As a Senior DevOps Engineer my responsibilities included among other things mentoring & coaching more junior members of the team, constantly looking for opportunities for improvements, and running team retrospectives and looking for other ways of improving our ways of working. I was also responsible for picking up legacy projects and understanding them quickly and deeply enough to be able to implement required changes and fix issues.

• Advocated for and implemented a you-build-it you-own-it culture in the development team I worked closely with. This included ensuring that our platform provided best practices and support for the infrastructure to ensure that developers are able to own the part they're an expert in (their software) without being burdoned with requiring AWS Expertise.
• As part of ongoing collaboration with an internal development team to increase development speed and reliability of deployed software I worked closely with the development teams implementing into our platform features such as security, e2e, performance testing automatically during deployments.
• Represented the platforms team in ISO audit resulting in no non-conformities for our area of the business
• Designed and lead a migration from DataDog & Cloudwatch to a unified observability system based on the Grafana LGTM stack running on AWS EKS.
• Worked closely with the Platforms team manager to control & reduce AWS costs across the company, including auditing resource usage, implementing tools such as Cost Intelligence Dashboards, Investigating and implementing third-parties such as spot.io for our clusters (instrumental in reducing costs for our new monitoring platform to make it feasible) and vantage.sh for cost-reporting and cost-ownership across the business.
• Worked with development teams to assist tracking down harder problems. This included tracking down performance issues using perf & flamegraph, helping reason about and data races, and tracking down global variables that should be thread-local.
• Designed and built complete caching strategies for multiple sites (including sites embedded in household name companies such as SkyBet & WilliamHill) working up from Redis at the application layer to Fastly CDN configuration. Some of these were quite complicated and ended up needing VCL in the thousands of lines.

At Spotlight Sports Group, I was a member of the DevOps team responsible for building an internal platform to enable development teams across the company to take ownership of their code in production. In addition, I provided advice and guidance to teams on best practices for reliable code, effective monitoring, and support in production. My contributions included designing and implementing a deployment platform using Jenkins and Terraform, collaborating with developers to redesign AWS infrastructure, and implementing a GrayLog-based internal log management system. I also played a significant role in supporting the release of a major website version and advocating for the adoption of Trunk Based Development and best practices for testing to ensure safe and continuous deployments.

• Led the design and implementation of a new deployment platform for standardizing deployments across multiple development teams, leveraging Jenkins and Terraform to deploy to Fargate.
• Collaborated closely with developers to redesign the AWS infrastructure for a major project, enabling faster and safer development and supporting a redesigned software architecture.
• Provided key support for the successful launch of a multiple major website releases, troubleshooting and resolving performance issues and bugs encountered during and after launch.
• Implemented an internal log management system using GrayLog, supplementing DataDog for less frequently used and higher volume logs. This system played a critical role in diagnosing multiple production issues.
• Championed and assisted in implementing Trunk Based Development to enable continuous deployment of software within one of the development teams. Collaborated closely with team members to identify workflow issues and possible solutions.
• Provided guidance and feedback on testing methodologies and best practices to ensure safe deployments on the journey to continuous deployment, emphasizing the importance of early testing and maintaining fast feedback cycles while finding the right balance between integration and unit tests.

• Consulted on Agile principles to help a small company more effectively use their small development resource: I worked closely with the development team of a small company to help them adopt agile methodologies and processes that would make their software development process more efficient. This involved introducing them to Agile principles and practices, and helping them implement them in their daily work. I also provided training on Agile tools and techniques, such as user stories, sprint planning, and retrospectives, and offered ongoing support and guidance to ensure the team remained on track.
• Carried out exploration of, and produced a report on, LoRaWAN technology and integration options for a customer's existing tech stack: I conducted research into LoRaWAN technology, a wireless protocol designed for the Internet of Things (IoT), and explored integration options for a customer's existing tech stack. I produced a detailed report outlining the available software options for integrating it into their system. The report included recommendations on the best course of action for the customer, based on their specific needs and requirements.
• Hosted and maintained a Gitlab server for a small company: I set up and configured a Gitlab server for a small company to improve their software development process. I provided ongoing support and maintenance for the server, including installing updates and patches, monitoring performance, and troubleshooting issues.
• Hosted, maintained, monitored, and provided ongoing support for a wiki for a charity, which served as a central repository of documentation for their users.

At Microserve, I fulfilled a diverse range of responsibilities. My primary responsibility was to implement and maintain various systems, such as an internal QA system and other related tools, to enable developers to work efficiently and deploy safely and quickly. Additionally, I assumed the position of IT Systems Administrator and was entrusted with managing all company IT equipment and the office network, including its security, and other associated functions.

• Successfully managed a re-build of the office network, enabling the separation of the network of the two sister companies while maintaining access to shared resources, demonstrating excellent project management skills and a strong ability to deliver network projects to a high standard.
• Led a project to create a Docker-based QA system, using Golang, AWS ECS, EC2, Lambda, and Dynamodb, which enabled the system to be as self-service as possible while maintaining parity with production environments. This initiative resulted in significant improvements in testing efficiency and system reliability.
• Responsible for overseeing the maintenance and security of the office network, including regular installation of security updates on networking equipment, providing support for developer laptops, and ensuring the overall security of the network, demonstrating strong IT and security knowledge and proactive risk management.
• Initiated the process of working towards an ISO 27001 certificate, including being an ISM manager, leading technical changes to achieve certification, and working with the Operations Director to write company policies for compliance. This initiative demonstrated a strong commitment to information security and risk management, which would provide a strong competitive advantage for the company.
• Collaborated closely with lead QA testers to implement automated testing using Selenium, resulting in significant improvements in testing efficiency and system reliability.
• Provided expert support and guidance to customers during onboarding and throughout their time with the company, helping them to find the right hosting provider and providing advice and guidance on operations-related issues (e.g., DNS, caching, security, etc.), demonstrating a customer-centric approach and a strong ability to work with non-technical stakeholders.
• Provided effective support to developers for all Linux and server-related issues, enabling them to perform their jobs effectively with the least possible friction, demonstrating excellent technical knowledge and an ability to support internal stakeholders effectively.

At Dexdyne, I held a diverse role that involved managing and improving the server architecture, as well as contributing to software development across the stack. I primarily worked with PHP on the servers, and HTML/JS for the frontend. Although I did work with embedded C, it was not a primary area of focus. Along with server management, I provided software development support as needed, ensuring that our products were performing optimally and meeting the needs of our customers. In cases where server issues arose, I worked closely with affected clients and stakeholders, including internal management, to keep everyone informed and reassured.

• Proposed, planned, and managed a project to implement Chef-based configuration-as-code for all production servers. This initiative involved transitioning the company from an undocumented 'live-patching' workflow to a more structured and documented server architecture with rollback capabilities. As a result, the company was able to achieve a more streamlined server management process that improved overall system reliability and resilience.
• Successfully reverse-engineered existing undocumented application servers to recreate them in documented Chef scripts as part of the execution of configuration-as-code, ensuring that our systems were thoroughly documented and maintainable.
• Demonstrated exceptional customer service skills by working closely with customers when they experienced issues, including guiding non-technical engineers through debugging RS485 links and networking issues remotely.
• Led the implementation of PostgreSQL backups for production databases using pgbarman, significantly improving our data backup and recovery capabilities.
• Achieved a significant reduction in server costs by over 50% while improving uptime and ease of management by transitioning from two large servers to one small server per customer, made possible by the adoption of configuration-as-code practices. This initiative resulted in substantial cost savings for the company while maintaining or improving system performance, demonstrating a strong commitment to operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
• Implemented robust server monitoring solutions, including custom application metrics, notifications, and third-party uptime monitoring, to improve system performance and identify issues before they impacted our customers.
• Advocated for and implemented a ticketing system to improve the level and organization of support provided to our customers, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and a more streamlined support process.