DaD Digital

What I do

One engineer, the whole stack — from the tenant it runs in to the app in your customer’s hand.

Between those two ends sit the network, the database, the domain model and the client build, and I work at every one of them. Most engagements mix the categories below, which is rather the point: you want it fixed, not routed between three vendors.

Production Azure support & on-call

Ongoing responsibility for a live Azure platform: incident response in and out of hours, patching cadence, certificate lifecycle, capacity and cost right-sizing, release pipelines and rollback — and backup restore verification, because a backup you have never restored is a belief, not a control.

Retained monthly support with a defined P1 escalation path
24/7 contactability with an acknowledgement target
Comfortable inside your tenant and your change process
Runbooks and architecture docs written as I go
Monitoring and alerting reviewed rather than merely configured
Cost and capacity reviewed on a schedule

The first month is the same regardless of what happens: a written inventory of what is actually running, one tested restore, and the monitoring gaps documented.

Cloud architecture & infrastructure as code

Designing and provisioning what the workload actually needs. Azure and AWS, containerised workloads, private networking, TLS, identity, observability, and environments that can be rebuilt from source rather than remembered.

Azure · AWS CDK · Docker / Podman · Kubernetes · Ansible · Terraform · GitHub Actions · Azure DevOps

Custom software & modernisation

Business applications built to stay cheap to change years after launch — the backend, the web front end, the mobile builds and the database design underneath. Equally, the systems that have already become expensive to change: re-platforming, and migrations that cannot afford to lose data. Most recently a fifteen-year-old production platform rebuilt from the ground up and cut over onto a new stack, solo, with a live user base throughout.

C# / .NET 10 · ASP.NET Core · TypeScript · SvelteKit · React · PostgreSQL · SQL Server · Ionic / Capacitor · CQRS / event sourcing · data migration under test

Advisory, review & coaching

Architecture and code review, test and CI/CD strategy, developer-experience tooling, technical hiring, and one-on-one coaching. A long record of raising the engineering standard of the teams I join, and of explaining technical risk to the people accountable for it but not fluent in it.

Architecture review · test architecture · DevEx · recruitment & assessment · mentoring

AI & agentic engineering

Product features built on self-hosted model inference, and the practical side of agentic delivery: where to give an agent autonomy, where that costs more than it saves, and the guardrails that keep a codebase reviewable at speed.

Self-hosted inference · llama.cpp · ROCm / CUDA / Vulkan · Claude Code · agentic workflow design

A note on how this works now

The constraint used to be headcount.

For most of my career, delivering software meant assembling people. That is no longer the binding constraint. A great deal of the work that once justified a team of fifteen — or an offshore one of thirty — now runs on GPUs, under direction, at a pace that makes the old shape of a project look odd. This is not a prediction. It is how I have been working.

What has not changed is the part that was always scarce. Knowing what to build. Knowing how to structure it so it is still cheap to change in five years. Knowing, when an answer comes back fluent and confident, that it is wrong. Judgement was never available at a discount, and it does not arrive by adding seats.

The rewrite described below was delivered this way — sole architect and engineer, roughly 1,500 commits, most of the code written agentically under close architectural direction. The practices that make that safe are the ones that made a codebase maintainable long before any of this: pure domain logic, tests that run in milliseconds, generated clients, and rules enforced structurally rather than by convention.

The tooling changed. The engineering did not.

Approach

How I work, and why the arrangement tends to suit.

01

I have been the technical half of a business, not its supplier

DaD Digital's two long-running platforms are partnerships: the business partners brought the idea, the domain and the market, and we brought the ability to build it and keep it running. Both have been live on Azure for the better part of fifteen years, and I have been the only engineer responsible for either — the infrastructure, the databases, the backups, the certificates, the pipelines and the phone call. Taking somebody else's idea to market and then holding it there for fifteen years teaches lessons that project work does not, mostly about the gap between what a system is documented to do and what it does at three in the morning.

02

A developer first, and an infrastructure engineer because of it

I write the application code, and went deep on infrastructure because on small teams you wear both hats. When something breaks at 2am, whether it is a platform fault or an application fault is usually the expensive question — and I can answer it rather than handing it back across a boundary.

03

Plain English is a deliberate practice

Much of my career has been spent explaining technical risk to people accountable for it but not fluent in it — CTOs, CEOs, and a national executive team I presented a data strategy to. If you are the non-technical person in the room, you should finish the meeting knowing what the risk is and what it will cost.

04

Written down, then automated

The reason a one-person support load has stayed viable for fifteen years across two products is documentation and automation, not heroics. Runbooks, pinned and reproducible builds, tests that run in milliseconds, and rules enforced structurally rather than by convention.

Track record

Thirty years, described by what it involved.

Employers, clients and product names are given in conversation. This page describes the substance rather than the letterhead. References on request.

15 years
continuous

Two ventures carried from idea to market, and kept there

Both began as someone else's idea. In each case non-technical business partners brought the domain and the market, DaD Digital came in as the technical partner, and the product went live and stayed live — since 2011 and 2015 respectively. One serves over 10,000 registered users with personal data behind a login; the other has sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. I have been the only engineer responsible for either, for their entire lives: compute, databases, storage, networking, DNS and TLS, backup and restore verification, capacity and cost, release and rollback, and incident response out of hours, alone. Both operate under the Australian Privacy Principles.
2 years
enterprise

Azure at high concurrency, inside someone else's change process

Linux containers, Service Bus, Cosmos DB, Event Hubs and Service Fabric, with Log Analytics and KQL for diagnostics and Datadog for observability — at a scale where a latency regression is measured in money. Here I was one engineer inside a large organisation's governance rather than the owner of it, which is the relevant experience for working in a client's tenant. Reduced hosting cost measurably by profiling and rewriting poorly performing code paths.
Inception to
hundreds of
customers

A platform architected from nothing to tier-1 corporate scale

Technical design and lead development of a B2B SaaS product from first commit through to hundreds of large corporate customers — among them banks, airlines, universities and government departments — handling commercially sensitive data. CQRS and event sourcing on .NET Core and PostgreSQL, with the developer inner loop treated as the single largest lever on team productivity, and the team recruited and coached along the way.
~1,500
commits, solo

A fifteen-year-old platform rebuilt and migrated without losing a record

Sole architect, engineer and operator of a ground-up rewrite onto .NET 10 and PostgreSQL, running as containers on Ansible-provisioned Linux behind Caddy, with one deployment pipeline serving three products from shared base images and pinned image versions for reproducible builds. The data migration was pinned by tests against real production records, with explicit partial-failure reporting rather than silent loss.
Regulated &
government

Delivery into government and high-consequence settings

A major business intelligence programme delivered into a large federal government department as project manager, architect and lead. Government departments among the tier-1 customers of the platform above. Work to formal change control in regulated environments across betting, legal and enterprise settings. Against the Essential Eight, most mitigations are already standard practice for me rather than a compliance exercise — managed patching cadence, multi-factor authentication, restricted administrative privileges, pinned images and centralised package management, and daily backups with tested restores.
Before
all that

A long apprenticeship in unglamorous, load-bearing systems

Enterprise client portals, integrated accounting systems, national supply-chain and B2B integration, mobile applications shipped to both stores from one codebase, and master-data leadership through a group-wide ERP transformation across multiple states. The kind of work where the measure of success is that nobody had to think about it again for years.

Damien Sawyer · Principal Engineer

About

Damien Sawyer

Solutions architect and hands-on engineer. I specialise in systems that stay cheap to change — and in being the person still answering for them a decade later.

DaD Digital has traded continuously since 2010. Alongside it I have worked as an employed architect and lead across ticketing, legal technology, sports betting, manufacturing, supply chain, finance and government. I work equally comfortably as an individual contributor, a technical lead or a coach.

Elsewhere I contribute to open-source developer tooling in Go, Rust and Lua, and in 2024 stood for local council as an independent.

Based Melbourne. All work performed in Australia
Engagement ABN contractor, GST registered, since 2010
Right to work Australian citizen, unrestricted
Compliance Confidentiality deeds signed on request; insurances and a current National Police Check arranged to your requirements

github.com/damiensawyer →

Working together

Three ways engagements usually start.

Retained support

A monthly retainer that buys availability, plus a banded rate card covering business hours, scheduled out-of-hours and unscheduled incident response. Suits a live platform that needs a custodian rather than a project.

Project delivery

A defined piece of work — a migration, a rebuild, an integration, a new product — scoped and quoted up front, delivered with the documentation and pipelines needed to keep running it after I hand it over.

Advisory

A short, sharp engagement: architecture or code review, a second opinion on a build versus buy decision, a hiring process, or ongoing coaching for an engineer or a team.

Rates are quoted per engagement and depend on scope, hours and the on-call profile. Ask and I will send a rate card the same day.

Contact

Tell me what's broken, or what you'd like built.

A short description of the platform and the problem is plenty to start.

damiensawyer@daddigital.com

Melbourne, Australia · remote Australia-wide · on-site in metropolitan Melbourne by arrangement.

Someone to answer for the platform your business runs on.