Nic Cope
Senior Principal Software Engineer at Upbound
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNic Cope is a Senior Principal Software Engineer in Seattle with 12 years building resilient, cloud-native infrastructure and platform tooling, specializing in Go and pragmatic processes to solve scalability and reliability challenges. He leads architecture and strategy at Upbound, represents the company on the Crossplane Steering Committee, and has driven Crossplane’s engineering direction while contributing upstream to Kubernetes and controller-runtime. His open-source work includes integrity and performance improvements to Kubernetes’ discovery cache and flexible controller lifecycle changes in controller-runtime, reflecting deep expertise in controller design and API-server stability. Nic has a track record of moving large organizations toward infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, and robust SRE practices from roles at Planet, OfferUp, and Spotify, and he pairs hands-on engineering with product and community-facing leadership. An unexpected detail: he balances high-level architecture with low-level fixes—implementing cache checksums and TLS SNI tweaks—demonstrating a rare blend of strategic vision and meticulous systems craftsmanship.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Information Technology, Computer Security / Internetworking, Bachelor of Information Technology, Computer Security / Internetworking at Edith Cowan University
Github Skills (16)
caching10
kubernetes10
go10
checksum10
controller-manager10
performance-optimization10
sha10
kubernetes-pods10
api-design9
apidoc9
devops9
etcd9
api9
automations8
automation8
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
crossplane-contrib/provider-aws
Jan 2019 - May 2022
Crossplane AWS Provider
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 105 reviews, 462 commits in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nic primarily contributed to the implementation and refinement of the backend infrastructure. They fixed issues related to connecting to AKS clusters and setting up TLS SNI negotiation. The user also added autogenerated resources and implemented controllers for the new RedisCluster resource and the Azure Redis cache. They also made changes to the core resource claim code.
providerterraformawsterraform-modulecrossplane
kubernetes-sigs/controller-runtime
Mar 2020 - Apr 2020
Repo for the controller-runtime subproject of kubebuilder (sig-apimachinery)
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 38 comments in 1 month
Contributions summary:Nic primarily contributed to the `controller-runtime` project, focused on enhancing the functionality of Kubernetes controllers. Their work involved enabling controllers to be started and stopped on-demand, independent of the manager, and renaming related concepts for better clarity. Furthermore, the user implemented examples and refined the manager's behavior regarding leader election, indicating a strong understanding of Kubernetes controller design and management. These modifications were critical to allowing for more flexible deployment of Kubernetes controllers.
controllerkubebuildercontroller-runtimeruntimesubproject
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