Dennis Pham

Dennis Pham

Philadelphia, PA

I'm a Platform Engineering Lead at Rolls-Royce who enjoys building tools and infrastructure that make other engineers' lives easier. When I'm not working, you'll find me tinkering with my homelab, playing guitar, taking photos, or picking up a new hobby.

Experience

  1. Rolls-Royce

    Platform Engineering Lead

    Rolls-Royce

  2. Rolls-Royce

    Platform Engineering Intern

    Rolls-Royce

    • Architected and deployed private Kubernetes clusters on Azure with Argo CD, Istio, Calico, Prometheus, Grafana, and Kiali, securely connected to the on-premises network
    • Built a developer platform with integrated SSO via Microsoft Entra ID through Envoy proxy, abstracting authentication away from application code
    • Collaborated on IaC to automate provisioning of infrastructure on Azure with Terraform and GitOps workflows
    • Implemented a standard web framework for internal applications with autogenerated CRUD GraphQL resolvers, RBAC, and reusable GitHub workflows
    • Integrated SAST, DAST, and SBOM generation into CI pipelines across all repositories
    • Implemented caching in CI for tests and Docker builds to significantly reduce job execution time
  3. Merck

    Data Science Researcher

    Merck

    • Publication: doi.org/10.1109/ICSC64641.2025.00021 (IEEE ICSC 2025)
    • Built an ETL pipeline for SDS documents with Apache Airflow to generate chemical ontologies
    • Created an information retrieval library leveraging VLMs for document retrieval and data extraction using taxonomy embeddings
    • Managed infrastructure on AWS with Terraform and deployed applications to EKS with GitOps
    • Developed an end-user web application with Next.js to generate chemical shipping cover sheets from extracted SDS data
  4. Merck

    Data Science Researcher

    Merck

    • Developed an automated pipeline to process SDS documents and generate packing sheets, resulting in a 235x improvement in speed over the manual process
    • Built a Python parsing library to convert SDS PDFs to JSON for programmatic access of chemical attributes
    • Created a full stack web application (PostgreSQL / S3 / FastAPI / Next.js) to upload, process, and view SDS documents
  5. Purdue University

    Computer Science, B.S.

    Purdue University

Technologies

Kubernetes Azure AWS Terraform Crossplane GitOps Argo CD Istio Envoy Cilium Rook Ceph Backstage Grafana Prometheus Loki OpenTelemetry Kyverno GitHub Actions Ansible Docker Rust Go Python TypeScript Next.js React FastAPI PostgreSQL

Beyond Work

I've spent the past 7+ years running Axolotl Cloud, a Kubernetes homelab that has been continuously rebuilt and rearchitected over the years. It's where I experiment with new tools, break things, and learn by doing. Public docs are available if you're curious.

I also have a 3D printer that I use for making and prototyping, from functional parts for around the house to enclosures for electronics projects to custom gifts for friends and family.

Photography is another big one. I shoot with a Sony A7C II and enjoy capturing people, landscapes, and travel moments. See the photos page for a selection of my work!

I've been playing fingerstyle acoustic guitar for nearly a decade and have recently started exploring electric. It's a great creative outlet and a fun challenge to learn new techniques and songs!

Outside of all that, I also enjoy cooking, baking, hiking, woodworking, and of course, traveling!