• Full Stack Engineer
  • AWS
  • Microservices
  • Automation
  • React
  • AI Tooling

Steven Gorrell

I build software and solutions at scale in AWS

  • 5

    AI and data certifications Including Palantir Foundry Data Engineer

  • 5

    AWS certifications Including DevOps Professional

  • 60+

    Services and automations shipped to production Several running continuously for 5+ years

About

Continuous adaptation, refinement, and improvement.

I started on Windows servers and kept evolving. Systems administration became SharePoint engineering. SharePoint engineering became leading a team of engineers and consultants supporting hundreds of customers. Then I transitioned back to delivering custom solutions.

After moving my focus has been on building and delivering reliable, scalable, event-driven, decoupled, serverless applications — API Gateway, Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, SQS, ECS, ECR, Fargate, OpenSearch — provisioned entirely through Terraform and deployed by automated pipelines.

Many of these solutions are required to be PCI DSS compliant. I have multiple years of experience implementing requirements, and creating and presenting evidence to auditors.

Most recently I've been working in the AI space — building Model Context Protocol servers, and delivering full stack solutions for clients on top of AWS Bedrock and Palantir.

What I do

Things I get called in for

  • AI tooling & MCP

    Model Context Protocol servers that expose internal APIs to LLM assistants with customer-level access controls — backed by Amazon Bedrock, and paired with agentic solutions built on LangGraph. Custom solutions built on top of Palantir. AWS Certified AI Practitioner. Palantir Data Engineer Certified.

  • Serverless architecture

    Event-driven services built from API Gateway, Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, SQS and SNS. Designed for fault tolerance first: idempotent handlers, dead-letter queues, and a failure alerting on every state machine.

  • Platform APIs & front ends

    Versioned REST APIs with custom Lambda authorizers, OpenAPI documentation and Athena-queryable request logs — paired with React and TypeScript single-page front ends that engineers actually use during an incident.

  • Data & analytics pipelines

    Ingestion and transform pipelines feeding OpenSearch, Kinesis streams and Palantir Foundry — ending in dashboards that executives use for revenue trend and business-review reporting. Palantir certified Foundry Data Engineer.

  • Infrastructure as code

    Terraform or CloudFormation from the VPC up. Reusable modules, plan-and-approve pipelines with manual gates for production, and disposable per-branch test environments that tear themselves down.

  • Compliance engineering

    PCI DSS subject-matter expert. I build the controls rather than document them after the fact: continuous anomaly detection against an analysis engine, with daily evidence committed to version control for review.

Selected work

Systems I designed, built and operated

Nearly all of my professional code lives in private repositories, so what follows describes each system by its problem, architecture and outcome. Happy to go deeper on any of these in conversation.

  1. AI & MCP backed troubleshooting and analysis tool

    Engineers needed a way to spend less time reading and analyzing support tickets, and help diagnosing issues. I built a tool to take the ticket data in real time and run automated analysis against existing cloud infrastructure, knowledge databases, and various other supporting API's. Data gathered in this analysis is then sent to AWS Bedrock which has a multiple custom MCP servers. The AI provides a detailed summary of the issue and provides suggested troubleshooting steps with a confidence score, and will also generate remediation scripts or code patches if it deems them appropriate.

    • LangGraph pipeline, presents data to AI "personas" tuned for engineering and software development.
    • DynamoDB caching layer.
    • React frontend.
    • Python MCP servers.
    • AWS Bedrock, OpenSearch, APIs, and MCP servers give the LLM context.
    • End users are presented with actionable solutions.
    • AWS Bedrock
    • LangGraph
    • Python
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenSearch
    • API Gateway
    • React
    • Terraform
    • Vite
  2. Automated alarm triage & remediation pipeline

    Support engineers were spending their shifts running the same diagnostic steps against recurring cloud resource alarms. This service intercepts the monitoring event stream, filters noise, and hands qualifying alarms to Lambda backed Step Function workflows that execute diagnostic and remediation automation against effected resources. After running it provides the engineer with a detailed analysis of findings and fixes performed.

    • Per-alarm handlers covering compute, database, load balancer, backup, VPN and DNS conditions.
    • Filtering keeps invocation cost proportional to actionable events rather than total event volume.
    • Catch-all exception handling on every branch: a failure still produces an event, so nothing is silently dropped.
    • Extended to Google Cloud, where a single remediation absorbed a significant share of incoming alarm volume; later extended again to the private-cloud ticketing platform, taking a public-cloud tool company-wide.
    • Runs hundreds of thousands of automated actions a year, saving thousands of estimated support hours.
    • Python
    • AWS Step Functions
    • Lambda
    • AWS Systems Manager
    • DynamoDB
    • AWS SQS
    • ElasticCache
    • Terraform
  3. Multi-cloud support tooling automation platform

    A platform for deploying standardized configurations and monitoring tooling across a managed fleet spanning multiple cloud vendors. A product catalogue defines what can be deployed; a versioned REST API and worker fleet handle deployment, update and removal; every request lands in an Athena-queryable audit log.

    • Lambda-router API behind API Gateway with a custom authorizer and published OpenAPI documentation.
    • Athena schemas over structured request logs, so auditing a change is a simple SQL query.
    • React for end user interaction.
    • A large, versioned catalogue of supported automations.
    • Python
    • API Gateway
    • Lambda
    • DynamoDB
    • Athena
    • React
    • TypeScript
    • Vite
    • Terraform
  4. Alert suppression API and front end

    Planned maintenance used to page engineers and open tickets for alarms everyone already expected. This product lets support teams suppress alerts and tickets for a defined window, through an API and a React front end that replaced a workflow only reachable by sending API calls from code. Every onboarded AWS and Google Cloud customer is enrolled automatically.

    • Serverless API with a React and TypeScript front end for support engineers.
    • Automatic enrollment of onboarded customers, so coverage never depends on someone remembering to opt in.
    • Rebuilt on React and Vite with shared single sign-on session handling, and deployed through Terraform and GitHub Actions.
    • Integrated as a micro-frontend in the customer portal.
    • Python
    • API Gateway
    • Lambda
    • DynamoDB
    • React
    • TypeScript
    • Vite
    • Terraform
  5. Continuous PCI anomaly detection with audit trail

    PCI-regulated environments must prove that every privileged API call was expected. This service evaluates an environment's control-plane event stream against a declarative ruleset of authorized principal, action and resource combinations. Anomalies are alerted on and recorded in real time.

    • Declarative ruleset keyed on principal, action and target resource — reviewable as code.
    • Deployment pipelines are themselves modelled in the ruleset, so automated infrastructure changes are analyzed.
    • Fail-open-to-alert design: any processing exception emits an unexpected-event record rather than losing the event.
    • Provides assessors with an immutable, timestamped, reviewed trail.
    • Python
    • CloudTrail
    • CloudWatch Events
    • DynamoDB
    • Lambda
    • PCI DSS
    • Kinesis
    • Splunk
    • Terraform
    • Vite
  6. Multi-cloud account assessment & reporting tool

    Answering "what is actually running in this customer's cloud, and is it configured the way we recommend?" was a multi-day manual exercise. This tool automated it: a parser expands the request, agents collect inventory and configuration across accounts, results are processed asynchronously with progress tracking, and the output is rendered as a spreadsheet or published straight to the internal wiki. Built first for AWS, then extended to Google Cloud.

    • Asynchronous job model with progress reporting, so long-running scans don't hold a request open.
    • Agent-based collection via Systems Manager rather than requiring inbound network access.
    • Pluggable output writers — Excel for customers, JSON, wiki markup for internal review.
    • Parallel AWS and GCP implementations sharing the job and reporting model.
    • Python
    • AWS API Gateway
    • AWS Systems Manager
    • Lambda
    • AWS S3
    • AWS SQS
    • Step Functions
    • Terraform
    • Vite
  7. MCP servers for LLM-assisted cloud operations

    Giving an AI assistant useful access to cloud tooling is mostly an authorization problem, not a prompting one. I built the internal AWS tooling API and the Model Context Protocol server that fronts it, backed by Amazon Bedrock models and exposing resource lookup, configuration diffing and instance inspection as MCP tools, so support engineers can troubleshoot customer environments with an assistant. A second server connects configuration, inventory and ticketing data to a LangGraph solution that produces account-review material for account managers and next-step guidance for front-line support, inside the ticketing system.

    • Customer-level access controls enforced on the server side rather than left to the model.
    • Tool surface deliberately narrow and read-oriented — capability granted by design, not by prompt instruction.
    • Deployed as infrastructure-as-code alongside the API it wraps.
    • Python
    • Model Context Protocol
    • AWS Bedrock
    • LangGraph
    • FastAPI
    • Poetry
    • Terraform
    • LLM tooling
  8. Executive analytics pipelines and dashboards

    Data engineering for leadership reporting on the Palantir Foundry platform: Python transforms that shape CRM, ticketing and revenue data, TypeScript server-side functions that compute the metrics, and React front ends built with Vite and Recharts that turn them into revenue-trend and monthly business-review dashboards. Also built the streaming transforms that feed support-automation events into the platform's ontology, and the functions behind its capacity-planning views.

    • Transform layer separates raw ingestion from the metric definitions consumed by dashboards.
    • Server-side TypeScript functions keep metric logic in one place across dashboards and applications.
    • Front ends built against a shared internal design system for consistency with other tools.
    • Python
    • TypeScript
    • React
    • Vite
    • Recharts
    • Palantir Foundry
    • Kinesis

Open source & publications

Work that's public

Most of what I write is closed source, but I have contributed to a number of open source projects.

    • Python library
    • Generates CloudFormation templates

    Contributor to the widely used Python library for generating CloudFormation templates. My merged work added support for AWS Auto Scaling Plans and Aurora backtrack windows, corrected the EC2 Spot Fleet load-balancer structure and an over-strict launch-template requirement, filled in missing CloudFront parameters and validators, and fixed a DynamoDB validator error.

    • Python
    • CloudFormation
    • Open source
    • Terraform modules
    • Reusable AWS infrastructure

    Author and long-term maintainer of several modules in Rackspace's public Terraform library. I wrote the SQS module outright, brought S3, SNS and SQS to parity with their CloudFormation equivalents, added Route 53 support and queue policies, fixed redrive-policy handling, reworked bucket ACL behaviour to match AWS defaults after the provider's ACL changes, and set up their CI.

    • Terraform
    • AWS
    • CircleCI
    • Module design
    • Photo editing software
    • Camera support data

    Contributed Canon EOS R3 support to darktable, the open-source photography workflow and raw development application. Camera support there depends on contributors doing the measurement work: I shot and processed calibration reference frames to mathematically derive values for white-balance presets across the camera's colour-temperature and preset range, plus a denoise profile covering its ISO range. Raised the tracking issue, then delivered both data sets.

    • Colour calibration
    • Sensor profiling
    • Open source
    • Photography
    • Contributing author
    • Wrox / Wiley
    • ISBN 978-1-118-49581-0

    Contributing author on Wrox's professional administration title. Alongside it, I presented pro bono at SharePoint Saturday community events, wrote and taught internal Rackspace University classes, and delivered customer-facing webinars.

    • Technical writing
    • Speaking
    • Teaching
    • Solution highlighted
    • Amazon Web Services

    One of my internal services is described in the solution section of this AWS case study.

    • AWS
    • Case study

Credentials

Certifications

Amazon Web Services

  • DevOps EngineerProfessional · 2024
  • Solutions ArchitectAssociate · 2016
  • DeveloperAssociate · 2021
  • SysOps AdministratorAssociate · 2024
  • AI PractitionerFoundational · 2025

Data platform & AI

  • Palantir Foundry Data Engineer2026
  • Palantir Foundry & AIP Builder Foundations2026
  • Palantir Foundry Aware2026
  • Generative AI with Large Language ModelsDeepLearning.AI & AWS · 2023

Microsoft

  • MCTS: SharePoint 2010
  • MCITP: Server AdministratorWindows Server 2008
  • MCSA: Windows Server 2008
  • MCTS: Active DirectoryWindows Server 2008
  • MCTS: Server Network Infrastructure
  • Microsoft Certified Professional

Other

  • FCC Amateur Radio Technician
  • Wilderness First ResponderNOLS Wilderness Medicine

Contact

Get in touch

Email is the reliable way to reach me, and I answer it. I'm happy to talk through any of the work above in more detail, and open to conversations about interesting problems in cloud platform engineering. Generally available for calls 2:00–7:00 PM Central — email first and we'll find a time.