Aj Doak

Aj Doak is an engineer at Vital. Before that, they worked as a DevOps Engineer at Sailthru from November 2017 to May 2021. They gained this position through the Summer of Tech program in Wellington, which involved working on infrastructure projects with their manager and providing new tools or processes for use by the rest of the team. The technical side involved deeper dives into AWS and Docker, introductions to technologies like AWS Elastic Container Service, Puppet and Serverless Framework, and building on development languages like Ruby, NodeJS and Bash scripting.

Their first large project involved the creation of an Elastic Stack (Logstash, Elasticsearch, Kibana). At the time, they were logging into AWS Cloudwatch, but it was a difficult interface for team members to search through. This task was their first with a large infrastructure design component, but it was also an opportunity to bring together experience from nearly every minor task up to that point; Serverless Framework, configuration management, and networking inside AWS to name a few. In the end, with great management and feedback from the team, they were able to present a system design that could scale as needed for log ingestion, split logging by staging/production, and generally be a friendlier experience to diagnose platform issues with thanks to Kibana. This project, along with most others like it during their internship, was something they were glad to be able to see used and improved upon even well into their continuing position at Sailthru Mobile.

Aj Doak has a BSc in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington and a Diploma in Communication Arts and Design from Design and Arts College of New Zealand.

They are on a team with William O'neil - Engineer, Piotr Zurek - Engineer, and Jason Ellison - Engineering. Aj Doak reports to Te Riu-Warren, Chief Technical Officer.