Virga Labs

Virga Labs focuses on water, climate, and society. They develop AWS-based tools to forecast and manage water flow in large bodies of water across the United States. I came in as a fractional CTO and lead AWS cloud architect to help deliver a federal project.

I focused on designing and deploying the simulation software on AWS, working closely with federal stakeholders to make sure it met all the contract requirements. We launched ahead of the deadline by prioritizing the right tasks, which saved the client five million dollars.

Along the way I fixed issues that were silently costing money. The team used to copy terabytes of data between five AWS accounts manually through the console, taking around five hours per sync. I replaced that with a simple Lambda-based automation, bringing the sync time down to twenty minutes and saving roughly eighty thousand dollars a year. I also optimized the Docker build process by splitting it into two stages with proper layer caching, cutting build time from three hours to twenty minutes.

On top of that, I helped the team move the whole project to CloudFormation while we kept rolling out new features. The infrastructure became repeatable, not hand-built.