Roland "Cole" Smith

I design scalable cloud systems, build practical solutions, and spend my free time perfecting barbecue and enjoying sports.

Cloud Engineer & Systems Builder

I’m a cloud engineer focused on designing scalable, reliable systems in AWS. My background in solutions architecture has given me experience translating complex technical requirements into practical, production-ready environments.

Sports, BBQ & Continuous Improvement

Outside of engineering, I’m passionate about barbecue and sports. I love the process of refining techniques, improving each iteration, and chasing better results over time. Barbecue teaches patience and precision. Sports reinforce discipline and competition. Both mirror how I approach life: stay consistent, improve every day, and execute when it counts.

Always Building

Curiosity drives me. I enjoy experimenting, breaking things, fixing them, and improving until they’re clean, scalable, resilient, and reproducible

Cloud Projects

Aspects of hands-on projects that reflect my focus on cloud architecture, automation, and scalable systems.

Serverless Data Lake

Built an AWS-based data ingestion and transformation pipeline using S3, Lambda, Glue, and DynamoDB.

Infrastructure as Code

Designed reproducible cloud environments using Terraform and CloudFormation. Automated provisioning for scalable, production-ready deployments.

CI/CD with GitHub Actions

Built a GitHub Actions pipeline that automatically deploys site updates on push, giving a fast, repeatable release workflow.

Event-Driven Architecture

Implemented event-based workflows using SQS, SNS, and Lambda to decouple services and improve system resilience.

Cloud Cost Optimization

Analyzed and re-architected workloads to reduce unnecessary spend while maintaining performance and availability.

Security & Best Practices

Implemented IAM role design, least-privilege access policies, and logging/monitoring strategies to strengthen cloud security posture.

Get in touch

I’m always open to discussing cloud architecture, engineering opportunities, interesting projects, or even barbecue techniques.

If you're building something ambitious and need someone who cares about execution and long-term scalability, I’d love to connect.