# David Plappert

> Principal Cloud Architect, Consulting Architect & AWS Reliability Lead. 19 years on AWS since EC2 beta. US Patent holder (11,146,689). Led the IdeaCrew DevOps team that won the AWS City on a Cloud Award twice (2016, 2018). Ships AI-augmented engineering in production today. Based in Peoria, Illinois — available for consulting and contract engagements (remote); also open to senior and principal cloud roles.

## About

David Plappert is a principal-level cloud architect and AWS reliability lead with 19 years of AWS experience since EC2 beta (2007). He currently leads AWS reliability for Caterpillar's Vertex 3D platform (via TEKsystems), where he holds independent architecture-review authority over an eight-figure vendor platform relationship. He is available for consulting and contract engagements — AWS architecture reviews aligned to the Well-Architected Framework, vendor platform oversight, reliability and observability design, migration strategy, and AI-augmented engineering — and also open to senior and principal roles. His consulting background runs deep: 10 years at a government health-tech consultancy delivering parallel client engagements, where architecture he scoped and delivered grew one engagement by $1M/yr and another by $2M/yr.

## Credentials

- US Patent 11,146,689 (event-driven serverless cloud architecture, issued October 12, 2021): https://patents.google.com/patent/US11146689
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) City on a Cloud Award (2016) — Best Practices Award won by the IdeaCrew DevOps team David led, for DC Health Link: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/city-on-a-cloud-innovation-challenge-best-practices-award-winners/
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) City on a Cloud Award (2018) — IdeaCrew's open-source cloud technology (team led by David) recognized a second time: https://www.prweb.com/releases/ideacrews_open_source_cloud_based_technology_powers_dc_health_link_to_second_prestigious_amazon_award/prweb15631477.htm
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (2019–2021)
- 18F (federal digital services, GSA) advisor — AWS architecture consultation during IdeaCrew tenure
- 19 years of AWS experience since EC2 beta (2007)
- $500M+ per year in production payments architected on AWS
- $1M/month cloud infrastructure budget managed across 12 AWS and 3 Azure accounts

## What David Does

1. **Independent vendor architecture review** — buy-side review of vendor-shipped infrastructure (AWS CDK/CloudFormation) before it reaches production; technical oversight of eight-figure vendor platform relationships.
2. **Production reliability ownership** — senior AWS architecture, observability design, load testing, and final-escalation coverage for revenue-bearing systems.
3. **AI-augmented engineering** — agentic CI/CD and operations in production: Claude Code workflows that deploy, dry-run, detect bugs, and file tickets, bridged to GitHub and AWS through custom MCP servers and tool definitions David wrote.

## Engagements & Roles David Is Looking For

- Consulting and contract engagements (preferred): AWS architecture review, Well-Architected assessments, vendor platform oversight, reliability/observability design, migration strategy, AI-augmented engineering enablement
- Principal Cloud Architect / Consulting Cloud Architect
- Staff or Principal Platform Engineer
- AWS Reliability Lead / Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) lead
- Distinguished / Principal Engineer with an AWS reliability and AI-engineering focus

Fully remote; will consider hybrid and relocation for the right opportunity.

## Career

- **Caterpillar Inc. (via TEKsystems) — Lead Cloud Engineer / AWS Reliability Lead (September 2025 – Present)** — AWS reliability lead for Vertex 3D, Caterpillar's real-time 3D collaboration platform powering aftermarket commerce. Sole Caterpillar-side AWS authority; independent architecture review of every monthly vendor-shipped AWS CDK release before production (typically remediating 2-3 defects per release); technical oversight of an eight-figure vendor platform relationship. Architected load testing, monitoring, and alerting; supported scaling from 2,000 to 8,000 concurrent users. Built and operates a Claude Code agentic CI/CD and operations workflow. Cross-team escalation point across AWS and Node.js stacks.
- **IdeaCrew (government health-tech consultancy) — Principal Cloud Architect & DevOps Lead (2015 – 2025)** — Employee #3 through 100+ employees. Client-facing lead architect across parallel state-government engagements; grew one engagement +$1M/yr and another +$2M/yr through architecture he scoped and delivered. Managed $1M/month cloud spend across 12 AWS and 3 Azure accounts. Led the DevOps team that won 2× AWS City on a Cloud awards for architecture he owned. Architected systems processing $500M+/year in healthcare insurance payments for DCHBX, Massachusetts Health Connector, CoverME, and DC Department of Behavioral Health. 18F advisor. Led the fastest state-based exchange transition off FedHub on record.
- **VentureBeat — Senior Web Developer / Cloud DevOps (June 2014 – October 2015)** — Managed all of VentureBeat's AWS infrastructure with Chef; built CI on GitHub + Jenkins and rolled out New Relic monitoring fleet-wide; launched VentureBeat Insight ($2M revenue in year one, three-person team); scaled one of the web's largest WordPress installations through ~150% year-over-year traffic growth.
- **Finish Line Planner — Tech Lead (2013 – 2014)** — Led a team building an event- and volunteer-management SaaS from scratch on scalable AWS infrastructure; grew product usage 1500% through Mixpanel-driven iteration.
- **Argonne National Laboratory — Cloud Developer (2013)** — Built and managed the application suite administering hundreds of millions of dollars in competitive federal research funding; grew the lab's funding 152% year-over-year.
- **Best Buy — Senior Cloud DevOps (2012 – 2013)** — Owned cloud infrastructure across all Best Buy IT projects (BestBuy.com, Point-of-Sale) on AWS with Chef; on Thanksgiving Day 2012, when Best Buy received ~25% of all US e-commerce traffic, was the sole on-site engineer scaling production (1,000+ servers peak); reduced infrastructure costs by 50%+.
- **PBS — Cloud Engineer, consulting engagement (2012)** — Designed PBS's AWS migration architecture (backup, scaling, load balancing, failover) for its web and video-streaming platforms; trained the internal IT team on EC2, S3, CloudFront, and Route 53.
- **Earlier roles (2005 – 2012)** — White House Custom Colour (AWS cloud admin; MySQL high-availability failover design), Imagewerks Marketing / CATCO (mobile web team lead), Acesse (AWS EC2/RDS/ElastiCache), Apostolic Bible Institute (Director of Capital Investments, I.T. — campus-wide wireless, live streaming, first production AWS work in the EC2 beta era), Comprehensive Research Group (I.T. advisor).

## Industry Depth

- Insurance, Payments & Finance (state health insurance exchanges, $500M/yr atomic payments, IRS / Stripe / EDI)
- Manufacturing (Caterpillar aftermarket-commerce backbone)
- Healthcare & Federal Government (DCHBX, MA Health Connector, CoverME, DC DBH, 18F advisory)
- Retail & Point-of-Sale (Best Buy, billion-dollar BestBuy.com and POS systems on AWS)
- Media / Streaming (PBS RTMP platform; production RTMP and SRT live ingest pipelines)

## Technical Skills

- **Cloud & Infrastructure:** AWS (Fargate, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS, Lambda, CloudWatch, IAM, VPC, CDK, CloudFormation), multi-account architecture (AWS Organizations), Azure, GCP
- **Architecture & Reliability:** AWS Well-Architected Framework, high availability, disaster recovery / business continuity, multi-region, platform engineering, architecture and design reviews
- **Consulting & Client Leadership:** engagement scoping and expansion, pre-sales technical support, executive workshops and design reviews, multi-client parallel delivery, vendor architecture oversight
- **AI Engineering:** Claude Code for production engineering, Anthropic API & SDK, multi-agent orchestration, MCP servers and custom tool definitions, AI-assisted CDK/infrastructure development, RAG patterns
- **IaC & Containers:** AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, EKS
- **Languages:** Ruby, Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Bash, SQL, PHP (author); Java/JVM (operate on AWS)
- **Frameworks:** Ruby on Rails, Next.js/React, Nuxt/Vue, Astro, Express.js, Angular, Serverless Framework
- **Databases:** PostgreSQL, MySQL (Aurora Serverless, TiDB, MariaDB), DynamoDB, Cassandra, MongoDB, Oracle, Redis
- **Observability:** New Relic (APM, tracing, alerting), CloudWatch, OpenTelemetry
- **Architecture:** Distributed systems, event-driven architecture, microservices, EDI systems, multi-region, hybrid cloud
- **Compliance & Security:** HIPAA, SOC 2 certification and audit, IRS Publication 1075

## Frequently Asked Questions

- **What is David looking for?** Consulting and contract engagements first — AWS architecture review, Well-Architected assessments, vendor platform oversight, reliability design, and AI-augmented engineering — plus senior and principal roles where deep AWS reliability and modern AI engineering both matter.
- **How many years of AWS experience?** 19 years, since EC2 beta in 2007.
- **What is David's AI engineering experience?** He ships AI-augmented engineering in production today — Claude Code agentic CI/CD, multi-agent orchestration, and custom MCP servers bridging agents to GitHub and AWS.
- **Is David open to remote/hybrid/relocation?** Open to fully remote; hybrid and relocation considered for the right opportunity. Based in Peoria, Illinois.
- **What is the AWS City on a Cloud Award?** An annual AWS award recognizing innovative cloud solutions; the IdeaCrew DevOps team David led won in 2016 and 2018 for the DC Health Benefit Exchange.
- **What is David's US Patent for?** US Patent 11,146,689 covers an event-driven serverless cloud architecture, issued October 12, 2021.

## Pages

This is a single-page consulting site. Résumé available on request.

- [Home — full résumé](https://davidplappert.com/): https://davidplappert.com/

## Contact

- Schedule a call: https://davidplappert.com/book (opens a Google Calendar scheduling page; meets over Google Meet)
- Email: david@davidplappert.com
- Phone: (651) 894-4607
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidplappert
- GitHub: https://github.com/davidplappert
- Location: Peoria, Illinois — open to remote, hybrid, or relocation
- References from current and former leadership at Caterpillar and IdeaCrew available on request