Fraser Whitaker

S

CTO at Saffron Ops · Cloud infrastructure · Prometheus, Kubernetes

Saffron Ops
Belfast, UK · GMT (UTC+0)
13+ years experience
University of Glasgow
English, Spanish
Messaging unavailable

Overview

Currently at Saffron Ops, where I lead cloud infrastructure with a team of 26. Mentored 14 engineers through their first promotion. Brought on-call pages for infrastructure down from 14 a week to 3. Board games, hiking, and terrible puns.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Second opinions on Kubernetes decisions
  • Thoughtful intros to people in my field
Please don't message about
  • Crypto token projects
  • Recruiters for roles outside my stack
  • Agency or outsourcing pitches

Travels often; replies within 48 hours

Skills
PrometheusLinuxTerraformincident responseGoKubernetesAWS

Experience

  1. CTO
    Aug 2025 - Present
    Saffron Ops · 1 yr 2 mo · Full-time · Belfast, UK
    • Shipped 29 launches on the infrastructure team without a rollback.
    • Wrote the AWS service that now handles 80 million requests a day.
  2. Senior Engineering Manager
    Aug 2021 - Jun 2025
    EY · 3 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Belfast, UK
    • Led the migration of 18 services to AWS.
  3. Director of Engineering
    Jul 2019 - Aug 2021
    Meta · 2 yr 1 mo · Full-time · Belfast, UK
    • Moved 85% of infrastructure traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
    • Cut p99 latency on the infrastructure services from 627ms to 166ms.
  4. Principal Engineer
    Dec 2016 - Jul 2019
    Rolls-Royce · 2 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Belfast, UK
    • Previously an operator for 10 years before investing.
    • Led or co-led 17 investments, 8 of them now at Series B or later.
  5. Senior Site Reliability Engineer
    May 2013 - Dec 2016
    Vodafone · 3 yr 7 mo · Full-time · Belfast, UK
    • Moved 77% of infrastructure traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.

Projects

Write-up: cloud infrastructure in practice
2023

A long-form guide to cloud infrastructure for people starting out.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. University of Glasgow
    MA, Electronics and Communication
    2003 - 2005
  2. University of Manchester
    BSc, Electronics and Communication
    1997 - 2000

Details

Compensation expectations
What they are targeting for their next role.
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Direct contact details
Direct email and a scheduling link.
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