Nicholas Crew Ferguson · Tampa Bay

I build the platforms
your engineering team
runs on.

Solo platform engineering and security consulting. I design, build, and ship production infrastructure — internal developer platforms, security tooling, and AI-augmented workflows — typically as a one-person team operating at startup speed inside larger organizations.

4 Production platforms in 11 months
4,400× WAF performance improvement
~1000 Endpoints across security tooling

Most recently I built four major production platforms at A10 Networks under the ThreatX brand — a Rust/Pingora WAF delivering a 4,400× throughput improvement, a fleet management system, a multi-tenant security testing platform, and a Linux endpoint agent — all solo, in under a year. Before that, I built internal developer platforms and security tooling across multiple organizations.
I work best embedded with teams that need someone to own an entire platform surface from architecture through deployment. I'm fast, I ship, and I don't need a committee.

Platform

Internal Developer Platforms

End-to-end platform engineering — CI/CD, infrastructure provisioning, developer portals, and the glue that connects them. Designed for teams that need to move fast without drowning in ops.

Security

Security Tooling & Infrastructure

WAF/reverse proxy architecture, fleet security management, vulnerability assessment platforms, and compliance automation. Production security at performance scale.

AI

AI-Augmented Workflows

LLM integration into development and operations workflows. Not chatbots — real augmentation for code analysis, traffic pattern recognition, scenario generation, and automated testing.

Product

Solo Product Engineering

Full-stack product development from zero to production. Architecture, implementation, testing, deployment, and handoff. I've shipped complete platforms alone that teams of five quoted months for.


Apparatus
Open source · Network simulation platform

AI-augmented network simulation across 13 protocols with full API and CLI. Fault injection, honeypots, exfil detection, and protocol-aware traffic generation.

13protocols 22verticals
Synapse WAF
A10 Networks / ThreatX · Production

Complete WAF rebuild in Rust with Cloudflare's Pingora framework. Replaced legacy infrastructure with a high-performance reverse proxy delivering transformational throughput gains.

4,400×throughput Soloin 2 months
Chimera
Open source · Vulnerable application platform

Multi-vertical vulnerable API server with nearly 1,000 realistic endpoints, full authentication flows, and exploitable surfaces across 22 industry verticals.

~1000endpoints 22verticals
Facet
Open source · Vector-based resume platform

Modular resume generator with vector targeting, Typst WASM rendering, JD analysis, and a full theme system. React 19, TypeScript, Zustand.

8theme presets TypstWASM PDF

Languages & Runtimes

  • Rust
  • TypeScript / Node
  • Python
  • Go
  • Bash / Systems

Infrastructure

  • Kubernetes / Helm
  • Terraform / Pulumi
  • AWS / GCP
  • Docker / containerd
  • Cloudflare / Pingora

Domains

  • WAF / Reverse Proxy
  • Fleet Management
  • CI/CD Pipelines
  • Security Automation
  • LLM Integration

Let's talk.

Available for contract and consulting engagements. Remote or on-site in the Tampa Bay area.

nick@atlascrew.dev