About

I’m Rick Waterman, a Lead Cloud Architect in the Vancouver, WA / Portland, OR metro. I’ve spent ten-plus years in backend and cloud engineering — leading architecture and delivery for AWS serverless systems, event-driven services, and company-wide data platforms, and before that building full-stack systems for payment-risk detection at scale, financial research tooling, and agricultural IoT.

Day to day I care about durable architecture: systems teams can actually operate, CI/CD that gates every merge, observability that catches problems before users do, and infrastructure as code for all of it. I hold the AWS Certified Developer (2023) and AWS Solutions Architect (2020) certifications.

This blog is where longer-form writing lands. Working references live at notes.rickwaterman.com, and the main site with my resume is rickwaterman.com.

AI disclosure #

The ideas and opinions on this blog are my own. I draft and edit with generative AI assistance, including source research, and review everything before it ships. Each post carries a short notice at the top, and factual claims link to their sources.