Richard Downer
Principal Engineer (AWS Cloud) at FinOps Foundation
City of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRichard Downer is a Principal Engineer with nearly two decades of software engineering experience and over a decade focused exclusively on cloud computing, helping organisations migrate datacentre applications to AWS and adopt cloud-first engineering. He blends hands‑on coding (Java, C#, scripting) with architecture, operations and FinOps discipline—holding AWS DevOps Professional and FinOps Practitioner certifications—and routinely automates delivery and runbook processes. At Cloudsoft he led development of Cloudsoft AMP and played a central role in donating and shepherding Apache Brooklyn through the ASF, serving on its PMC and contributing jclouds CloudStack/OpenStack integrations. Equally comfortable across Unix, Windows and macOS, he pairs deep platform pragmatism with an open‑source ethos and experience moving proprietary products into foundation stewardship. Outside work he pursues retro computing and FPGA/Verilog projects, reflecting a long-standing curiosity for low-level systems that informs his cloud architecture choices.
14 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc. Computer Science, B.Sc. Computer Science at University of Warwick
Stackoverflow
772reputation
47kreached
13answers
3questions
ajax
top-5%
Github Skills (17)
api-rest10
restful-api10
java10
javas10
api10
rest10
rest-api10
ajax9
unit-testing9
tomcat6
amazon-ec26
passwords6
windows6
asp-net-mvc6
jquery6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
jclouds/legacy-jclouds
Oct 2011 - Jan 2013
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:119 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily focused on adding and modifying CloudStack API functionality within the `legacy-jclouds` project. They implemented changes to the existing CloudStack APIs by adding annotations and modifying existing methods. Furthermore, the user updated unit tests to reflect these API modifications. The user also implemented new APIs, demonstrating an understanding of the project's domain and the specific needs of cloud service interactions.
cloudsoft/cloudonaut-aws-cf-templates
Nov 2018 - Jul 2022
Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation
Contributions:9 commits, 1 PR, 5 pushes in 3 years 8 months
aws-cloudformationcloudformationfree-templatesaws
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.