Andrew Williamson

Staff Software Engineer at GoDaddy

Complex systems.
Less friction.

I’m Andrew. I build cloud platforms, self-service APIs, and agent-assisted workflows that give people more room to do their best work.

13+ years in production infrastructure.
Deep in AWS. Always building something.

Explore my work Let’s connect
Years in production cloud
13+
Lower Query Service AWS spend
~50%
Teams in AICloudShift beta
12
Infinity for iOS installs
300K+

Cloud infrastructure / Automation / Agent engineering

Find me on GitHub

01 / Selected work

Built with curiosity.
Made to be useful.

From a cluster in my homelab to an app
in hundreds of thousands of pockets.

01 / Systems & infrastructure

A small cluster.
A lot of possibilities.

My Turing Pi homelab brings Jetson, RK1, and Raspberry Pi nodes together in a Docker Swarm cluster, with AI-aware scheduling and an RTX 5090 workstation.

Ansible keeps it reproducible. Traefik and ELK make it observable. Ollama puts open-weight models to work across the fleet.

  • Ansible
  • Docker Swarm
  • Ollama
  • ELK

02 / From idea to App Store

Built independently.
Used by 300,000+.

I designed, built, and operated Infinity, an Objective-C stat tracker for Halo 4, from the iOS app to the CentOS backend.

300+ five-star reviews. Around 400,000 server requests a month at peak. A lesson in owning the whole system.

  • Objective-C
  • iOS
  • CentOS
  • 2013–2016

Agent tooling / Internal open source

claude-py

A Python wrapper around the Claude CLI that brings headless agents into automation and CI. Built and internally open-sourced at GoDaddy.

  • Python
  • Agents
  • Automation

FORGE hackathon winner / 2025

rogue.ai

Turns Slack incident threads into AI-generated runbooks, giving the next on-call engineer a useful place to start.

  • LLMs
  • Slack
  • Incident response

02 / Experience

A builder, from the ground up.

From cloud-platform intern to Staff Engineer. Thirteen years of making infrastructure work better for the people who use it.

  1. 2024 – Present GoDaddy

    Staff Software Engineer Cloud Infrastructure & Cloud Governance

    Float between Cloud Infrastructure and Cloud Governance, building provisioning, compliance, and IaC-migration automation for GoDaddy's AWS estate.

    Cloud platforms, AI migrations & compliance
    • CloudFormer API. Provision and manage thousands of line-of-business AWS accounts (lifecycle, IAM, roles, access) through IaC and a custom API that wraps CloudFormation into self-service provisioning used by thousands of engineers.
    • AICloudShift. Led an AI-agent system (CrewAI + LangGraph) that auto-migrates legacy Sceptre IaC to AWS CDK — adopted by 12 teams in closed beta. Generates compliance-correct CDK, hardened against CWE-22 and CWE-209, with automatic AWS-credential sanitization.
    • StackSafeguard. Designed the GuardHook → Elasticsearch pipeline for real-time compliance monitoring across every AWS account (Kibana dashboards, Elastic ML), plus conformers that auto-enforce KMS encryption before misconfigurations reach production.
    • Toil reduction. Won two FORGE hackathons (an AI FAQ bot in 2024; rogue.ai in 2025, turning Slack incident threads into AI-generated runbooks) and built claude-py, an internally open-sourced Claude CLI wrapper for headless agents.
    • AWS CDK
    • CloudFormation
    • CrewAI
    • LangGraph
    • Elasticsearch
    • Python
  2. 2020 – 2024 GoDaddy

    Senior → Staff Engineer · Founder & Tech Lead Query Service, Partners Data

    Took a mandate to detect anomalous Managed WordPress users and grew it from a solo project into a funded team running a Python platform that serves data integrations across the company.

    Cost savings, reliability & platform migrations
    • Cut AWS spend ~50% ($37.3K → $20.3K/mo) by consolidating regions, enabling S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and moving the queueing container to Lambda — beating a 20% target.
    • Test coverage 50% → 86% and a zero-downtime migration off legacy OpenStack: rewrote every Ansible playbook, moved to GitHub Enterprise, and migrated CI/CD to GitHub Actions.
    • Site availability 7% → 90% on ~12–16K Managed WordPress sites by validating PHP-rollback batches with Elastic Heartbeat; added Elastic ML and APM tracing across the platform.
    • Partnered with Security on PhotoDNA / VideoDNA hashing to detect and take down CSAM on the platform.
    • Delivered the Pagely / WooSaaS acquisition data integration on time; re-architected the queue layer (Redis → SQS) for pluggable backends.
    • Docker Swarm
    • ECS
    • Kubernetes
    • Nomad
    • Lambda
    • SQS
Earlier at GoDaddy 2013 — 2020Explore the foundation
  1. 2018 – 2020 GoDaddy

    Senior Software Engineer Hosting & Cloud Platform

    • Built a Python/Django API — among GoDaddy's first AWS-deployed services — for global product-performance data, plus a serverless Lambda + Selenium availability poller.
    • Stood up a Managed WordPress platform on Kubernetes in AWS as scrum master.
    • Led R&D on Sceptre-based AWS deployments; wrote and internally open-sourced hooks and resolvers adopted across teams.
  2. 2017 – 2018 GoDaddy

    Senior Software Engineer Cloud Platform, Elasticsearch

    • Tech lead for Elasticsearch-as-a-Service, used by ~70–80% of company teams: large-scale deployments and upgrades with Docker and Ansible, an orchestration UI, and company-wide Elastic APM adoption.
  3. 2014 – 2017 GoDaddy

    Software Development Engineer Cloud Platform, Ceph

    • Automated deployment of Ceph distributed storage (Puppet + Python) across hundreds of servers storing terabytes; built Sensu → Slack monitoring and recovery tooling, a Django self-service portal, and racked new hardware.
  4. 2013 – 2014 GoDaddy

    Software Development Intern Cloud Platform

    • Ported 10,000 C# unit tests to Java, wrote Python functional tests for the Office 365 launch, and automated Jenkins deployment.

04 / Toolkit

The tools behind the work.

Languages
Python (expert), TypeScript, Bash, Go
IaC & provisioning
AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Ansible, Puppet, Sceptre
Containers
Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Nomad, ECS, multi-arch builds
AWS
Organizations & multi-account, IAM, Lambda, ECS, SQS, DynamoDB, S3
AI & agents
CrewAI, LangGraph, Claude CLI, Ollama, open-weight LLM inference
Observability
ELK (Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM, Beats), Elastic ML, tracing, Sensu, on-call
Security & governance
Compliance conformers, KMS enforcement, threat modeling, CWE hardening
Storage & hardware
Ceph, Elasticsearch, Jetson Orin, RK3588, RTX 5090

05 / People

Leadership

  • Brought 12 interns into GoDaddy and converted 6 to full-time engineers; several are now SDE III/IV and team leads.
  • Founding member of the GoDaddy Bootcamp program — designed its group project and run recurring 3-hour hands-on Docker/ELK workshops.
  • Regular presenter at Cloud Platform's "AI Adventure Hour," sharing agent-engineering lessons across the org.

06 / Foundation

Education

B.S. Computer Science

Arizona State University — Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, 2010 – 2014

Dean's List (Fall 2010, 2012, 2013) · National Society of Collegiate Scholars

Have something in mind?

Good systems start
with a conversation.

Open to conversations about cloud platforms, infrastructure automation, and agent engineering.

Message me on LinkedIn GitHub