Neil Watson
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Aiven
Markham, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNeil Watson is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer with 14 years of hands-on experience designing, building, and operating large-scale Linux/UNIX infrastructures across cloud and on-prem environments. Based in Markham, Ontario, he has driven cloud transformations and Kubernetes-focused CI/CD at companies like Genesys and Aiven, and has deep expertise in Terraform, Ansible, CFEngine, and GitHub Actions. A longtime practitioner of DevOps before the term existed, Neil combines systems architecture, automation, and security hardening to deliver reliable, auditable platforms for thousands of hosts. He mentors and trains teams, translating operational requirements into production-grade pipelines and observability stacks using Prometheus, New Relic, and Spinnaker. His background includes building high-scale provisioning and configuration services (10k–30k hosts) and developing open-source security tools, reflecting a pragmatic blend of engineering, teaching, and tooling.
14 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Technologist, Mechanical, Technologist, Mechanical at Loyalist College
Stackoverflow
1,020reputation
129kreached
23answers
39questions
Github Skills (180)
python10
command-line-interface10
terraform10
vim10
automation10
ssh10
network-configuration10
ansible10
cli10
text-editor10
aws-cli10
terraform-provider10
configuration-as-code10
aws10
dns-record9
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
neilhwatson/cfbot
May 2015 - Jul 2018
An IRC bot for CFEngine channels
Contributions:190 commits, 24 PRs, 173 pushes in 3 years 2 months
cfengineirc-bot
neilhwatson/vim_cf3
Apr 2012 - Apr 2022
Cfengine 3 vim plugins
Contributions:62 commits, 15 PRs, 20 pushes in 10 years 1 month
cfenginevim-pluginvim
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