Elias NavarroEngineering ManagerAustin, TX
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Professional Summary

Runs platform teams that treat developer time as the scarce resource. Golden paths, paved CI, and internal platforms only count if a product squad can ship on Friday without filing a ticket on Thursday.

At Driftwood, cut median PR-to-prod time from 3.4 days to 11 hours for 22 squads. Previously built Copperline's self-service environments and Lantern's local toolchain before anyone called it DX.

Skills

Group by:
14 years:
Python
11 years:
AWS
10 years:
TypeScript
9 years:
System Design
Kubernetes
8 years:
Technical Leadership
Change Management
7 years:
Program Management

Work Experience

Driftwood Platform
Austin, TX, February 2022 to Present
Austin company that sells an internal developer platform to product-led SaaS. Elias runs the team that has to use the product on itself first.

Engineering Manager, Developer Experience Driftwood Platform

Replaced seven ad-hoc pipelines with one paved path that 22 squads could actually ship on. Median PR-to-prod fell from 3.4 days to 11 hours; Friday deploys stopped being a rumor. The old pipelines still exist as a museum exhibit with a sunset date, which is how adoption happened.
Shipped the catalog and scorecards that made ownership visible instead of a tribal Slack thread. Orphaned services dropped from 61 to 9; onboarding time for a new service went from 9 days to 2. The portal is a product with a backlog, not a link farm with a search box.
Per-PR environments on a shared EKS fleet, with a TTL so they did not become a second staging. QA cycle time fell 44% and the #platform queue for a staging slot went quiet. Product squads stopped hoarding shared namespaces like they were conference rooms.

Copperline Cloud
Austin, TX, March 2017 to January 2022
Austin IaaS reseller that grew an internal platform the hard way. Elias turned the environment factory into something product teams could click.

Staff Engineer, Platform — January 2020 to January 2022Copperline Cloud

Automated AWS account and IAM boundary creation so a new environment was a request, not a ticket archaeology project. New-environment lead time fell from 12 days to 40 minutes; audit exceptions on shared credentials went to zero. Security liked the boundaries; product liked the 40 minutes.
Codified the ten rules security actually cared about so a public bucket was a deny, not a conversation. Blocked 230 misconfigured public buckets in the first year without a ticket per request. The exceptions process is three people and a date; it is not a Slack emoji.

Senior Software Engineer — March 2017 to January 2020Copperline Cloud

Python CLI that mirrored staging networking on a laptop, including the parts people used to fake with a hosts file. Laptop-only bugs filed against platform dropped 58%. Local still is not prod; it is close enough that the remaining bugs are real.
One set of pipelines instead of 30 forks that drifted the week after they were copied. Mean pipeline minutes per week fell 36% after cache and image reuse landed. The template is versioned; the forks are a support burden we stopped taking.

Featured Projects

Paved-road golden-path scorecards for platform teams

A public version of the Driftwood catalog rules: what a golden path must guarantee, how scorecards stay honest, and why a portal is not a platform. Includes the orphan-service definition that dropped the count from 61 to 9.

Technical Leadership
System Design
Program Management

Education

The University of Texas at Austin

B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering — May 2012

Certifications

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional

Amazon Web Services — June 2021

Credential ID: DOP-ELIAS-0618

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Cloud Native Computing Foundation — February 2023

Credential ID: CKA-ELIAS-2302