About Dave Rix

Senior AWS Cloud Architect, platform engineer and MySQL/Aurora DBA, with 30+ years across data, databases and infrastructure – and AI-assisted engineering woven through the daily workflow.

The short version

I design, build and operate the infrastructure that other people’s systems depend on. Three decades of it: large-scale data platforms, relational databases under real load, and automated multi-region AWS estates with the CI/CD and SRE machinery that keeps them shipping. I bring the same discipline – reproducibility, observability, cost control, failure planning – to how I use AI in day-to-day engineering.

The arc

I began in large-scale data analysis and ETL, spending 18 years at CHKS building and running a healthcare analytics platform – 1,500+ MySQL databases, 16TB of data, multi-billion-row tables – processing hundreds of millions of NHS patient records with Bash and AWK. That taught me to care about correctness and scale before anything else.

From there I moved into contract consulting: MySQL and Aurora DBA work, then AWS architecture and DevOps leadership across logistics, retail, parking and regulated iGaming – Yodel, Travis Perkins, ParkNow, IGT and Cox Automotive among them. Leading teams of up to 12 engineers, automating everything with Terraform, Ansible and Jenkins, and tuning databases under serious load.

Today I focus on senior AWS architecture and Aurora/MySQL work, with AI-assisted and agentic coding part of the daily toolkit. I run a multi-agent organisation of 30+ CrewAI agents in Multipass, and have used Claude Code heavily to modernise an existing Terraform and AWS estate. I apply the same production discipline to AI that I bring to infrastructure, with OpenClaw as an experimental track I plan to build out.

What I do now

  • AWS Cloud Architecture – multi-region, multi-account design; VPC, PrivateLink, Outposts, WAF, CloudFront, Route53; AWS Well-Architected across all five pillars; cost optimisation and FinOps
  • DevOps, Platform Engineering & SRE – Terraform (expert), Ansible, Jenkins; self-service “Environment on Demand” provisioning; CI/CD; SLO/SLI definition, observability and on-call
  • Databases – MySQL and Aurora (expert), MariaDB, PostgreSQL, ProxySQL, Percona; performance tuning, replication, HA/DR and zero-downtime migration; large global Aurora fleets
  • AI & Agentic Coding – daily Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT in production workflows; a 30+ agent CrewAI organisation running in Multipass; OpenClaw as an experimental track; academic grounding in neural networks
  • Containers – Docker, EKS, Multipass and Helm

Selected achievements

  • Roughly halved the cost of a large AWS Aurora estate through strategic optimisation and right-sizing
  • Managed and optimised a global Aurora MySQL fleet (60+ clusters across regions) supporting dozens of production applications
  • Architected a compliant multi-region platform for regulated iGaming across European and US jurisdictions, with data residency, PCI-DSS and GDPR controls
  • Built “Environment on Demand” – Jenkins-orchestrated Terraform and Ansible self-service infrastructure
  • Led DevOps teams of up to 12 engineers across enterprise migrations and platform builds

Credentials

  • 5x AWS Certified – Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps Administrator Associate, Developer Associate, Security Specialty, Cloud Practitioner
  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate
  • SAFe Advanced Scrum Master and SAFe Practitioner
  • SC/DV eligible (DV approved 2016, not activated)
  • Currently pursuing AWS Database Specialty and Kubernetes CKA