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Independent software engineering · Brisbane

Senior engineering for cloud and AI systems.

Vierte Pty Ltd is the independent practice of Joshua King, a senior software engineer with more than ten years of experience building cloud platforms, backend services and, most recently, LLM-powered products and services.

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10+ years
in software engineering
AWS & GCP
architecture and delivery
LLMs in production
agent pipelines, RAG, cost control
Contract or permanent
open to both

Services

Where I can help

These are the areas where I have the most hands-on, production experience.

Cloud Architecture & Delivery

Designing and building systems on AWS and GCP, from the initial architecture through to infrastructure as code and deployment pipelines.

  • Solution architecture and technical design
  • Serverless and container platforms: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, ECS/Fargate
  • Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation) and CI/CD
  • Migrating an existing product into the cloud

BackgroundDesigned and built Comet Strategy's HPC SaaS platform from end to end on AWS. Running 1,000+ container instances per user.

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AI & LLM Engineering

Building LLM-powered systems for production use: agent pipelines, retrieval over your own content, and cost tracking per model and agent.

  • Agentic and function-calling pipelines on AWS Bedrock
  • Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and embeddings
  • Token and cost metrics per model and per agent
  • Prompt caching and context-window optimisation

BackgroundAt Squiz I architected an LLM-driven pipeline that migrates legacy websites onto a modern platform, and the cost metrics behind it.

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Performance & scale

Finding where a system struggles under load and fixing it, through load testing and infrastructure optimisation.

  • Load testing and bottleneck analysis
  • Infrastructure optimisation on AWS and GCP
  • Highly parallel, compute-heavy workloads
  • Reducing LLM latency and running costs

BackgroundI led GCP load testing and infrastructure optimisation at Safewill, and built 1,000-machine parallel compute at Comet Strategy.

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Backend & platform engineering

Hands-on senior development, mainly in TypeScript/Node.js, Java and C++, including testing, delivery pipelines and modernising older codebases.

  • APIs and backend services (Node.js, NestJS, Java/Spring)
  • Legacy modernisation, such as porting a Windows application to Linux
  • Automated testing and delivery pipelines
  • Data-privacy architecture, including PII tokenisation

BackgroundMore than ten years of backend work at Expedia, Comet Strategy, Safewill and Squiz.

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Working together

Ways to work together

  1. Contract engineering

    I join your team as a senior engineer for an agreed period, working on architecture, delivery or a specific problem that needs an owner.

  2. Permanent roles

    I'm also open to permanent senior engineering roles. My full background and career history are on the About page.

  3. Architecture & technical review

    A short, fixed-scope review of a system or a plan, with written recommendations covering scalability, running costs and what to change first.

  4. Scoped project delivery

    A defined piece of work, such as a prototype, a migration or an integration, designed, built, documented and handed over to your team.

No fixed price list. Contract and project work is scoped and quoted before it starts.

About

Joshua King

I\'m a senior software engineer based in Brisbane and the founder of Vierte. Over more than ten years I\'ve worked in engineering teams at Expedia, Comet Strategy, Safewill and Squiz, on travel booking services, massively parallel computing in the cloud and, most recently, LLM-driven content migration.

I work mainly in TypeScript/Node.js, C++ and Java, and mostly on AWS and GCP. When you work with Vierte, you work with me directly.

Full background and experience

Contact

Start a conversation

Tell me a little about what you\'re working on, or the role you\'re hiring for, and I\'ll get back to you by email.

  • LocationBrisbane, Queensland (AEST, UTC+10)
  • Hiring?I'm open to both contract and permanent roles. My full background is on the About page.

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