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HACKERRDAVE(1) HACKERRDAVE(1)

NAME

hackerrdave

Dave Kerr, senior software engineer at OnePay. I build the platforms other engineers stand on.

Fig. 1. Pratt through truss, elevation. Bridges like this were what I designed for a living before I wrote software.

SYNOPSIS

hackerrdave [--platforms] [--infrastructure] [--agents] problem ...

DESCRIPTION

Structural engineer turned platform engineer, with 10+ years building production-critical infrastructure, most of it in fintech. I keep choosing work I don't know how to do yet. Right now that's AI-native developer platforms.

Read the work, or email [email protected].

CURRENT WORK

AI-native, agent-shaped.

At OnePay I led implementation of the AI Gateway, the shared control plane between coding agents and model providers, and built Agent Control (agentctl), a Rust CLI that is the single entry point for OnePay engineers to configure and run coding agents through it.

AI is the latest technology I've gone after, and the one I'm most excited about. I'm building for a world where the second user of every system is a model: where docs are read by agents, where APIs are called by autonomous loops, where structure matters because the reader is no longer just human.

AI Gateway & Agent Control

2025–present

Senior Software Engineer · OnePay

Led implementation of OnePay's AI Gateway, the shared control plane between coding agents and model providers, and built Agent Control (agentctl), a Rust CLI that is the single entry point for OnePay engineers to configure and run coding agents through it.

stack: Rust, MCP, Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, LLM tooling

Database Re-encryption at Scale

2025–2026

Senior Software Engineer · OnePay

Migrated billions of records across hundreds of tables to a new encryption schema. Cut AWS KMS costs by >95% and latency by up to 90%.

stack: TypeScript, AWS KMS, Postgres, Terraform

PLATFORMS

The layer everything else stands on.

A decade of platform work: developer experience, infrastructure, the unglamorous tooling that lets a team ship. DevTools at Haven Life, observability and cost work at Galileo, AWS Organizations and CDKTF rollouts at NYDIG, autoscaling for quants at Engineers Gate, API gateway and SOC 2 at Orum. Each move was a chance to learn something new. The through-line was always the same: make the next employee's job easier by solving the problems nobody else wants to solve.

At OnePay that means platform engineering at a much larger scale: on-call for production payments across an engineering org of 200+, and a database re-encryption system that migrated billions of records to a new schema, cutting AWS KMS costs by over 95% and latency by up to 90% along the way.

API Gateway Migration: AWS to Traefik

2023–2024

Senior Software Engineer · Orum.io (acquired by Stripe)

Migrated Orum's public API gateway off AWS API Gateway to Traefik. Cut p95 latency by more than 50% and reclaimed full control over routing, validation, and auth.

stack: Go, Traefik, AWS, Terraform, OpenAPI

CDKTF Adoption at NYDIG

2021–2022

DevOps Engineer · NYDIG

Researched, prototyped, and rolled out CDK for Terraform across product engineering teams. Turned copy-paste HCL into a typed library of reusable infrastructure constructs.

stack: TypeScript, CDKTF, Terraform, AWS

ORIGINS

Built to carry load.

I started in steel and concrete. Five years designing bridges in Philadelphia and New York taught me how forces actually flow, and that the most elegant structures are the ones where every member is doing real work.

Those reflexes still shape how I look at software: hidden load paths, failure modes you can't fully test, redundancy designed in for a system that has to outlive its designer.

In 2014 I got curious about software and went after it, starting over as a web developer. That has been the pattern ever since: when a skill or a technology catches my interest, I find a way to leverage it.

67 Bridges in the Bronx

2011–2014

Structural Engineer · Dewberry Engineers

Inspection, load rating, and rehabilitation design for 67 bridge structures across the Bronx. The kind of unglamorous, load-bearing work that keeps a city moving.

stack: AASHTO LRFD, Steel & concrete design, Load rating, Rehab

HISTORY

  1. OnePay

    1. Senior Software Engineer Aug 2025 – Present, Remote

      • Led implementation of OnePay's AI Gateway, the shared control plane between coding agents and model providers, with centralized rate limits, PII guardrails and per-user cost attribution
      • Built Agent Control (agentctl), a Rust CLI that is the single entry point for OnePay engineers to configure and run coding agents (Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex) through the gateway with federated sign-in and short-lived credentials
      • Designed an MCP router that loads only the tools a task needs across 10 integrations (Slack, Jira, Datadog, GitLab and others), acting with each user's own permissions
      • Launched the OnePay Plugins marketplace with 25+ plugins that package tools, skills and specialized agents, plus workspace management with isolated git worktrees
      • Built a database re-encryption system migrating 100s of tables and billions of records, cutting KMS cost by >95% and latency by up to 90%
      • On-call for production incidents across an org of 200+ engineers

  2. Orum.io(Acquired by Stripe)

    1. Senior Platform Engineer Sep 2024 – Jul 2025, Remote

      • Owned platform deliverables for the SOC 2 Type II audit renewal: vulnerability patching, system design docs, network architecture
      • Supported the acquisition by Stripe

    2. Senior Software Engineer Sep 2023 – Sep 2024, Remote

      • Migrated public API gateway from AWS API Gateway to Traefik, dropping p95 latency by over 50%
      • Integrated OpenAPI codegen for spec-based request validation across core microservices

  3. Engineers Gate

    1. Systems Engineer Jun 2023 – Sep 2023, New York, NY

      • Designed cost-efficient autoscaling compute on AWS for equities alpha generation and quant model execution
      • Provisioned isolated cloud sandboxes for quant researchers

  4. NYDIG

    1. DevOps Team Lead Mar 2022 – May 2023, New York, NY

      • DevOps SME for product engineering across AWS, Terraform, CDKTF
      • Led migration from a legacy AWS account to a new AWS Organization with minimal downtime

    2. DevOps Engineer Jun 2021 – Mar 2022, New York, NY

      • Researched and rolled out CDK for Terraform across product teams

  5. Galileo Health

    1. Site Reliability Engineer Apr 2019 – Jun 2021, New York, NY

      • Instrumented observability across the core Python API and AWS Lambda fleet
      • Architecture refactors to materially reduce AWS spend
      • Built a Vendor Data Transfer service on AWS Step Functions
      • Wrote an HL7 CCD-A parser/generator for healthcare interoperability
[+] 2005–2019: Haven Life, Plyfe, Library For All, Dewberry Engineers, Alfred Benesch & Company, Lehigh University

  1. Haven Life

    1. Lead Developer DevTools Team Mar 2018 – Mar 2019, New York, NY

      • Owned source control, release cycles, self-hosted GitLab
      • Transitioned dev teams to container-based dev/deploy
      • Spearheaded automated SAST security scanning in GitLab pipelines

    2. Chapter Lead / Developer - Infrastructure/DevOps Team Mar 2017 – Mar 2018, New York, NY

    3. Lead Software Developer - New Products Team Aug 2015 – Mar 2017, New York, NY

      • New product launch: concept → production in 4 months

  2. Plyfe

    1. Software Developer Jan 2015 – Aug 2015, New York, NY

  3. Library For All

    1. Software Developer Aug 2014 – Dec 2014, New York, NY

      • First full-stack web role, working in Ruby, Rails, and JavaScript

  4. Dewberry Engineers

    1. Structural Engineer 2011 – Apr 2014, New York, NY

      • Designed and analyzed bridge structures across NYC, including 67 bridges in the Bronx
      • Inspections, load ratings, rehab design for aging infrastructure

  5. Alfred Benesch & Company

    1. Structural Engineer Sep 2009 – 2011, Allentown, PA

      • Designed bridges over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia
      • Steel and concrete superstructure design, deck rehabilitation

  6. Lehigh University

    1. B.S. Civil Engineering Aug 2005 – May 2009, Bethlehem, PA

      • Civil engineering with a structural emphasis

SEE ALSO

Email is the fastest way to reach me.

email(1)
[email protected]
github(1)
github.com/hackerrdave
linkedin(1)
linkedin.com/in/hackerrdave
x(1)
x.com/hackerrdave
llms.txt(5)
/llms.txt, a plaintext index for agents