RocketPod

Andrew Pryde · Cloud Infrastructure Engineer · Bristol, UK

Resilient Cloud Infrastructure. Engineered for Scale.

Deep technical leadership for mission-critical systems. Former Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Cloud (OCI).

Email Andrew Recent writing CV (PDF)
Andrew Pryde

Currently

Technical Lead, iShamba (part-time)

Availability Consultancy engagements
Focus Platform engineering, Kubernetes

Focus Areas

I help teams design, deliver, and operate production cloud infrastructure with clear technical ownership.

Infrastructure Strategy

Platform scope, roadmap, and boundaries that support reliable delivery and sustainable operations.

Kubernetes & Control Planes

Control plane design, multi-tenancy, and production readiness reviews informed by real incidents.

DevOps & Operations

Incident response leadership, observability, and delivery practices for stable production operations.

How I Can Help

Hands-on public cloud engineering focused on uptime, delivery confidence, and operational clarity.

Infrastructure Architecture

  • Cloud architecture design and review.
  • Kubernetes platform design, scaling, and operations.
  • Production readiness and risk assessments.

DevOps & Reliability

  • Incident response, on-call design, and observability.
  • Control plane services, operators, and controllers.
  • Delivery pipelines for platform and application teams.

Public Cloud Engineering

I build control plane services, infrastructure tooling, and cloud integrations in Go, Java, and Python.

Go Java Python

Latest From The Blog

Recent writing on cloud and Kubernetes

Experience

Senior hands-on infrastructure experience across public cloud services, consultancy delivery, and customer-facing operations.

2017–2023

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Consulting Member of Technical Staff (IC5), Cloud Native Group.

  • Led redesign and live migration of OKE’s etcd-backed control plane datastore.
  • Designed and delivered core Oracle Kubernetes Engine management plane components.
  • Built key OCI API Gateway management plane services, adapting Kubernetes design patterns to Java.
  • Represented OCI in Kubernetes SIG Cloud Provider and delivered OCI cloud provider and CSI integrations.
  • Led engineering on Oracle’s Kubernetes MySQL Operator and OCI Cloud Controller Manager.
  • Contributed to OCI Container Instances and mentored engineers progressing into senior technical roles.
Two promotions during tenure

Notable Engagements

Operational incident and integration support for enterprise-scale customers including Zoom, ByteDance, and 8x8.

Patents

Named inventor on three granted US patents related to public cloud services:

  • US 11,650,830 B2 (Techniques for modifying a compute instance).
  • US 12,045,210 B1 (Zero‑downtime migration of strongly consistent distributed database clusters).
  • US 11,621,888 B2 (Techniques for migrating worker nodes to a new manager instance).
2016–present

RocketPod LTD

Technical Director.

Founder delivering public cloud and platform engineering consultancy.

2016–2017

The Mediae Company

Technical Lead.

Technical lead for iShamba: led platform implementation, mentoring, and scaling from tens to hundreds of thousands of users.

2013–2016

RocketPod LLP

Technical Director.

Co-founder delivering web and software projects across the public and private sectors.

Django web applications iOS apps Desktop software (OS X & Windows)
2008–2013 + internships

Early Career

Software Engineer.

  • Pryde Design (Freelance): Built websites for SMEs, public sector, and NGOs.
  • Microsoft (SDET, 2013): Office International Publishing Group; tooling to test localisation across languages.
  • Torchbox (2010): Drupal web development for large NGOs, including Greenpeace UK and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

What You Get

Direct, hands-on infrastructure leadership focused on reliability, operability, and practical delivery.

Outcomes I Optimise For

  • Reliability and incident recovery speed.
  • Delivery confidence for platform changes.
  • Clear ownership and reduced operational toil.

How I Work

  • Hands-on and accountable from design to rollout.
  • Clear communication during complex delivery.
  • Practical plans teams can actually execute.
  • Clear technical ownership for complex infrastructure streams.
  • Architecture decisions that prioritise operability and cost control.
  • Incident response leadership across high-impact outages.
  • Customer-facing delivery for demanding integration partners.
  • Control plane engineering experience at public cloud scale.
  • Pragmatic delivery style that keeps teams moving.
I can operate as a senior individual contributor, a delivery lead, or both, depending on what your team needs most.

Core Stack

Depth where it matters, breadth where it helps teams deliver safely.

Kubernetes Control planes Go Java Python Django Wagtail Etcd MySQL Public cloud

Education

BSc (Hons) Computer Science, University of Bristol.

Thesis: Implementing pooled cryptocurrency mining in Go — an analysis of Go for large-scale concurrent applications.

Let’s Talk Cloud Infrastructure.

If you need hands-on support with cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, or DevOps delivery, send over a short brief and I will reply quickly.

Email Andrew

Or email directly at andrew@rocketpod.co.uk.