NICK LANNG#
Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK
nicklanng1@gmail.com • linkedin.com/in/nick-lanng-26b31692 • github.com/nicklanng
PROFILE#
Staff engineer and technical leader with almost 20 years of experience, most recently architecting and leading the build of Nickel, Copper's multi-tenant platform for launching new products on shared foundations. I design cloud-native systems on AWS end to end, from Go services, event streams, and data modelling to Kubernetes, GitOps, CI/CD, and observability. I care most about architecture and developer experience: clear domain boundaries, reusable platform services such as identity, billing, and automation, and workflows (including AI-assisted development) that let small teams ship quickly and safely.
SKILLS#
Languages: Go, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, React, SQL
Cloud & Infrastructure: Amazon Web Services (AWS: EKS, S3, CloudFront, KMS, SES), Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, Flux, ArgoCD, Docker, GitHub Actions, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Apache Kafka, Keycloak, Microservices
Observability: OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo
Data: DynamoDB, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch
Practices: Software Architecture, Team Leadership, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), End-to-End Testing (Playwright), Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD), Agile, AI-Assisted Development
EXPERIENCE#
Copper, Remote // Feb 2021 – Present#
Staff Engineer
Technical lead and senior individual contributor responsible for designing and delivering cloud-native platform capabilities, modernising legacy systems, and improving developer experience across the organisation.
Nickel — Platform and Architecture Lead
Architected and led the build of Nickel, Copper's new multi-tenant platform for launching vertical products quickly on shared foundations.
- Designed the platform architecture: Go HTTP edge services, a gRPC domain backbone, Kafka event streams, and single-table DynamoDB, with strict ownership boundaries between domains.
- Led the design and implementation of reusable platform services: identity and SSO (Keycloak), organisations and membership, billing and entitlements, records and search (OpenSearch), calendar, CMS, integrations with an encrypted credential vault, and a workflow automation engine with its own work-queue runners.
- Delivered products on top of the platform, including Rally, an agency hub with events, registration, payments, and QR check-in for network-marketing organisations.
- Designed the AWS infrastructure (DynamoDB, EKS, Terraform, Flux GitOps) and the deployment patterns used across every service and environment.
- Established the engineering standards: contract-first TDD with protobuf and integration specs, CI/CD with automatic service discovery, and observability dashboards and alerting in Grafana.
- Built an AI-assisted development workflow, with codified rules, skills, and review loops that let parallel coding agents deliver production changes to the same standards as the team.
- As the team became smaller and moved to AI-assisted development, led the platform's evolution into a modular Go monolith on PostgreSQL, keeping the domain boundaries while reducing operational overhead.
Wyndy.co
Designed and delivered the backend for a new high-performance CRM focused on speed, simplicity, and scalability.
- Built a suite of Go microservices communicating over gRPC.
- Designed data storage on Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3, with Apache Kafka for asynchronous communication, background jobs, and data synchronisation.
- Developed a custom job execution system on top of Kubernetes Jobs.
- Deployed to Amazon EKS with infrastructure managed using eksctl, Helm, and Karpenter.
- Added end-to-end observability with logs, metrics, and distributed tracing in Grafana Cloud.
Forms
Built an embeddable form builder in Next.js that created and updated Copper CRM records directly from customers' website form submissions.
Wider Technical Leadership
- Drove adoption of Go microservices for new product development, extending the existing Rails monolith with independently deployable services.
- Evaluated security, compliance, and architectural considerations for emerging fintech products integrating with providers such as Plaid and Stripe.
- Mentored engineers and provided architectural guidance across teams, shaping engineering processes and long-term technical strategy.
InfoSum, Basingstoke // Dec 2019 – Jan 2021#
Golang Engineer
Worked on privacy-first data collaboration products, building new platform capabilities and improving deployment reliability.
- Extended the Discovery marketplace, enabling customers to advertise datasets to other clients.
- Implemented rolling deployments in Kubernetes, eliminating service downtime during releases.
- Designed and built company and team management capabilities, allowing users to share access to datasets and resources.
- Strengthened application security by identifying and fixing issues in the custom session management service.
- Introduced a more collaborative development process that reduced cycle time, clarified requirements, and involved stakeholders outside engineering.
UserReplay, Theale // Jan 2019 – Nov 2019#
Golang Engineer
Contributed to the modernisation of a high-volume session recording and replay platform.
- Rebuilt core components as distributed services coordinated through Apache Kafka.
- Implemented search and analytics using Elasticsearch and Kibana.
- Developed services in Go and Node.js, containerised with Docker and deployed to Kubernetes on AWS EKS.
Lush Digital, London // May 2018 – Dec 2018#
Golang Engineer
Helped re-architect Lush’s ecommerce platform from a PHP monolith to Go microservices.
- Rebuilt core online store and supporting services in Go.
- Containerised applications with Docker and deployed them to Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform.
- Identified and mitigated security risks relating to JWT handling and secret management.
NewVoiceMedia, Basingstoke // Sep 2015 – Apr 2018#
Senior Software Engineer
Technical lead of a platform team responsible for foundational services and API enablement.
- Built a voicemail microservice in Go, deployed to AWS ECS using Docker.
- Developed a Chrome extension that maintained persistent WebRTC connections across page navigation.
- Led adoption of an API-first strategy and spearheaded development of an in-house API gateway written in Go.
- Established the company’s first DevOps team by embedding operations directly into the development team.
- Designed the ContactPad CTI interface, reducing integration effort for customers and partners.
- Delivered a major customer integration in two days, directly contributing to a significant new contract.
LexisNexis, Woking (Contract) // May 2014 – Mar 2015#
Developer
Designed the AWS networking (VPCs and secure connectivity to on-premise Active Directory) for a migration of on-premise systems to the cloud.
NewVoiceMedia, Basingstoke // Sep 2011 – Mar 2014#
Senior Software Engineer
Built backend systems for SaaS contact centre products in C#, Java, and MySQL, and served on the Architecture Guild.
Pitney Bowes Software, Henley-on-Thames // Apr 2010 – Sep 2011#
Product Engineer
Built and re-architected core components of the Portrait Foundation CRM toolkit in C# and C++.
NSC, Camberley // Nov 2007 – Dec 2009#
Programmer / Analyst
Developed multiplayer simulation training software for defence clients, deploying it on exercises in the UK, the Netherlands, and Kuwait.
EDUCATION#
BSc (Hons) Computer Science, University of Exeter // A-Level: Maths, Further Maths, Computing, Music Tech