I have proven cloud-first experience with AWS, immutable infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code, which is rooted in a strong foundation of past roles in traditional Linux, network sysadmin, and systems integration.

While I have led and built DevSecOps teams in my most recent positions and continue to enjoy mentoring junior engineers, I want to continue to develop my technical skills and primarily remain an individual contributor.

Qualifications & Certifications

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate (Sep 2018)
• Red Hat Certified Engineer & Administrator (Sep 2016)
• VCP310 / VMware Certified Professional on VI3 (Feb 2008)
• Additional certifications in Puppet, MySQL, Oracle 9i, ITIL

Technologies

• Languages: BASH, Go, Perl, some Python, Makefiles
• Cloud Platforms: AWS, Google Cloud, OpenStack
• IaC Automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Packer, Ansible
• Containers & Orchestration: Kubernetes, Helm, Docker
• CI/CD: GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Artifactory, some Buildbot, DEB+RPM packaging
• Operating Systems: Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL), FreeBSD & various Unixes
• Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, AWS RDS & Aurora, PICK
• Networking: iptables, LVS, PXE netboot, Cisco IOS
• Version Control: Git, GitLab, GitHub, Perforce, SVN

Professional Experience

Jul 2020: General System Group (Excession Technologies) - Principal DevSecOps Engineer

Core Roles/Skills: AWS, some GCP, Terraform, CloudFormation, Packer, GitLab CI/CD, Artifactory, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus, packaging and infrastructure-as-code for SaaS product in the national defence and intelligence sector.

Grew a team of 5 engineers responsible for packaging and development of infrastructure-as-code used to deploy the Excession product, as well as the CI/CD and cloud infrastructure used by the software development and QA teams. Provided technical design advice to software development teams, sales and leadership teams.

Designed and managed the rollout of a product release process, including the packaging and distribution of the product using Docker images.

Designed and implemented Helm umbrella chart with documentation for customers to install the Excession platform.

Apr 2018: GeoSpock - Lead DevOps Engineer

• Led a team of 4 engineers.
• Managed packaging and infrastructure-as-code for SaaS product and platform deployment.
• Implemented Jenkins CI/CD to build, package and deploy into AWS ElasticBeanstalk, EMR using Terraform and CloudFormation.
• Prototyped proof-of-concept to move SaaS product into Kubernetes.

Feb 2015: Velocix/Nokia Video BU - Principal DevOps Engineer

• Administered ~400 hosts, developed CI/CD automation, and managed infrastructure.
• Migrated from Nagios to HA Zabbix, from Perforce to hosted GitLab, and Buildbot to GitLab CI and Jenkins for ~150 engineers.
• Implemented automated remote upgrade of customer CDN appliances from custom OS to CentOS using kexec into dynamically built loopback-mounted ISO images.

Oct 2010: Google UK - Site Reliability Engineer

• On-call for 3 and 4 nines high-QPS large scale distributed systems.
• Managed high-availability systems for Google advertising services.
• Developed internal tools for SRE teams to detect drift between infrastructure-as-code in source control and deployed environments.

Aug 2009: The Cloud Networks - Senior Systems Engineer

• Maintained ~150 servers and network infrastructure for public WiFi hotspots.
• Automated diskless PXE-boot server deployments and implemented centralized syslog server.
• Implemented Git control configuration management.
• Wrote automated network topology discovery and visual mapping tool.

2006: McAfee International - Senior Infrastructure Engineer

• Designed custom-forked 10-node Nagios system monitoring >500 host and >2000 services.
• Automated bare-metal and virtualised host deployment with PXE and RHEL Kickstart.
• Consolidated infrastructure using VMware ESX and NetApp SAN storage.

2004: BBC - UNIX Engineer

• Managed mod_perl application and streaming web servers running BBC and BBC News websites.
• Security audited all Perl CGI and mod_perl code deployed onto BBC online services.
• Oversaw and managed custom build and upgrade of servers from Perl 5.004 to 5.6.1 & 5.8.7.

2001: Frontier Internet Services - Network Operations Engineer

• Administered Linux servers and network infrastructure for a business ISP.
• Developed Perl and shell automation and monitoring scripts, using RRD, MRTG & SNMP.
• Handled customer leased-line installations.

2000: Optio Software UK - Technical Consultant/Developer

• Programmed business documents, installed software, and provided customer support in the UK and Europe.
• Instructed on-site customer training courses for domain-specific language.
• Learned and honed analytical skills and independence working at customer sites.

1996: Interactive (UK) - Software Integration Programmer

• Customized PICK/SB+ 4GL ERP/MRP products and integrated third-party software.
• Experience with HP-UX, AIX, DG-UX, SCO, Solaris and Linux.
• Instructed on-site customer training courses for DCL domain specific language.