2025 – Present
Meta · Firmware Automation
Production Systems Engineer
Building the tooling that takes firmware safely from vendor to fleet, across every server, switch and AI cluster at Meta.
Hi 👋 I'm Ciaran
{ sounds-like: 'keearan' }
An infrastructure and reliability engineer building firmware automation at hyperscale: the systems that deploy, monitor, and safely retire firmware across a global datacenter fleet.
Before engineering, I spent five years as a child-protection social worker, so I bring a mix of technical and person-centered experience.
Timeline
Most recent first.
2021 – 2025
Meta · OpenBMC
Production Engineer
Fully automated firmware delivery across Meta's fleet: qualification, testing, canary and rollout.
Joined in 2021 through Meta's Production Engineering programme.
2020 – 2021
Learning to code
Self-taught
Taught myself to code in the evenings while working full-time in child protection, shipping full stack apps within a year.
The Rhythm Box · Hot Dogz · Diploma, Code Institute
2017 – 2021
Tusla · Child & Family Agency
Child Protection Social Worker
Assessed risk and led safety plans for families in crisis, presented evidence in court, and ran team training.
2012 & 2015
University College Cork
Bachelor of Social Science · Master of Social Work
cd ~
Killarney, Co. Kerry
What I do
PythonGoRustSQLBashLinuxDockerAnsible
Reliability
- CI/CD & release engineering
- Safe rollouts (canary, phased)
- Test automation
- Observability & alerting
Domain
- Server lifecycle, provisioning to decommissioning
- Firmware / BMC tooling
- New-platform bring-up
- Distributed systems
What colleagues say
An aspect I like about Ciaran is the empathy and sense of responsibility he shows in his work: there's an understanding that there is more to a project than just the code.
In spite of difficulties like the randomness of the issue, physical security requirements and the absence of any hint of what the problem was, Ciaran persisted and eventually arrived at a fix. His determination to succeed here was impressive.
Proactive in identifying technical debt and taking ownership of solutions independently, often fixing issues before others are even aware of them.
Ciaran is a doer and just moves forward. He also listens to feedback, offers his suggestions and is a great meet-in-the-middle person. A joy to work with.
The rest of me
Outside work I'm a serious football fan. You'll usually find me in an Arsenal shirt, especially after a good result.
Music is the other passion in my life. I play drums (badly, for fun) and grew up playing traditional Irish music on the tin whistle. Depending on the day, you can catch me listening to everything from Slipknot to Dolly Parton.
I'm a strong believer in a free, open and private web and I self-host my own media, both as a fun hobby and also because I think it matters who owns the infrastructure we run our lives on.
Say hello 👋
Open to conversations about infrastructure and reliability roles.