Corey Hornbeck, Developer in Chicago, IL, United States
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Corey Hornbeck

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Full-stack and Cloud Engineer and Developer

Chicago, IL, United States

Toptal member since January 24, 2025

Expertise
TerraformLinuxAWSJavaScriptMacOSRubyKubernetesPostgreSQLNode.jsReact.jsMySQLCloud EngineeringPHPGolang
Bio

Corey is a full-stack and cloud engineer working for late-stage startups. He develops in Ruby, PostgreSQL, and Terraform and builds distributed workloads in Kubernetes with AWS. A former biomedical engineer, Corey is now a self-taught and driven software engineer passionate about making workplaces more diverse and inclusive, especially for small startups where culture is an extremely young and sensitive trait.

Portfolio

Panorama Education
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Terraform, JavaScript, Ruby, Amazon EKS...
Jiobit
React, MySQL, AWS ELB, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), PHP, MacOS, Linux...

Experience

  • Linux - 6 years
  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 5 years
  • JavaScript - 5 years
  • Kubernetes - 3 years
  • Amazon EKS - 3 years
  • PostgreSQL - 3 years
  • Terraform - 3 years
  • Ruby - 3 years

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

MacOS, Linux, Amazon EKS, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Terraform, Buildkite, Ruby, JavaScript, Go, Kubernetes

The most amazing...

...project I've completed is leading and implementing an entire cloud infrastructure migration from Heroku to AWS while creating a Kubernetes cluster from scratch.

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer

2021 - 2024
Panorama Education
  • Headed and implemented a cloud infrastructure migration project from Heroku to AWS while creating a Kubernetes cluster from scratch.
  • Saved approximately $70,000 per year in cloud costs by implementing Karpenter and smart scaling techniques.
  • Improved incident response times by integrating open-source observability tools, such as Prometheus and Grafana, with Kubernetes clusters.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Terraform, JavaScript, Ruby, Amazon EKS, Linux, Buildkite, PostgreSQL

Senior Software Engineer

2017 - 2021
Jiobit
  • Implemented Node/Koa, React, and MySQL architecture to build internal tools.
  • Managed PHP and Node.js servers for web and in-app store transactions.
  • Expanded an SQL database and AWS ELB instances to handle 3rd-party APIs for product fulfillment.
Technologies: React, MySQL, AWS ELB, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), PHP, MacOS, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), JavaScript, Node.js

Experience

Optimization of Container Orchestration by Migration to Kubernetes

Migrated microservices, PostgreSQL databases, Redis caches, and data analysis scripts from managed Heroku projects to AWS with Terraform and CloudFormation. This project consisted of creating a Kubernetes cluster from scratch on AWS EKS. The cloud resources were migrated to it.

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Node.js, React

Tools

Terraform, Amazon EKS, AWS ELB

Languages

Ruby, JavaScript, Go, PHP

Platforms

MacOS, Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Buildkite, Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Storage

PostgreSQL, MySQL

Other

Amazon RDS

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