Justin Fernbaugh — Infrastructure & Software Engineer.

I work on infrastructure, software engineering, and distributed systems, primarily with Go, Bazel, Kubernetes, GCP, and AWS.

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Portrait of Justin Fernbaugh

Key wins for organizations

65%+
P50 build and test improvement
80%
P90 build and test improvement
25 min
P95 build/test time, down from 1h 25m
2,000+
Architected publishing pipelines across a 20M+ line monorepo

01 / Featured work

OSS Projects

Open-source projects spanning cloud infrastructure, AI systems, Go libraries, and network automation.

01

rules_cloudrun

Cloud Run configuration is easy to duplicate and difficult to validate. These Bazel rules validate inputs, generate typed manifests, and support digest-pinned service, job, and worker deployments.

  • Bazel
  • Starlark
  • Cloud Run
  • Go
View rules_cloudrun on GitHub

02

Jarvis

A search-grounded Discord AI system with multi-cloud and multi-LLM-provider support. It can run as separate gateway and worker microservices or as a single deployment, with optional DynamoDB-backed state.

  • Go
  • Bazel
  • Multi-cloud
  • Multi-LLM
  • DynamoDB
  • Discord
View Jarvis on GitHub

03

std

Reusable Go building blocks for production command-line applications: stack-aware errors, graceful shutdown, and retry behavior designed around resilient operations.

  • Go
  • CLI
  • Errors
  • Retries
View std on GitHub

04

DNS Controller

A small Go service that watches a changing public IP and keeps Cloudflare DNS records synchronized, removing a fragile manual step from home-lab operations.

  • Go
  • Cloudflare
  • DNS
  • Docker
View DNS Controller on GitHub

02 / Open source

Upstream contributions.

Contributions, features, and fixes to upstream open source projects.

In review

Bazel #29758

Fixes exclusive-if-local incorrectly limiting concurrency when actions use remote execution.

Merged

rules_js #2313

Adds configurable directory and file permissions to JavaScript image layers.

Merged

Sous Chefs PostgreSQL

#765 and #767 correct multi-version package selection and OS-specific PostgreSQL yum GPG key handling.

03 / Experience

Systems that hold up at scale.

Selected outcomes from platform engineering, infrastructure, and software roles.

Build & CI

Faster feedback, consistent artifacts.

At Apex, architected Bazel CI that reduced P50 build/test time by 65%+, P90 by 80%, and P95 from 1h 25m to 25 minutes, while standardizing container builds across Go, Java, TypeScript, and Python. All with a sub four-minute P50 Build/Test on PRs, and Merges.

GitOps delivery

Deployment tooling at scale.

Designed services and tooling for manifests, configuration, and GitOps orchestration in a 20M+ line monorepo supporting 500+ builds, 900+ applications/services, and thousands of deployments, all daily.

Infrastructure

Resilient open-source hosting.

At the OSU Open Source Lab, built infrastructure for more than 100 clients and implemented multi-zone automatic PostgreSQL failover serving over 150 organizations.

Chronology

  1. — Present

    Platform Engineer

    Apex Fintech Solutions

  2. — Present

    Startup Co-Founder

    Lavndr

  3. —

    Systems Engineer

    Oregon State University Open Source Lab

  4. —

    Software Engineer

    Lithia & Driveway

  5. —

    Instructor

    Coding with Kids

  6. —

    B.S. Computer Science

    Oregon State University · Systems and distributed systems emphasis

04 / About

Based in Portland, Oregon.

I’m an infrastructure and software engineer interested in distributed systems, build systems, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling.

Outside of work, I manage a home lab, follow Formula 1, and hike around the Pacific Northwest. I also share the house with three cats—Fish, Milo, and Ramen—who are much less interested in reliable infrastructure.

Fish, a white and tabby cat, sitting in a car seat wearing a harness
Fish
Milo, a gray tabby cat, resting with one paw draped over a cat bed
Milo
Ramen, a black cat with green eyes, wearing a gray sweater on a cat tree
Ramen