HEE1KO

About

I am a cloud support engineer in Sydney. Before that I was a designer, and before that I was going to be an architect. The through-line is not technology — it is that I like taking something confusing and making it clear enough to act on.

Day to day I work deep-dive customer cases on Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore and SageMaker, mostly for large regulated enterprises. The work I am proudest of is the tooling around it.

Heewon Ko

Architecture first

I studied architecture at Konkuk University in Seoul and graduated in 2015. Alongside the degree I spent three years doing architectural volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and after it I coordinated an exhibition for a national architecture award. Architecture taught me to hold a whole system and a single detail in mind at once, and to expect that the constraints are the interesting part.

Ten years in design

I moved to Australia in January 2016 and worked as a graphic and UX/UI designer for the better part of a decade. I formalised it with a Certificate IV in Graphic Design at Shillington College in 2018, and worked across a small Sydney studio, a community dance organisation I still design for, and a health-technology institute in Brazil.

That last one changed my direction. Working remotely with a Brazilian team, I learned Portuguese well enough to work in it, and I started contributing Python to the product API — first at a Hacktoberfest, then properly. I had not planned to become an engineer. I just kept finding that the part of the problem I wanted to own was one layer below the design.

Retraining, deliberately

So I did it properly rather than by vibes: a Certificate IV in Information Technology at TAFE NSW in 2021, and a Diploma of Cloud Computing at Swinburne, finishing this year. I then took a career break for a couple of years before joining AWS in February 2025 through the Women in STEM apprenticeship programme.

In my first eight months I earned five AWS certifications. I mention the number not because certifications are the point, but because ramping fast on unfamiliar technology turned out to be the transferable skill from ten years of taking on client work in domains I knew nothing about.

Now

My habit is to reproduce an issue in my own sandbox before I answer, pull the logs that prove it, and write the tool if the tool does not exist. That last habit is what most of my projects are.

Certifications

Five AWS certifications, earned Apr–Nov 2025. Currently studying for the Generative AI Developer – Professional.

Elsewhere

I speak Korean natively, English fluently and Portuguese conversationally, with enough Spanish and Japanese to be polite. I have designed for a Sydney Forró dance community since 2016. I taught AI fundamentals to Year 10 students because someone did roughly that for me, much later than they should have had to.