Summary
Colin Shield is a seasoned engineering leader and hands-on staff engineer with 27+ years of experience building large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native platforms. Currently at VMware he’s deepening his systems and Go expertise by developing a Percona MySQL operator for Kubernetes, blending operational reliability with operator-pattern automation. Previously he led a 40‑engineer Cloud Foundry organization, hiring with an unconventional, outcomes-focused approach and instilling TDD, CI/CD and SRE practices across multiple language stacks. Colin’s career spans early work in high-throughput Java and C++ systems to modern microservices and infrastructure-as-code, giving him a rare end-to-end perspective from low-level daemons to cloud operators. Based in Denver, he pairs pragmatic technical direction with talent development, and often prefers solving hard platform problems by designing repeatable patterns rather than ad hoc fixes.
11 years of coding experience
22 years of employment as a software developer
BA Hons, Systems Analysis, BA Hons, Systems Analysis at University of the West of England