Dave Burt

Turning legacy systems and teams into high performers — web, data, and AI, since 2001.

Phone
0400 943 211
Email
dave@burt.id.au
Github
dburt
LinkedIn
daveburt
Shorter Resume
onepage.html

Summary

Technology leader and full stack developer with over 20 years of ops and executive experience across software engineering, team leadership, and digital transformation in the financial services, travel, health, and energy industries. Most recently led AI-driven automation that cut incident resolution time by 80%, and drove low- to high-performer change in all four DORA software delivery metrics at BIG4 Holiday Parks.

Key Skills

Leadership & Team Building: Extensive experience in leading and mentoring engineering teams.

Software Development: Polyglot, expert in Ruby, C#, Python, JS, CSS, SQL, Bash. Expert in Claude Code, Codex.

System Architecture: Expert in safely modernising legacy system architectures, distributed systems, scaling.

Data + AI Engineering: Experience with data + ML pipelines, MLOps, data warehouse, model deployment, agentic and RAG systems, MCP.

CI/CD & DevOps: Strong background in testing and deployment pipelines and DevOps practices, DORA software delivery optimisation.

Cloud Infrastructure: Skilled in IaC and cloud infrastructure management across AWS, Azure, and cloud repatriation, some experience with GCP.

Cybersecurity: Strong understanding of cybersecurity risks, processes, practices and controls; experience in governance and ops.

Highlights

Some contributions I'm particularly proud of — most of them public, so you can look them up:

Employment

September 2024 -

Tech Lead

BIG4 Holiday Parks

Insourcing software development and data engineering from agencies including Covaler and others, setting up business processes for prioritisation and software delivery, shaping rearchitecture of software systems to support business growth strategy.

  • Led AI-driven automation initiatives, reducing incident resolution time by 80%.
  • Drove low- to high-performer change in all 4 DORA software delivery metrics.
  • Consolidated legacy apps and infrastructure for 20% saving on AWS bill and 50% reduction in lines of code.
  • Designed and implemented ML and data pipelines, including Microsoft Fabric and custom agents.
  • Developed deep expertise across systems and infrastructure, writing documentation and tooling, and training the team.
June 2022 - September 2024

Software Architect

Covaler

Covaler provides data-driven solutions, software development services, and digital transformation services, and features a depth of experience in financial services data. We offered both consulting (for clients including BIG4 Holiday Parks and Ipsos) and products, most notably the Acceleon, Talefin and Beddoes financial services data platforms, and Effective Coach for driving enterprise-wide coaching excellence.

My roles have included:

  • Evolving system architecture, team resourcing and training within heterogenous and legacy technology environments.
  • Managing business transitions, integrating Beddoes business and data platforms into Covaler and sold assets out into Adviser Ratings.
  • Recovering troubled client projects, focusing on team sustainability, product reliability and development cycle time.
  • Transforming our engineering team culture from Panic-Driven Development to reliable continuous delivery, using Effective Coach, mentoring, training and cultural event initiatives.
  • Improving software delivery lead time from weeks to hours, on an app that supported 10x business growth for our major client over 4 years.
  • Establishing a software development competency matrix to support coaching and team growth.
  • Signing up new clients for both consulting and for our SaaS and data products.
Jan 2007 – May 2022

Chief Technology Officer

Beddoes/Allori

Beddoes is data and technology company with top tier clients in the financial services and pharmaceutical sectors. Allori is a healthcare communications agency.

It has grown in the time I've been there from a fresh startup to an established and recognised agency with international reach, working for most of the top 20 global Pharma companies and almost all Australian life insurers.

My role has grown accordingly from part-time web dev slash sysadmin to full time strategic business software development and deployment, managing up to 4 devs and a system administrator, and taking care of hundreds of software projects. I've focused on:

  • Building and leading software development teams
  • Architecting data pipelines and platforms (with Rails, Python, and Azure)
  • Migration of office data centre to cloud (closing physical office due to COVID-19)
  • Gathering and presenting industry insights to insurance industry leaders.
  • Arranging secure transfer of data with executives, managers and analysts of top-tier clients
  • Establishing ISO 27001-compliant information security policies and processes
  • Slick iPad presentations of various kinds (native-hybrid, web-based, various presenter software)
  • Full stack web development (>200 projects, Rails, Sinatra, PHP, static, custom pipelines)
  • iOS apps (HTML Presenter and mHubs, numerous hybrid apps with Cordova)
  • Development infrastructure and processes (e.g. migrating > 100 projects from local Subversion to Bitbucket, establishing continuous integration)
  • Deployment process management (Capistrano, Chef, Ansible, shell, Ruby)
  • Network and systems (Linux and Windows servers and desktops, Mac desktops, VPN)
  • Monitoring, logging and backup systems (NewRelic, HipChat, Papertrail)
  • Training and professional development for our small I.T. team
  • Supervision and coaching across most of those tasks

Some publicly-accessible examples of my work while at Allori/Beddoes:

Mar 2003 – Sep 2008

Partner

Illuminus

Illuminus was small Melbourne-based Web Design and Multimedia business. We crafted web applications using Ruby on Rails, PHP, Flash, and provided graphic design, hosting, consulting and other IT services. After the partnership split up, I ran Illuminus a sole trader. My roles included:

  • general I.T. consulting,
  • systems analysis and design,
  • programming (websites (HTML/JS/CSS), web apps (Rails, PHP), scripting (Ruby, VBA), automation (Office/VBA)), and
  • systems administration (Linux).
Feb 2003 – Mar 2008

Analyst/Programmer

APA Group

When my role expanded beyond the completion of the four-week project I was hired for, I comprised 33% of the IT workforce at the company (then called GasNet Australia) of around 200. I was responsible for the majority of internal software development and application maintenance from then until my resignation. I designed, developed and maintained software for:

  • employee timesheets (ASP/VB, SQL Server)
  • visualising metering data (MS Access and Excel)
  • other various business systems (Access, SQL server, ASP.NET, C, scripting languages)
  • scripts for the sysadmin team
  • auditing contractor-built software
Jul – Nov 2002

Analyst/Programmer

NAB (Global Data Warehouse)

Placed here as part of my Bachelor of Information Technology, as part of a small team managing a big data warehouse system, I developed thoroughly-reviewed COBOL, Oracle SQL, Perl, shell scripts, and C programs which were deployed on the warehouse's IBM mainframes and Linux server.

Feb – Jun 2001

Analyst/Programmer

DMR Consulting (Office of Housing Portfolio Management Project)

Placed here as part of my Bachelor of Information Technology, I began work on the incoming transition of a large outsourcing project shortly after its inception and left soon after it got into full swing. My roles included developing project procedures and tools, supporting management of the transition, application support (INGRES SQL and 4GL, and C), enhancements and ad-hoc reports on the main application, software auditing, and development of a separate, complementary ASP/SQL Server system.

Education

2000 – 2003

Bachelor of Information Technology

Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn

Technology

Languages: Ruby, C#/.NET, Python, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, Bash.

Web: Rails, React, Next.js, Node.js, REST APIs, HTML, CSS, Sass, Rspec, Cucumber, Capybara.

Data: PostgreSQL, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Factory, DuckDB, Parquet.

AI: LLMs, RAG, custom agents, MCP and Agent Skills (building and integrating), Claude Code, Codex, Ollama.

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, GCP, Linux, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, MS Graph APIs, Git, GitHub Actions, CI/CD.

Also worked with: C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, COBOL, Objective-C, VBA.

Contact Dave