A follow-on from the smash hit that was “My First 4 Months at Bazaarvoice.”

While my first post focused on onboarding and adapting to a global organization, this post shifts focus to developing at scale, navigating major organizational shifts, and my journey to becoming a Senior Engineer.

What’s Been Going On? (The High-Level View)

To say the past two years have been busy would be an understatement. We’ve been operating at a massive scale, balancing long-term infrastructure modernization with the daily realities of keeping the lights on across long lived systems.

Here is a snapshot of what the Platform Engineering team and I have tackled:

• Infrastructure Modernization: Migrated over 100 Kubernetes deployments from a long standing, self-managed KOPS cluster over to multiple AutoMode EKS clusters.
• Cloud & Cost Optimization: Improved our overall AWS posture by enforcing consistent tagging standards, reducing waste, and redesigning infrastructure for our systems.
• CI/CD Overhauls: Helped multiple development teams migrate from Jenkins setups to modern GitHub Actions pipelines.
• Multi-Cloud Networking: Connected our AWS and GCP footprints via a private cross-cloud interconnect.
• Developer Empowerment: Developed an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) to consolidate and accelerate our application development lifecycles.

Navigating the Team Merger: Cultivating a Shared Brain

Halfway through my tenure, our Platform Engineering organization underwent a major shift. Originally, we operated as two small, distinct teams: Cloud Engineering (my team, focused on our AWS footprint, cloud governance, and least-privilege access across 50+ accounts) and Developer Experience (DevEx).

Unifying into a single, cohesive team was a huge win for our operational health. Not only did it give us a far more sustainable on-call rotation, but it also allowed us to share deep system knowledge and enhance system resilience. 

When we merged into a single Platform team, we inherited 60+ new applications and services, including the long standing KOPS Kubernetes cluster and scattered CI/CD tooling.

Bridging this massive knowledge gap wasn’t going to happen overnight. To tackle it, we designed a deliberate knowledge-transfer strategy:

• Targeted KT Sessions: Deep dives into large, complex systems led by the original maintainers.
• Split On-Call Rotations: Pairing a DevEx member with a Cloud Engineer (Primary/Secondary) so engineers could safely shadow unfamiliar issues.
• Leveraging Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Recognizing that no single engineer can learn every bespoke system in a few months, we leaned on individual strengths. Everyone naturally upskills over time by collaborating with the resident experts.

Game Days: Turning Chaos into a Sandbox

While product development teams have hackathons to build new features, our platform team has benefited immensely from Game Days. These are safe, controlled sandbox environments where the team can work through real-world failure scenarios without risking production.

They have proven incredibly useful for two things: handing over newly developed systems, and reverse-engineering complex, long-standing architectures. 

Case Study: Cross-Cloud Interconnect

My teammate and I were responsible for building our Cross-Cloud Interconnect, a private connection linking our GCP and AWS VPCs. While we knew the architecture inside and out, the rest of the team were focused on other projects and lacked context.

To fix this, I led a series of Game Days. In a sandbox environment, I intentionally broke the infrastructure so other engineers could get hands-on experience troubleshooting errors like BGP session failures, overloaded capacity, and connection scaling. We also practiced modifying the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) that defines the system.

This served as the perfect final handover. It allowed us to stress-test our runbooks & documentation, fill in any missing gaps, and ensure the entire team felt confident supporting the system.

The outcome of this was that we had 100% up time across the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend where Cross Cloud Interconnect handled 2 Billion+ requests.

We used this same chaos engineering model to build confidence in our long standing systems rebuilding them from scratch in a sandbox to map out hidden dependencies and understand how they behaved under load.

Embedding with Development Teams

In Platform Engineering, it’s easy to become siloed in your own ecosystem and lose sight of what product teams are actually building. Over the past year, we made a conscious effort to break down those walls and embed directly with our internal “customers.”

Instead of just handing over infrastructure from afar, we partnered closely with development teams on two major initiatives:

• Simplifying Architecture (Lambda to ECS Fargate): We collaborated with a development team to migrate a complex, multi-Lambda and Step Function setup into a streamlined AWS ECS Fargate deployment. Rather than treating this as a one-off fix, we used it as a blueprint for the future. We built reusable Terraform modules and shared GitHub Actions workflows, creating a repeatable “paved path” that any team at Bazaarvoice can now leverage to adopt Fargate instantly.
• Standardizing the Core (The KOPS to EKS Migration): Migrating applications over to our new EKS clusters wasn’t just a technical shift; it was a chance to see the daily challenges of dev teams working with heterogeneous applications and infrastructure. Working side-by-side with various teams gave us insights into their unique tech stacks. We used these insights to drive organizational consistency, aligning disparate development workflows as we moved them into the new EKS ecosystem.

By shifting from an “isolated platform” mindset to a collaborative, high-touch model, we didn’t just ship improved  infrastructure, we built stronger relationships across the entire engineering organization.

Developing in the Era of AI

In the two years I’ve been here, AI tooling has shifted from a novelty to an absolute necessity. Tools like GitHub Copilot have evolved from simple unit-test generators into foundational workflow drivers. If you aren’t actively leveraging AI in your development workflow today, you are unintentionally slowing yourself down. 

This was majorly highlighted at Platform Con 2026 where a majority of talks and workshops were AI focused. Meaning it isn’t just a shift at our org, but across Platform Engineering as a whole. 

Recognizing this shift, I gave an internal talk sharing tips and tricks for maximizing Copilot’s utility covering prompt engineering, model selection, and the critical importance of providing rich repository context.

In the world of LLMs, things move fast. With the emergence of MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, agentic workflows and repository-level configuration files, the landscape is shifting again, and keeping our engineering practices aligned with these advancements is a continuous focus.

Agentic Case Study: Automating IAM Audits

Historically, managing IAM permission changes meant tedious, manual reviews from the Platform team. By offloading the first pass to an AI agent, we now automatically scan every IAM PR for least-privilege violations and compliance policy drift. This cuts down manual toil for our team while giving developers instant feedback on security concerns.

The Path to Senior Engineer

Looking back at my first four months, my focus was inward: learning the communication loops (like moving “work out of DMs” into public Slack channels), understanding team work-ownership, and treating internal developers as stakeholders.

Moving into a Senior Engineer role over these past two years required shifting that focus outward. Seniority at Bazaarvoice hasn’t just been about handling larger technical footprints like EKS migrations or cloud networking; it’s been about delivering impact at an organizational level rather than a team level.

Whether it was leading Game Days to up skill my peers, building reusable project scaffolds that abstract away complexity for hundreds of developers, the goal has been the same: make the right way the easy way for every engineer at Bazaarvoice.

It’s been a fast paced, incredibly rewarding two years and I’m excited for what’s next. Want to get in on the action? Head over to our careers page