John Donaghy — Minneapolis, MN

Hindsight is everything.

Thirty years of building software and infrastructure, including a few wrong turns. That experience is what I bring to your hardest technical decisions — as a fractional CTO, senior architect, or trusted advisor, without the overhead of a full-time hire.

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"I've been the platform engineer who asked developers to learn Helm and ArgoCD before they could ship. It felt reasonable. They didn't use it. Going back to writing application code is what taught me why."

Who I work with

You might be in one of these situations

01
You're growing faster than your infrastructure Your deployment story made sense at ten engineers. At thirty, it's becoming a liability. You need someone who knows what breaks first and how to get ahead of it.
02
You have a cloud migration ahead of you Moving to Azure — or making better use of it — is the right call. The question is what to build, what to buy, and what order to do it in. These decisions are hard to undo.
03
Your platform team is building things developers won't use This is more common than anyone admits. The tools are technically correct. The adoption is zero. The problem is usually the interface boundary, not the technology.
04
You need a senior technical voice without a full-time hire Architectural decisions, vendor evaluations, engineering leadership — you need someone who can operate at that level on a fractional basis, through your S-corp or as an advisor.

Capabilities

Where I can help specifically

The work I do is Azure-heavy and platform-engineering-focused, but the judgment is broader than any one stack.

Azure Platform Eng. Container Apps, AKS, Bicep, paved-road deployment patterns, IaC accelerators — building the infrastructure layer that developer teams will actually use.
Fractional CTO Technical strategy, architecture decisions, hiring judgment, vendor evaluation. Senior leadership capacity without the full-time overhead.
Agentic AI Adoption Practical integration of LLM-powered tooling — Claude Code, agentic workflows, what makes sense for your engineering team right now versus what's hype.
Architecture Review Independent assessment before you commit. Cloud architecture, deployment strategy, platform design — the decisions that look small until they aren't.

Background

Thirty years of building things

I've written software, led teams, founded a company, and spent the last several years doing platform engineering at scale in a large enterprise. That range is the point — I've felt the platform from both sides of the interface boundary.

2020 – present
DevSecOps Leader / Senior Solutions Architect — Title Insurance Industry Building and evangelizing a security-approved DevOps platform on AKS and Azure Container Apps. Architectural guidance, cloud adoption strategy, AI capability evaluation across a large organization.
2014 – 2019
Co-Founder & CTO — Axon Financial Systems Self-funded startup. Responsible for the entire IT operation — platform, products, security, and team. Grew to a successful exit over five years.
Earlier
Twenty-plus years across market data, financial services, healthcare, and enterprise software From early-stage startups to the New York Stock Exchange — two decades of software development and technical leadership before founding Axon.

Writing

On platform engineering and agentic AI

I write about the things I'm building and the ideas behind them — Azure paved-road platforms, agentic coding workflows, and what it actually takes to build cloud infrastructure that teams use.

Absorb the Platform, Don't Expose It
Azure · Platform Engineering · May 2026

Get in touch

Let's talk about what you're working on

If you're navigating a platform decision, evaluating a cloud migration, or trying to figure out where AI tooling actually fits in your engineering workflow — I'm available for consulting engagements and fractional CTO work through Heuron Technology LLC.

LinkedIn is the best place to start the conversation.

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