Chris Williams

Chris Williams is Head of Cloud and Principal Cloud Engineer at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), where he has been transforming one of the UK’s largest public sector organisations into a cloud-native operation.

Since joining DVLA, Chris has grown the cloud engineering capability from a small team to a 28-strong team, establishing the technical foundation for the agency’s digital transformation. He sets the strategic direction for DVLA’s cloud infrastructure, championing the adoption of modern technologies including Kubernetes, serverless architectures, and other AWS services that now underpin critical government services used by millions.

Under his leadership, DVLA has built a comprehensive cloud platform centered on Amazon EKS, providing development teams with a robust, scalable container orchestration environment. He also architected a serverless developer portal that enables cloud access across the organization, enabling teams to self-serve infrastructure while maintaining governance and security standards.

His most notable achievement involved migrating SoftwareAG applications, running Adabas and Natural on mainframe to AWS. This complex migration required reimagining mainframe workloads for the cloud era. Chris architected a solution that would leverage Natural in Kubernetes with high availability while deploying Adabas clusters on EC2 following AWS best practices: multi-AZ redundancy, infrastructure as code, and automated failover capabilities.

Beyond technical delivery, Chris is passionate about building engineering capability in the public sector. He has recruited, mentored, and developed a world-class cloud team, proving that government can compete for top talent and deliver innovative solutions at scale. His work demonstrates that even the most complex systems can be successfully modernised when technical expertise meets strategic vision.