Jens Skott
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Jens Skott

Platform Engineering · Cloud Architecture · Full-Stack Development

thoughtgears.co.uk

Professional Summary

Independent platform engineer and cloud architect with over 15 years across GCP and AWS, running my own practice, Thoughtgears. I am currently the sole platform engineer for Scoreline, a platform serving 60,000+ paying subscribers on Google Cloud — landing zone, IaC, observability, security and cost, plus the services that sit on top. Before that I ran engineering at Checkatrade (£15M budget, 20 headcount) and led infrastructure at Fresha. I ship the whole stack myself when the job calls for it: native iOS and Android apps, edge web on Cloudflare, serverless backends, a BigQuery warehouse, and the Terraform underneath — which is why my platform advice tends to be concrete.

Key Highlights

  • ▸Sole platform engineer for a revenue-bearing consumer SaaS on GCP: Pulumi landing zone, factory-pattern service components, 40+ architecture decision records
  • ▸Built a read-only AI incident investigator that reads logs, traces, source and billing data and posts a structured assessment to Slack, on a provider-agnostic LLM port
  • ▸OpenTelemetry-first observability with a vendor-swappable backend, plus request-based CPU billing defaults, sandbox spend guards and billing anomaly alerting
  • ▸Zero standing access on GCP: Workload Identity Federation, Privileged Access Manager entitlements, no service-account keys anywhere I run
  • ▸Reduced infrastructure incident hours by 75% and CI/CD runtime by 60% in previous leadership and consulting roles
  • ▸Shipped three native iOS apps and one Android app to the stores solo — Swift 6 and SwiftUI, SwiftData + CloudKit, StoreKit 2, watchOS, Kotlin + Compose
  • ▸Terraform, Pulumi, GitOps (Spacelift, ArgoCD), Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloudflare Workers, BigQuery + Dataform

Professional Experience

Principal Platform Engineer

February 2026 – Present

Scoreline (Fantasy Football Hub)

  • ▸Platform Foundation:Sole platform engineer for a subscription sports-analytics business on Google Cloud. Built the organisation landing zone and delivery platform in Pulumi (TypeScript, state in Cloud Storage): factory components that give every Cloud Run service and job observability, cost guards, IAM and secrets by default, ephemeral sandbox stacks per pull request, and a GitOps/ChatOps operating model — recorded in 40+ architecture decision records.
  • ▸Observability & AI Incident Investigation:Standardised on OpenTelemetry as the only telemetry surface in application code, with the backend reached through a collector sidecar so it stays swappable; built a central observability project, trace-correlated logging, and job heartbeat alerting. Designed and built a read-only AI incident investigator that consumes the alert bus, investigates against logs, traces, source and billing data, and posts a structured assessment to Slack — on a provider-agnostic LLM port.
  • ▸Security & Access:Moved the estate to zero standing access: two-tier Workload Identity Federation for CI, Privileged Access Manager entitlements for humans, least-privilege service identities, org policy and Security Command Center, and secrets consolidated out of CI variables into a managed secrets platform.
  • ▸Cost:Owned cost visibility and efficiency: a cost-driver assessment across the estate, request-based CPU billing as the platform default with production services migrated one at a time, sandbox spend guards enforced in the factories, and billing anomaly alerts routed into the investigator.
  • ▸Subscription Platform:Re-platformed the tier-1, revenue-bearing subscription service that normalises Stripe, PayPal and RevenueCat webhooks into one event-sourced store — Bun and Hono on Cloud Run, Drizzle on Neon Postgres, CI-owned migrations, an admin operations console, and OpenTelemetry tracing end to end.
  • ▸Resilience:Built the disaster-recovery backup service — Cloud Run Jobs backing up Postgres, Cloud SQL and object storage from a single typed manifest into an isolated backup project — and the runbooks and incident process behind it.

Founder & Principal Engineer

2015 – Present

Thoughtgears

  • ▸Bobbin — AI incident investigation for GCP-native teams:Designed, built and run a multi-tenant SaaS that investigates Cloud Monitoring alerts read-only inside the customer's own Google Cloud org and posts a root-cause hypothesis into the incident's Slack thread. Cloud Run scale-to-zero, Firestore, Pub/Sub, a Vertex AI Gemini tool-calling agent behind a swappable provider port, Stripe self-serve billing, alert-storm coalescing, a hard per-investigation spend ceiling, one service account per tenant, Terraform owning the Cloud Run services, CI authenticated through Workload Identity Federation. Live in production.
  • ▸Native apps, shipped solo:Three iOS apps on the App Store (SteelRep, LastLift, Vargr) and SteelRep on Google Play: Swift 6 and SwiftUI, SwiftData with CloudKit sync and versioned schema migrations, StoreKit 2, watchOS, Live Activities, HealthKit; Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room and Play Billing on Android. Cross-platform parity enforced by a golden-vector harness that replays the iOS engines against the Kotlin port; 2,000+ Swift Testing cases across the three apps.
  • ▸Web applications:Bobbin's console as a React single-page app on Vite with React Router; an internal portal on TanStack Router with a shared Radix component library; sixteen Astro sites across the estate on Cloudflare Workers Static Assets — including a paid web product with Stripe checkout, magic-link auth and state held in Cloudflare's edge key-value store.
  • ▸Analytics platform:A BigQuery warehouse with Dataform (raw → staging → marts, 100+ models across eleven brands) fed by TypeScript Cloud Functions collectors for Cloudflare, App Store Connect, Apple Search Ads, Google Play and Stripe — scheduled, private, secrets from Secret Manager, deployed through Workload Identity Federation.
  • ▸Infrastructure & standards:All GCP, Firebase, Cloudflare, GitHub and Workspace infrastructure in Terraform via Spacelift with a zero-drift policy and no service-account keys; an org-level engineering standards repo (skills, decision records) that every product repo inherits.
  • ▸Consulting:Reduced deployment times by 75% (2 hours to 30 minutes) with Docker Compose and Firebase emulator workflows, moving a team from 3–4 releases a week to daily; for a major insurance client, cut CI/CD runtime by 60% and enabled on-demand releases by decoupling dependencies and re-engineering the release process.

Infrastructure Team Lead

August 2025 – February 2026

Fresha

  • ▸SDLC Transformation:Restructured the team's delivery process by transitioning to a Kanban-style workflow, reducing context switching and improving team efficiency and morale through focused, high-value work prioritisation.
  • ▸Platform Strategy:Designed and proposed a 3-year platform roadmap focused on developer experience, aiming to build a 'Heroku-lite' abstraction layer that simplifies the complex tooling landscape for engineers.

Head of Engineering & Principal Engineer

February 2021 – March 2025

Checkatrade

  • ▸Operational Excellence:Reduced infrastructure-related incident hours by 75% (40h/month to 10h/month) by architecting a new event-driven platform on GCP as part of the AWS → GCP migration, and implementing rigorous Correction of Error frameworks.
  • ▸Leadership & Strategy:Managed a £15M annual budget and a headcount of 20, executing a 5-year strategic reorganisation that shifted the engineering culture from reactive operations to continuous innovation; introduced GitOps with Terraform and ArgoCD, cutting deployment times by a further 60%.

DevOps Lead Engineer

April 2020 – January 2021

Loveholidays

  • ▸Incident Response:Engineered ChatOps tools that reduced Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA) by 50% and Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) by 10%, and mentored teams onto Terraform and Kubernetes for automated deployment.

DevOps Manager

February 2018 – April 2020

Deltatre OTT

  • ▸High-Performance Engineering:Personally developed a Golang API router capable of scaling from 5k req/sec to spikes of 1 million req/sec using horizontal pod scaling and traffic stickiness; led the subsequent migration to AWS EKS.

DevOps Engineer

June 2016 – February 2018

Accedo TV

  • ▸Cloud Infrastructure & Backend:Designed and ran AWS infrastructure in Terraform, Chef and ECS for a move to microservices, contributing Go backend code to the decomposition of the monolith.

DevOps Engineer & IT Manager (early career)

2009 – 2016

Schibsted · Klarna · King · Gears of Leo

  • ▸Early platform and container work:Built an Internal Developer Platform for VMware at Schibsted in 2011, ahead of such platforms becoming industry standard; OpenStack/Chef automation for King, an OpenShift dev environment at Klarna, and an automated Rackspace/Chef/Jenkins environment at Gears of Leo with early Docker and Kubernetes evaluation.

Selected Work

  • Bobbin

    AI incident investigation for GCP-native teams

  • SteelRep·LastLift·Vargr

    Native strength & hybrid-training apps, iOS + Android

  • Passline

    UK fitness-test prep — Cloudflare Workers and Stripe

Core Competencies

Cloud & Platforms

GCPAWSCloud RunPub/SubBigQueryFirebaseFirestorePostgreSQLCloudflare WorkersWorkload Identity Federation

Infrastructure & Delivery

TerraformPulumiSpaceliftGitHub ActionsGitOpsKubernetesLinux

Observability & Operations

OpenTelemetryDatadogPrometheusGrafanaIncident Management / SREFinOps / Cost Optimisation

Languages & Frameworks

TypeScriptGoPythonSwift 6 / SwiftUIKotlin / Jetpack ComposeNode.jsBunSQL

Web & Frontend

ReactAstroTailwind CSSViteTanStack RouterDesign Systems

Mobile & Product

SwiftData + CloudKitStoreKit 2watchOSPlay BillingStripe

AI & Data

LLM Tool-Calling AgentsVertex AI (Gemini)Claude CodeDataform

Leadership

Team BuildingMentoring