I am a Principal Cloud Engineer at SMBC, working at Director grade in Dublin, Ireland. I work to shape cloud infrastructure and platform strategy within our EMEA region, drawing on my hands-on engineering background across AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). My focus is on secure, resilient enterprise platforms, infrastructure as code, and automation that enables teams to deliver at scale.
Experience & Focus
My career has grown from systems engineering into architecting and scaling multi-cloud platforms, and now into technical and people leadership. I work across complex enterprise systems, modern delivery practices such as CI/CD, Kubernetes, and GitOps, and the architectural decisions needed to turn technology strategy into reliable outcomes.
A life-long learner backed by dual Master’s degrees and extensive industry certifications, I believe technical leadership should remain grounded in practical experience. I continue to explore modern infrastructure through hands-on projects, from advanced delivery pipelines to self-hosted environments on GCP, keeping my perspective current while helping teams navigate complex engineering decisions.
Earned Certification Badges
I believe in continuous learning and have earned several industry certifications to stay at the forefront of cloud technology.
Google Cloud Certifications
Additional Certifications
Personal Projects
I use personal projects to explore ideas that are useful to my family while keeping my engineering skills practical and current.
- Growing Together: A privacy-focused height tracking application for parents. It makes it easy to record measurements for multiple children and visualize their growth over time through interactive charts.
- Patrick’s Art Gallery: An evolving digital gallery for my son’s artwork. I plan to develop it further as both a lasting home for his creativity and a space to experiment with new web ideas.
Legacy College Work
During my MSc, I developed a few projects that served as early playgrounds for my interest in CI/CD and cloud deployments.
- Demo App: A Blood Pressure Calculator app used to demonstrate automated deployment patterns.
- App Pipeline: The Azure DevOps pipeline that managed the build and release lifecycle for the demo app.
Contact me
Feel free to reach out via ctolan(at)gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.