I work on the platforms behind the rails banks run money on — regulated, hybrid, and expected to stay up while they change underneath.

Eight months at the IBM Payments Center leading platform architecture — CIAM at scale for a tier-1 GCC bank, and a dedicated Payments-as-a-Service instance for a Japanese financial group. The six years before that were IBM Cloud for Financial Services: regulated cloud landing zones, ISV enablement across 45 vendors for programs like BNP Paribas, and a US patent on secure landing zones now shipping as IBM Cloud Deployable Architectures. Same audit posture, new layer of the stack.

Read the field notes Engagement record
§01 · WRITING

Field notes

Long-form pieces on payments modernization, cloud, and adjacent things.

All entries →

§02 · ENGAGEMENTS

Selected work

Anonymized where required. Rendered as deployment records.

ENG-2025-004CIAM platform remediation, tier-1 GCC bank
region MEA scale 15M+ users · 100K TPM duration ongoing
Multi-phase engagement diagnosing performance degradation across the client's Customer Identity and Access Management platform on OpenShift, IBM Security Verify Access, and Secure Directory Server. Delivered architecture review, observability strategy, and an optimization roadmap sized to sustain 15M+ user identities and 100K TPM without another emergency.
ENG-2025-003Payments-as-a-Service dedicated instance, Japanese financial group
region APAC scale dedicated tenant · IPC Wires duration ongoing
Leading platform architecture for a dedicated IPC Wires instance — scalability, security, and compliance for a tier-1 Japanese group. The hard part is turning a shared PaaS into an isolated deployment that still absorbs the shared roadmap without diverging into a fork.
ENG-2024-002IBM Cloud for Financial Services — ISV enablement, European tier-1 bank
region EMEA scale 45 ISVs · 8 in production duration 18 mo
Led the onboarding of 45 ISVs onto IBM Cloud for Financial Services for a European tier-1 anchor bank — technical validation, compliance evidence, deployment guidance. Eight reached production; the program contributed $3.1M ARR in 2024. Also acted as technical liaison to the bank's SaaS platforming team on logging, failover, and redundancy patterns.
ENG-2023-001Project Vela — IBM Cloud Object Storage on the AI supercomputer
region AMER scale multi-zone production duration ~6 mo
Diagnosed and resolved performance bottlenecks in IBM Cloud Object Storage backing the Vela AI supercomputer used by IBM Research. Delivered production fixes across multi-zone regions; contributions folded back into the global COS platform — the kind of fix that never appears in a demo and quietly protects every subsequent workload.
ENG-2022-P01US Patent 11,755,717 B2 — Secure Landing Zone methodology
region global scale productized as IBM Cloud Deployable Architectures duration multi-year
A deployment methodology for provisioning security-compliant landing zones in regulated environments, productized into IBM Cloud Deployable Architectures and recognized with an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. The substance of the patent is the ordering of evidence, not the pipeline — an audit is a proof, not a checklist.
§03 · STACK

Instruments

Platforms and tools I use in anger, grouped by what they're for.

Platforms

  • Red Hat OpenShiftregulated K8s
  • Kubernetesvanilla, on-prem & cloud
  • IBM Cloud VPCFinServ-ready primary
  • AWSmulti-cloud secondary

Payments

  • ISO 20022CBPR+, migration
  • IPC Wirespayments-as-a-service
  • RTGS / RTPreal-time rails
  • SWIFT MT / MXcoexistence

Security & identity

  • Zero Trustarchitecture & governance
  • IBM Security Verify AccessCIAM, access mgmt
  • HashiCorp Vaultsecrets, PKI
  • cert-managerworkload PKI

Delivery

  • Terraformlanding zones
  • ArgoCDgitops delivery
  • GitHub ActionsCI & supply chain
  • Ansibleconfig & day-2

Data & observability

  • Apache Kafkaevents & enrichment
  • Prometheus & GrafanaSLOs, dashboards
  • Splunkenterprise logging
  • OpenTelemetrytracing & audit
§04 · ABOUT

About

Short version. Longer on /about.

I am a Payments Platform Architect and Engineering Lead at the IBM Payments Center, based in Toronto. My work sits between payments modernization, hybrid cloud, and the engineering leadership that keeps regulated platforms running while they change.

Before this I spent six years on IBM Cloud as a Senior Software Engineer, enabling ISVs on IBM Cloud for Financial Services and shipping platform fixes on IBM Cloud Object Storage — including work behind Project Vela. My deployment methodology for secure landing zones is US Patent 11,755,717 B2, productized as IBM Cloud Deployable Architectures.

I hold an MSc in Computer Science (bio-inspired robotics, Memorial University), an MBA, and a B.Eng. in Computer Engineering. Outside client work I write, mentor engineers earlier in the ladder, and read more incident post-mortems than is probably healthy.

based Toronto, CA works globally contact [email protected]