David La Roche

Site Reliability Engineer | Making complex socio-technical systems safer, more reliable, and easier to operate

Greater Brisbane Area

About

I work on making complex socio-technical systems safer, more reliable, and easier to operate. My background spans creative work and software engineering, which has shaped a strong interest in how tools, workflows, incentives, and human decision-making interact in real systems. Much of my current work sits within Site Reliability Engineering, which I treat as one lens for exploring broader questions of safety, reliability, and operational risk. I’m particularly drawn to work that reduces systemic failure and scales beyond individual effort.

Experience

  • Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Commonwealth Bank
    Feb 2026 - Present · 5 mos

  • Site Reliability Engineer at ANZ
    Aug 2023 - Jan 2026 · 2 yrs 6 mos

    As a Site Reliability Engineer within the Data Enablement domain, I worked on improving the safety, reliability, and operability of large-scale data systems. My focus included strengthening observability to improve system visibility, introducing and refining service level objectives to clarify reliability expectations, and maturing incident response practices to better support learning and recovery. Much of this work involved shaping guardrails and shared practices that reduced failure modes and improved how teams reasoned about risk in day-to-day operations.

  • Software Engineer at Animal Logic
    Jul 2022 - Aug 2023 · 1 yr 2 mos

    As part of the toolchain team, my role involved creating and maintaining tooling and automation to help other developers work more efficiently.

  • Junior Site Reliability Engineer at Doshii
    Feb 2022 - Jul 2022 · 6 mos

    As part of the Infrastructure team, my responsibilities included improving CI/CD tooling, provisioning cloud infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and optimising cloud-related costs, providing developer support for infrastructure issues, and participating in on-call rotation.

  • Configuration Administrator at Animal Logic
    Jul 2019 - Feb 2022 · 2 yrs 8 mos

    In my role as Configuration Administrator, I was responsible for configuring a custom database system. In this role, I often worked with technologies such as SQL, HTML/Javascript, Freemarker Template Language, and a proprietary in-house query language.