at cost parity with v2; dark-deployed in parallel for weeks before cutover
• Led a 3-engineer team to map the company’s entire AWS workload portfolio, characterising inter-system interactions, message formats, and control flows. Leveraged Claude Code for system analysis, producing a structured Obsidian vault queryable by AI alongside 3D visualisations of the full architecture
• Championed DevOps maturation across the organisation: implemented OIDC connectivity between CI/CD platforms (CircleCI, GitHub Actions) and AWS, authored proposals for multi-account architecture (fault, security, and billing isolation), and partnered with SecOps on implementation
• Mentored junior engineers and advocated for improved engineering practices including incident management integration (PagerDuty), alarming and instrumentation, automated integration testing, employment of GenAI in development and code review, investment in CI/CD pipelines for deployment and quality gating, and disciplined attention to system boundaries and managed interfaces

Cigna, Portland OR, USA — Application Development Sr. Advisor ( contract via Randstad Technologies USA )

August 2020 - September 2023

The Cigna Group is a fortune 50 multinational managed healthcare and insurance company.

[Python, NodeJS, AWS/OpenShift, Terraform, Jenkins, SQL, GraphQL/REST, Docker, Kafka, Avro]

• Expanded cross-organisational interaction data sharing by designing & developing an event driven interaction data pipeline. This pipeline serves as the enterprise’s central means for receiving, normalising, vetting and disseminating partner/customer interaction information
• Upskilled team members by mentoring in group and paired-development venues for unit testing, git, python, AWS development & support practices ( a fantastic team that started with no experience in AWS, python, terraform or nodejs and absolutely rose to the occasion )
• Ensured project alignment with shifting organisational priorities by

• Collaborating with product owners to produce stories and tasks from features, for several development efforts.
• Frequently communicating and managing changes with team members preferring minimal disruptive means such as project ‘blogs/changelogs’ and e-mail.

• Ensured reliable and responsive system operation by:

• employing DevOps with a heavy focus on tooling and automation
• authoring a comprehensive collection of playbooks and runbooks

• Reduced defect rate and ensured codebase/system consistency/navigability by

• developing & implementing published coding, naming and design standards (where possible, enforcing standards employing automation/build-pipelines & fitness functions)
• conducting code reviews
• employing corporate code quality tools

• Enabled integration of key LOB applications by designing & developing a GraphQL API [AWS lambda, AWS OpenSearch ]
• Published several billion historical interaction records across the enterprise by designing, developing and executing a large scale phased data migration effort [ AWS Batch, Kinesis, DynamoDB, S3, Event Bridge ]
• Streamlined team’s testing and release process by designing & developing the following tooling

• Developed a unix-style/pipeable CLI to generate randomised but realistic test data based off of a variety of JSON schema - eventually ended up being adopted by partner teams as part of their testing efforts [ NodeJS ]
• Implemented BDD styled cloud hosted integration tests [Behave & AWS Step Functions]
• Developed cloud hosted performance testing infrastructure [Locust, AWS Batch ]
• Developed a CLI to facilitate easier and more reliable release process including the generating requisite artefacts and calculating deployment and rollback plans

• Improved partner intake/onboarding by authoring several partner onboarding workflow & integration guides liaising with said partners to continuously refine and disambiguate the evolving processes.
• Enabled responsive and improved continuous integration for team’s portfolio of projects by maintaining and enhancing build pipelines

News UK (Times/Sunday Times), London UK — Senior Software Engineer

March 2019 - July 2020

News UK provides news, analysis and opinion to over 40 million subscribers in the UK and internationally.

[NodeJS/Typescript/Python, AWS, TeamCity/CircleCI, Terraform/Serverless, SQL, GraphQL, Docker]

• Streamlined and simplified content publication by maintaining and enhancing the core GraphQL API responsible for providing content for the Times web, mobile, tablet and kindle channels.
• Facilitated the performance improvement of several system by implementing load testing support using commercial cloud based load testing products
• Mentored junior developers, with a focus on general skill sets that port across tech stack and frameworks ( design, refactoring, SDLC and testing practice )
• Designed & delivered the backend functionality, including custom deployment pipeline, for the Times’ new ‘Channels & Collections’ initiative, offering custom and curated topical content for customers to explore
• Reduced operational costs of several legacy systems by conducting platform migration, consolidation and upgrade efforts.

Viavi Solutions Inc., Newbury UK — Senior Software Engineer

June 2015 - March 2019

Viavi Solutions is a global provider of network test, monitoring and assurance solutions for communications service providers, enterprises, network equipment manufacturers, original equipment manufacturers, government and avionics.

[C#/NodeJS/Python/Scala, Mesos, AWS, AngularJS/ASP.NET, SQL/ElasticSearch/MongoDB, REST, Jenkins/Ansible/Octopus Deploy/DSC, Docker, RabbitMQ/Kafka, LogStash]

• Improved the GEOoptimize product’s UX by

• Collaborating more closely with, not only product managers, but also the field trial engineers to develop and rapidly prototype new user and operations features
• Pairing with a junior developer to successfully develop a re-imagined v2 web UI aligned more closely with the various persona workflows interacting with the product.

• Promoted the employment of light-weight development processes; open source cluster platforms, modern source control, publication and packaging [Mesos, Docker Swarm, Git]
• Prototyped scripted AWS development and test environments for the GEOoptimize product [Ansible ]

Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA USA — Senior Programmer/Analyst

February 2012 - October 2014

Global semiconductor and wireless technology company.

[C#/NodeJS, SQL, Jenkins]

• Implemented CI/CD infrastructure and introduced RESTful API patterns, migrating a portfolio of internal workflow applications from legacy to modern architecture (DDD, SPA)
• Fostered engineering culture through a developer blog, cross-team workshops, and adoption of structured project management practices

Science Applications International Corporation. (SAIC), San Diego, CA USA — Senior Programmer/Analyst

December 2008 - February 2012

Fortune 500 scientific and engineering company serving national security, energy, and critical infrastructure.

[C#, SQL]

• Maintained and enhanced the enterprise’s key project management application; designed an event-driven sub-system for scheduled delivery of business information across the organisation
• Streamlined UI development by designing a reusable declarative validation framework