Tom Chaplin

Senior network engineer specialising in network automation, cloud engineering and large-scale infrastructure design. Eleven years of building systems that are more reliable because there are fewer humans in the change path.

My background is deep networking — routing, switching, security, multicast, wireless — across Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, Fortinet and Arista. What I've spent the last few years doing is putting software practice around it: automation frameworks, Terraform, CI, observability, and Kubernetes networking that behaves predictably under load.

I've led multidisciplinary teams, acted as interim staff engineer, and spent a lot of time mentoring engineers making the same jump I did. That's really why this site exists.

Most recently at Robinhood, where I built a Python automation framework, an AI-assisted troubleshooting layer over it, and a multi-region multi-CDN edge for every customer on the platform.