// lead platform engineer · nashville, tn

Travis
Hoover

I lead the platform team and build the systems engineers ship on — release pipelines, AWS infrastructure, observability, and SOC 2 compliance.

Read the write-ups GitHub LinkedIn
Travis Hoover

01 · About

Shipping software for a decade.

I'm the Lead Platform Engineer at Fortress OS, a property-management SaaS platform. I joined in 2018 as a developer, became the company's first DevOps engineer, and have spent the years since building the platform the rest of engineering ships on. I've led people for most of that time, and have had direct reports continuously since 2022, while staying hands-on with the systems in production.

My home turf is the path from commit to production: the release train and its release-candidate automation, feature flags and rollback strategy, AWS infrastructure defined in CDK across US and Canadian regions, and Datadog observability with SLO monitoring and incident-response runbooks. For the past three years I've also been the technical lead and primary auditor liaison for our SOC 2 Type I and Type II program, and I run our Okta directory and SAML SSO integrations.

I also lead AI-assisted development adoption for our engineering team, including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and their MCP integrations. Most of my own code today is written alongside Claude Code. My job is scoping the change, checking it against production data, and owning what ships.

Before Fortress I built backend services on Azure at Johnson Controls, ingesting sensor telemetry at scale for IoT-connected building automation, and supported Azure infrastructure at MyHealthDirect.

  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • SQL
  • PostgreSQL · Sequelize
  • AWS · CDK · ECS · Lambda
  • SQS · SNS · IAM
  • GitHub Actions · Docker
  • Redis / Valkey
  • LaunchDarkly
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • CI/CD & Release Eng
  • Datadog & SLOs
  • Okta / SAML SSO
  • SOC 2
  • Claude Code

02 · Experience

Where I've been.

  1. 2018 — Present

    Fortress OS

    Lead Platform Engineer · previously Director of Engineering, Principal DevOps Engineer and Engineering & QA Lead, Software Developer and DevOps Manager

    • Leadership. Lead the DevOps team that owns deployment infrastructure, release engineering, and platform reliability, with direct reports continuously since 2022. Earlier I managed DevOps and served as engineering and QA lead. In 2025, as Director of Engineering, I led both development and DevOps, including the rework of our affordable-housing compliance reporting product.
    • Release engineering. Own the release train end to end: scheduling, hotfix and fast-track paths, and the release captain rotation. Rebuilt it around automated daily release-candidate pipelines, ephemeral RC environments, and an approval flow that decouples testing from deployment. Co-built the GitHub Actions deployment control plane shared by six product repos, and with a direct report cut ephemeral-environment deploys from 17 minutes to 6.
    • Infrastructure as code. Led the company's move to AWS CDK and brought production onto it in 2022. I've been the top contributor to the CDK codebase since: about 90 stacks across dev, US production, and a full Canadian production region I stood up for clients that require in-country hosting.
    • Platform modernization. Chose ECS on EC2 after weighing EKS and Fargate, and lead the Elastic Beanstalk → ECS migration, with dev and ephemeral environments live and the production cutover planned. Led the Redis → Valkey migration, introduced RDS Proxy in production, and consolidated DMS replication instances to cut cost. Also led the core API's Sequelize 4 → 6 upgrade (408 files, a ~1M-line Node.js codebase).
    • Reliability and security. Moved Datadog log collection to sidecar agents, and own SLO monitoring, dashboards, and incident-response runbooks. Hardened the network with isolated database subnets and a CDK-managed VPN, and built the AWS Inspector export and triage automation that turns CVEs into Jira remediation tickets.
    • Compliance and identity. Technical lead and primary auditor liaison for SOC 2 Type I and Type II, three consecutive years without a lapse. Leading the move off third-party compliance tooling to an in-house replacement. Administer Okta and SAML SSO across the SaaS stack.
  2. Apr — Jun 2018

    DevOps Engineer · MyHealthDirect

    Supported Azure cloud infrastructure and deployment automation for a healthcare scheduling platform serving large regional health systems.

  3. 2016 — 2018

    Software Engineer · Johnson Controls

    Built backend services and APIs on Azure for IoT-connected building automation products, including sensor telemetry ingestion pipelines at scale across a distributed, microservices-oriented stack. Wrote the Groovy Jenkins pipelines and administered the Jenkins server.

03 · Selected work

Problems I've solved.

Most of my work lives in private repositories, so here are write-ups instead: the problem, the decisions, and what the numbers said. Details are generalized and nothing customer-identifying is included.

Migration · Node.js · PostgreSQL

Upgrading a million-line API from Sequelize 4 to 6

A 408-file ORM upgrade guarded by a diff-aware lint gate, the silent behavior changes it surfaced, and the production heap regression I traced to a single deep clone.

Read the write-up →

Reliability · ECS · SQS

Deploys that don't stall the queue

Why every deploy could freeze a customer's financial queue for 30 minutes, why SIGTERM never reached Node, and how per-worker leases and a bounded drain fixed both.

Read the write-up →

Security · IAM · CDK

Replacing PowerUserAccess without breaking the workers

Moving off a shared PowerUserAccess role: an SDK-call inventory, a 26-check policy simulation (9 of 26 passing before, 26 of 26 after), and a test that keeps the roles from drifting apart.

Read the write-up →

On the side

ProofOfLife

Self-hosted Discord bot for BeReal-style daily photo check-ins: random daily pings, hidden-until-reveal photos, streaks, and photo-of-the-day voting.

TypeScript

Pongbot

Serverless Slack bot that tracks office ping pong games, rankings, and bragging rights on AWS Lambda.

JavaScript

More on GitHub →

Weekend projects, experiments, and everything else.

04 · Contact

Say hello.

Want to talk shop, swap Nashville restaurant recommendations, or nerd out about serverless? My inbox is open.

traviskhoover@gmail.com