David RobinsonOperations & Transformation

1994 → today

Thirty years of building the thing, then fixing how it runs.

Regional ISPs before the web was mainstream. Government firewall clusters. A poultry processing plant. Eight years inside Amazon. A granted US patent. Lean training in one of three facilities of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. It reads as a wandering path, but it is one habit repeated: understand the system, remove the waste, make it hold.

1994 – 2001 · Early internet & UNIX

Milestone

1994 – 1996

Technical Lead, one of regional NSW's first ISPs

Northern Rivers Gateway (NRG) · Lismore, NSW

  • Built the ISP from dial-up modems, a Cisco router and a 128K ISDN link to Sydney.
  • Ran it on Slackware Linux with multiple serial cards feeding banks of physical modems. A Christmas tree of blinking lights at night.
  • First real introduction to UNIX, and to the idea that infrastructure is something you can build yourself.

1994 – 1996

Technical Training Instructor, early internet navigation

Northern Rivers Telecentre · Lismore, NSW

  • Taught Introduction to Macintosh and Introduction to the Internet to the Lismore community.
  • Worked alongside early-90s internet artists and university students building some of the first Australian websites.

1996 – 1997

MacOS Support Technician

Integrated System Solutions Corporation Australia

  • Second-level MacOS support across AppleTalk networks.
  • Contracted for three weeks, stayed five months. The entry point into corporate IT.
  • Started programming for MacOS to migrate drafting users off UNIX.
Milestone

1997 – 2001

UNIX Admin & Internet Security

NSW Department of Public Works & Services · Sydney

  • Maintained Solaris, RedHat Linux, HP-UX and SVR4 servers plus internet firewall security.
  • Secured servers across government divisions and stood up an IP DMZ server network.
  • Engineered remote monitoring for power, temperature and PABX control. Critical-environment instincts, twenty years before it was called DCIM.
  • Built a fully fault-tolerant e-business DMZ: Foundry ServerIron hardware load balancing, three WebShield firewalls, two internet links, hosting web, FTP and database servers for multiple departments.

2000 – 2012 · Networks, ownership & operations

Milestone

2000 – 2002

Board Director & Shareholder, Technical

Nornet Pty Ltd · Lismore, NSW

  • Technical director with financial interest. First taste of carrying the commercial outcome, not just the system.
  • Built and maintained a multi-site IP network connecting clients across regional areas.
  • Developed in-house billing software in PHP and PostgreSQL with an online credit card gateway.
  • Monitored every server and network with Nagios and MRTG as primary 24/7 technical contact.

2002 – 2010

Technical Manager

Nornet Enterprises Pty Ltd · Lismore, NSW

  • Owned servers, network and business-account escalation across an eight-year run.
  • Migrated a multi-POP network to a single POP over Telstra Wholesale.
  • Created a 24/7 support business with a technician team able to answer and escalate.
  • Consolidated servers into virtualised co-location in Sydney, the first data center migration of many.

2010 – 2012

General Manager

Alstonville Poultry Farm · Alstonville, NSW

  • Ran every aspect of a food processing plant: HR, training, supervision, performance.
  • Redesigned the processing room to increase throughput.
  • Delivered improvement programs that reduced electricity and gas consumption.
  • Automated ordering, stock allocation and invoicing with OpenOffice macros.
  • Where process improvement stopped being an IT idea and became a physical, measurable one.

2013 – 2021 · Amazon & AWS · 8 years

Milestone

2013 – 2016

Senior Data Centre Technician

Amazon Web Services · Sydney

  • Installed, supported and troubleshot server and network hardware and software at hyperscale.
  • Installed and maintained hundreds of racks across a career spanning more than eight years in critical environments.
  • Vendor management while holding the line on physical and data security.
  • Built a JavaScript wrapper over the trouble ticketing system to give technicians real task workflows.
  • Built an automated rack position tester verifying network position was 100% ready before rack install.
  • Wrote UNIX and Greasemonkey scripts to automate daily activity; developed logistics automation for part allocation and stock control.
Milestone

2016 – 2020

Operational Excellence / ACES / LEAN / DevOps

Amazon Web Services · Sydney

  • Four and a half years of ACES and LEAN software and process development inside AWS data centres.
  • Continuous improvement delivered as working software, not slideware.
  • The formative period: Amazon's operational mechanisms, applied at a scale that punishes any process that does not hold.

2020 – 2021

Technical Program Manager

Amazon Web Services · Sydney

  • Designed the process flow for deploying new hardware into Amazon data centres.
  • Coordinated logistics, install and validation into a single repeatable deployment path.
Patent granted

2021

US Patent US11131692B1: Line isolating power connector

United States Patent and Trademark Office

  • An original invention taken from problem statement through to granted patent.
  • View the patent

2022 – 2024 · Founder, Lean & teaching

2022 – 2023

Trainer

One Training (RTO 45692) · Ulverstone, Tasmania

  • Delivered a range of accredited courses to expand community skills and employability.

2022 – 2023

STEM Educator

HIVE Ulverstone · Tasmania

  • Delivered hands-on STEM electronics activities for children at HIVE, Ulverstone's science centre.

2022 – 2023

Certificate IV in Training & Assessment (TAE40116)

TasTAFE · Plenty Training (RTO 32371)

  • Nationally recognised trainer-and-assessor qualification supporting the design, delivery and assessment of competency-based adult vocational learning in Australia.
  • Applied through accredited adult training, Lean facilitation, coaching and practical technical education.

2023

Founder, Born Global Incubator

Enterprize Tasmania

  • Twelve-week Lean Startup program, ending in a digital Demo Day broadcast to tens of thousands.

2023

Founder, Giants Cohort 7

Blackbird

  • Ten-week program with mentoring, founder knowledge-sharing and accountability tracking.
Milestone

2023 – 2024

Chief Technology Officer

Lean AI · Australia

  • Applied AI to implement Lean across organisations. The thesis that now underwrites everything: the improvement layer itself can be automated.
Milestone

2023 – 2024

Lean Team Leader, Elphinstone SWE

People Improvers · Burnie, Tasmania

  • Facilitated Lean training in the Elphinstone Simulated Work Environment, one of only three facilities of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and the only one in Australia.
  • Taught Lean fundamentals and tools, then bridged the simulation back to participants' real operations.

2024

Small Business Mentor

The van Diemen Project · Tasmania

  • Mentored Tasmanian small businesses in Lean and AI tooling to improve workflows.
  • Supported by the Australian Government Small Business Advisory Services program.

2024 – now · APAC data center operations

Current

Nov 2024 – present

Manager, Operations Service Management, APAC

Vantage Data Centers · Sydney, NSW

  • Lead APAC operations service management across incident, problem, change and knowledge workflows, with a focus on service quality, governance and consistency across sites.
  • Run regional incident management, coordinating operational response, escalation, post-incident review and improvement actions.
  • Led APAC service improvement through the APAC-to-global ServiceNow transition and the stabilisation period after it.
  • Established a consistent leadership reporting cadence: weekly APAC incident reporting plus RCA and corrective action reporting.
  • Drove process governance through standards and quality reviews across incident and problem documentation and RCA output.
  • Developed and implemented problem management KPI frameworks, including staleness controls and clearer accountability.
  • Coordinated stakeholders across Site Ops, Service Desk, CE, platform teams and leadership to resolve delivery and readiness risk.
  • Delivered workflow improvements through automation and structured process redesign to cut non-value-added work.
  • Supported WHS controls through permit-to-work, change management and maintenance programs.
  • Managed and developed team capability, including direct leadership support for APAC Change Management.

Jul 2024 – present

President and Operational Lead

NW Tasmania Community Media · The Coastal Voice

  • Expanded a free monthly community newspaper beyond the Central Coast Council area into Burnie and Devonport and built a new contributor team.
  • Develop relationships across councils, state representatives, community groups, clubs, local businesses and advertisers.
  • Lead editorial judgement, publication operations and AI-enabled editorial and distribution workflows.
  • Bring public speaking and community-listening experience from standing as an independent candidate in local council and NSW elections.
  • Community leadership case study · thecoastalvoice.au
Certification

August 2026

AWS Certified AI Practitioner

Amazon Web Services Training and Certification

  • Validated foundational knowledge of AI, machine learning and generative AI on AWS, including responsible use and selecting technologies for specific use cases.
  • Issued 18 August 2026; valid until 18 August 2029.
  • Verify the credential on Credly
Certification

2026

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Amazon Web Services Training and Certification

Next chapter

Senior operations leadership in AI-era data centers.

Thirty years of building, running and fixing critical infrastructure, now pointed at the hardest version of the problem: keeping operational discipline while the industry rebuilds itself around AI capacity.

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