Platform engineering · Newalla, OK

Brian D. Frost

Principal Engineer – Platform|Kubernetes · GitOps · GCP

I build low-friction platforms that let developers ship code as simply as possible — and keep it running. At Wendy's, that took deploys from months to hours and availability from 98% to 99.999%+.

Get in touch Résumé (PDF)
Brian D. Frost
Months→hours
Time to deploy new code
98→99.999%+
Platform availability
600+
Services for 150+ developers
10x
Return delivered on customer investment
About

The platform should be the easy part.

I'm a principal platform engineer. I've run large-scale infrastructure at Seagate, kept cloud-native e-commerce running at Techolution, and today I build the platform behind Wendy's mobile and web ordering.

My job is to take friction out of shipping. When the paved road is the easiest road, developers move faster and production gets more stable, not less. At Wendy's, that approach took us from months to hours to deploy new code, and from 98% availability to a level so high we no longer measure it below 99.999%. The platform runs on a tiny fraction of overall cloud spend while the revenue it carries keeps growing.

  • Paved roads beat gates and tickets.
  • Reliability is a feature that ships with every release.
  • Spend where it earns its keep.
  • Grow the next generation of principal engineers.

Never mistake activity for achievement.

— John Wooden
Experience

One through-line

Making systems faster to change and harder to break.

Aug 2022 – Present
The Wendy's Company

Principal Engineer – Platform

  • Lead a low-friction developer platform serving 150+ developers and 600+ services across GKE clusters, for Wendy's Mobile/Digital and Enterprise Apps teams.
  • Absorbs dynamic demand peaks at meal times while letting teams release code as simply as possible.
  • Built on GKE with ArgoCD, Argo Workflows and Terraform, extended with Go-based Kubernetes operators.
  • Cut the time to deploy new code from months to hours.
  • Raised availability from 98% to 99.999%+ — downtime is now too low to measure meaningfully.
  • Platform costs are a small fraction of total cloud spend and support the mobile and web channels behind Wendy's growing digital revenue.
  • Mentor engineers on the path to principal engineer.
Oct 2017 – Aug 2022
Techolution
New York

Sr. Consulting Cloud Engineer

  • Led managed-services engagement teams across multiple customers using BOSH, Packer, Terraform and Concourse CI/CD pipelines in the cloud.
  • Directed onshore and offshore teams to deliver 10x returns on customer investment.
  • Hardened an e-commerce platform with millions in daily revenue, using proactive tooling to protect availability and revenue flow.
Earlier
Seagate Technology

IT Enterprise Manager – Network & Storage

  • Led a team that cut maintenance costs by 80% while improving uptime.
  • Replaced closed-source cluster storage with open source, eliminating a multi-million-dollar budget line.
Projects

Selected work

Production platforms I've led, and what they delivered.

Wendy's

Wendy's internal developer platform

A low-friction, self-service path from commit to production for 150+ developers and 600+ services across Wendy's Mobile/Digital and Enterprise Apps teams. GitOps on GKE made releasing simple, made reliability the default, and handles dynamic demand peaks at meal times.

GKEArgoCDArgo WorkflowsTerraform
Months → hours to deploy · 98% → 99.999%+ availability
Techolution

E-commerce reliability at revenue scale

Managed-services engineering for an e-commerce platform with millions in daily revenue: immutable infrastructure, automated pipelines and proactive tooling to protect availability.

TerraformBOSHPackerConcourse
Millions in daily revenue protected
Seagate

Open-source shared storage for clusters

Replaced expensive closed-source storage with a fast, low-cost open-source shared-storage system for compute clusters.

LinuxOpen SourceStorageCost Engineering
Multi-million-dollar budget line eliminated
Skills

The toolbox

Grouped by discipline.

Platform & Kubernetes

KubernetesGKEHelmDockeringress-nginxcert-managerexternal-dns

GitOps & Delivery

ArgoCDArgo WorkflowsGitLab CI/CDConcourseRenovateSealed SecretsDeveloper Platforms

Cloud & IaC

GCPAWSTerraformPackerBOSHCloudflare

Observability & Reliability

PrometheusGrafanaLokiUptime KumaHigh AvailabilityIncident Prevention

AI & GPU

NVIDIA GPU OperatorOllamaOpen WebUIHolmesGPTkagent

Systems & Languages

Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat)TCP/IPDNSBashGo (working knowledge)
Leadership & credentials

Beyond the keyboard

Mentorship

Growing future principals

At Wendy's I mentor engineers on the path to principal: system design, influence without authority, and making a case rather than giving orders.

Certifications
  • Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architectlapsed
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professionallapsed
Education

Oklahoma Baptist University

B.A., Religion · Minor in Computer Science

Contact

Let's build the paved road.

Happy to talk platform engineering, developer experience, Kubernetes, or reliability at scale.

bfrost@brainboy.com LinkedIn GitHub
Newalla, OK · Central Time