Ryan Cormack
Principal Engineer at Motorway
AWS Community Builder | Serverless & Event-Driven Architecture | Speaker & Writer
About Me
Ryan is a Principal Engineer at Motorway with a unique journey from digital marketing to software engineering. He specialises in serverless and event-driven architectures on AWS, building scalable systems that power one of the UK's fastest-growing automotive marketplaces.
As an AWS Community Builder, he is passionate about sharing knowledge through conference talks, blog posts, and open-source contributions. He has spoken at AWS user groups and events including re:Invent, and contributed to major open-source projects like terraform-provider-aws and aws-lambda-power-tuning.
He co-founded MemoryStoria, an online memoirs platform that raised EU funding, demonstrating entrepreneurial drive alongside deep engineering expertise.
"Ryan is one of the best engineers I have been working with. He is a combination of knowledge, skills and pragmatism. He is exceptional at keeping things simple and avoid overcomplication."
Experience
Motorway
Principal Engineer
- Led the design and delivery of Motorway's first event-driven system, shipping in weeks with a decoupled and isolated architecture
- Driving API platform strategy across documentation accuracy, SDK generation, WAF configuration, and authentication patterns
- Championing engineering best practices and mentoring teams across the organisation
- Working with modern tooling including Smithy, MCP servers, and AI-assisted development
Moonpig
Serverless Engineer
- Built and maintained serverless services on AWS, powering the platform for personalised cards and gifts
- Optimised Lambda performance using AWS Lambda Power Tuning, achieving measurable cost and latency improvements
- Implemented feature flags on AWS to enable safe, incremental rollouts
- Contributed to cloud architecture decisions, earning Advanced Architecting on AWS certification
Open Source & Projects
strands-ts
ArchivedTypeScript implementation of Strands agents framework
cdk-webapp
ArchivedMultiple ways to deploy a static web app and serverless backend to AWS with CDK
kiro-mcp-manager
MCP server manager for macOS
strands-agents-ui
UI for Strands AI agents
aws-console-share-extension
Browser extension for sharing AWS console sessions
apple-containers-ui
UI for Apple containers on macOS
smithy-mcp
Smithy MCP server integration
parameter-store-extension
AWS Parameter Store Lambda Extension demo
Talks & Presentations
I regularly speak at meetups, user groups, and conferences about serverless, event-driven architecture, and AWS.
Writing
I write about serverless engineering, AWS, and event-driven architectures on Medium.