Ciaran Concannon

Infrastructure & Reliability Engineer

Dublin, Ireland

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.

Experienced in site reliability engineering and DevOps, with a proven track record of replacing manual, error-prone processes with efficient, automated solutions in complex systems. A background in child-protection social work brings a strong mix of technical and soft skills.

Timeline

Most recent first.

2025 – Present

Meta — Firmware Automation

Production Systems Engineer

  • Built the tooling that unblocked onboarding of new AI platforms.
  • Designed the phased-rollout templates governing firmware changes across AI/GPU training platforms.
  • Led efforts to standardise firmware from vendor to fleet: proposed a common contract for how vendors deliver firmware, and unified lab and production upgrades into a single shared library.
  • Expanded firmware automation to cover the legacy network-switch fleet.

2021 – 2025

Meta — OpenBMC

Production Engineer

  • Moved firmware releases from on-demand pushes to automatic fleet rollouts: built the continuous-deployment pipelines, integrated CI testing, and engineered the canary system with real-time health monitoring and automated rollback.
  • Built the secure, distributed decommissioning service on the critical path for unprovisioning servers across Meta's entire fleet.
  • Led a major firmware upgrade of a legacy fleet segment, strengthening fleet security with no production disruption.
  • Contributed to Meta's open-source OpenBMC distribution, and upstream to the Linux Foundation project.

September 2021

Joined Meta

Discover Production Engineering program

2020 – 2021

Learning to code

Self-taught in software development while working full-time as a child-protection social worker — from first principles to a deployed full-stack e-commerce application within a year.

Projects from this period: The Rhythm Box (full-stack Django e-commerce) and Hot Dogz (Flask photo-sharing).

2017 – 2021

Child & Family Agency

Child Protection Social Worker · Limerick, Waterford, Kerry & Dublin

  • Assessed and responded to child-protection concerns in the community, making safety decisions in complex and emergency situations, often out of hours.
  • Practice leader: designed and delivered team learning sessions on implementing the Signs of Safety framework.
  • Acting team leader when required, overseeing case allocation and decisions in complex cases.
  • Authored court reports for childcare proceedings and presented evidence in person.
  • Worked closely with gardaí, schools, GPs, hospitals and foster carers.

Skills that carried over: calm in a crisis, careful planning, cooperation across agencies, and keeping perspective under pressure.

Education

  • Diploma in Full Stack Software Development, Code Institute (2021)
  • Master of Social Work, University College Cork (2015)
  • Bachelor of Social Science, University College Cork (2012)
Killarney, Co. Kerry

What I do

Languages

  • Python (primary)
  • Go
  • Rust
  • SQL
  • Bash

Infrastructure

  • Linux
  • Docker / Compose
  • Containerised services at scale
  • Ansible
  • Homelab & self-hosting

Reliability

  • CI/CD & release engineering
  • Safe rollouts (canary, phased)
  • Test automation
  • Observability & alerting

Domain

  • Server lifecycle, provisioning to decommissioning
  • Firmware / BMC
  • New-platform bring-up
  • Distributed systems

Beyond the code

  • End-to-end service ownership
  • Automating manual work & reducing toil
  • Incident response & root-cause analysis
  • Debugging across hardware, firmware & software
  • Cross-team technical leadership
  • Driving process change across teams
  • Mentoring & interviewing
  • Technical writing & documentation

What colleagues say

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.
Software engineer, partner team
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.
Engineer, teammate
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.
Tech lead
Proactive in identifying technical debt and taking ownership of solutions independently, often fixing issues before others are even aware of them.
Manager

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 constant. It's what first drew me from Kerry to Dublin, and my taste runs the whole gamut, from Slipknot to Mongolian throat singing to Doja Cat. I play drums (badly, for fun) and grew up playing traditional Irish music on the tin whistle.

I care about a free, private web. I'm a FOSS and privacy advocate, and I self-host my own media — partly for the hobby of it, partly because I think it matters who owns the infrastructure our lives run on.

Get in touch

Open to conversations about infrastructure and reliability roles.