Carlos Castillo

HOW I THINK ABOUT INFRA

• Make the platform the easy path. If the secure, observable, reviewable way to ship is also the fastest, nobody has to be reminded to use it. Most of the leverage on a platform team comes from removing the reasons people work around you.
• Write down the procedure, not just the policy. A policy says what’s allowed. The procedure — written down, in the repo, runnable by the next on-call or by an agent — is what actually scales.
• Design for two readers. Increasingly that means humans and coding agents. I’ve been treating docs/ai/ as a first-class part of every repo for the last year — schema files, template metadata, validation rules.
• Prefer reversible over clever. Cheap rollback beats a clever design every time, especially at the edge.

HOW I GOT HERE

Started in high school on Cisco gear and picked up the CCENT before I graduated. The first few jobs after that were network-shaped — wiring closets, switch and router configs, VLAN cleanup, the unglamorous side of keeping a network running. Weekends and evenings were side projects: home labs, a Pi-hole sinkhole running the apartment’s DNS, a Tailscale tailnet stitching my machines together. That habit never stopped.

Cloud crept in by way of the side projects first, then the day job. UT Dallas (Information Technology & Systems, 2018–2021) lined up with a pivot into cloud consulting at Crayon — hundreds of small AWS and Azure customers, which was the fastest possible education in what not to do at scale. From there to CLEAResult to build out a Terraform module library and the first real Entra/AWS SSO integration I’d owned end-to-end.

Joined Redfin in 2023 on the cloud governance team, promoted to Senior the following year. Most of what’s on /projects is from that stretch.