John Williams
Principal Engineer at Epic Games
Waterloo, Illinois, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Williams is a Principal Engineer with 15 years of experience specializing in cloud cost optimization and operational readiness, currently leading cloud cost savings initiatives at Epic Games. He rose through SRE and readiness leadership roles at Basecamp and served as a founding FinOps-style engineer, combining deep systems expertise with pragmatic cost control at scale. Based in Waterloo, Illinois, he blends hands-on engineering—rooted in early web development and systems engineering—with strategic team leadership to make large, distributed environments more efficient and resilient. Known for turning operational complexity into measurable savings, he emphasizes readiness, observability, and cost-aware architecture. His background in Management Information Systems gives him a practical business lens on technical decisions, helping align engineering trade-offs with organizational priorities. Colleagues describe him as a thoughtful operator who surfaces actionable optimizations that quietly save significant cloud spend.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Management Information Systems/Business Creation and Development, Management Information Systems/Business Creation and Development at Marian University Indianapolis
Github Skills (65)
ruby10
command-line-tool10
interruption10
html10
rails10
basecamp10
cli9
mvc9
mysql-database9
ruby-on-rails9
activerecord9
redis9
binaries9
homebrew9
administration9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
basecamp/mysql_role_swap
Apr 2015 - Feb 2021
(Nearly) Zero interruption mysql maintenance script.
Contributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 4 pushes in 5 years 11 months
mysqlzeromaintenance-scriptinterruptionmysql-database
basecamp/omnibus-software
Jan 2021 - Jul 2021
Contributions:24 pushes in 6 months
omnibusopen-source-software
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