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Employment Details
July 2016 - Present: Claranet Limited (London)
:: Head of Portfolio Architecture and Engineering (Mar 2023 - Present)
As Head of Portfolio Architecture I am responsible for the architecture and tooling underpinning all of Claranet UK’s portfolio of services. This includes supporting the definition of services, working with vendors and managing budgets for the investment in tools and in-house engineering capability.
In addition, this role comes with the responsibility for the software development teams building internal tools for engineers in addition to customer facing tools and services. Focused on scaling these teams, evolving agile software development practices and delivering customer products based on flow and empathy.
:: Cloud Practice Director (Apr 2020 - Mar 2023)
As the Cloud Practice Director, I was responsible for the entire cloud engineering team of 40+ engineers across all supported cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, VMware) as well as Cloud Economists and Learning and Development.
My focus has been to grow the Cloud team whilst creating and evolving a culture that is aligned to the purpose, values and goals for the business.
As part of the leadership team, I am responsible for shaping the product portfolio ensuring that my teams have the skills, the tools and the autonomy to deliver successfully to customers. This includes building a platform of tools to support the delivery, operations and team learning to ensure the practice can continue to expand from 50 to 100+ engineers.
:: Technical Principal (CloudOps) (Aug 2019 - Apr 2020)
This was a combined management and delivery role. I managed the initial team of 8 engineers, as the Technical Principal. I was much more engaged across the multi-cloud portfolio (Azure, AWS and GCP) supporting the expansion and definition of new service offerings to customers.
This involved continued end-customer engagement and consulting at multi-levels, working on business plans and service definitions. This role expanded my knowledge of Product Management, customer leadership and allowed me to enhance my journey of strategy and roadmap development.
:: Azure Practice Lead (Jul 2018 - Aug 2019)
With a Windows team already established I took on a new role to build and grow the team and capability with Microsoft Azure. This was a very entrepreneurial/leadership role within the business where I was leading all elements of the business growth including hiring the team, partner management with Microsoft and pre-sales with C-level customer prospects.
I also expanded my technical knowledge of the Azure platform and worked with my team to introduce new tools and establish a deployment and operations platform to support large customer engagements on this new (for the business) platform.
:: Windows Cloud Practice Lead - Bashton Ltd (Jul 2016 - Jul 2018)
I joined Claranet just 6 months after the acquisition of Bashton Ltd - their first acquisition for public cloud capability. The initial expectation of this role was to build a team to support the deployment and on-going support of Windows infrastructure and applications on AWS.
This included working with some high-profile retail brands such as FunkyPigeon, Missguided and Superdry.
It was part of my role to introduce new tools and processes to the newly established public cloud practice and to support the integration between Bashton and the wider Claranet business. During the two years in this role, I also lead the first engagements with Microsoft and Google which would later turn into formal partnerships and established cloud teams within the business.
Feb 2014 - July 2016: OpenTable International Limited (London)
:: Senior Infrastructure Engineer
A Senior infrastructure engineer at OpenTable means supporting the datacenter operations and development teams to build new infrastructure and to automate the build and management of existing legacy infrastructure.
During my time at OpenTable I built a logging infrastructure from the ground-up (on AWS using ELK and Apache Kafka that can support 1B message a day), replaced multiple monitoring systems based on nagios with a single solution based upon sensu, applied config management to a wide range of systems both on Windows and Linux and helped to develop new tools to support standardized deployments on Apache Mesos.
A significant portion of this role involved me liaising with and training development and operations teams both in London and in San Francisco. It also required communicating with all layers of management to ensure the successful rollout of the projects.
This work gave me the opportunity to work and release a lot of open-source code and build communities around that; in particular I made significant contributions to the Puppet community by providing additional support for Windows. I learnt a lot from this experience in building community though blogging, giving talks and podcasting on this and other subjects. Community evangelism is not something that is often thought of as significant in an operations-based role, but I found it to be both enjoyable and beneficial on many occasions.
From April 2015 to July 2016, I lead my team in its projects and decision making. We remained autonomous within the organization, identifying problems and providing solutions wherever we saw value.
June 2010 - Feb 2014: Mimecast Ltd (London)
:: DevTools Engineer
As a build and release engineer for Mimecast I worked with all teams within the business and directly with the CTO to introduce Continuous Delivery into the business. That continued to be my main focus as the engineering team grew from 20+ to 100+. As the maturity of the build and release process advanced my role changed to a more DevTools focused position.
I think a devops mentality was critical to a role like this and I had to make sure that I remain balanced in both my development and operations skill sets. This means that I was involved in all aspects of the software development lifecycle. I advised on component-based architectures to help speed up the build/delivery process, I introduced and educated on new testing tools, and I implemented and improved the deployment and release processes. I was also the primary administrator for all pre-production environments both Linux (CentOS) and Windows (all versions) and made extensive use of configuration management (puppet) and monitoring tools (Opsview, Nagios, Munin) to achieve this. I have performed many large migration projects and was heavily involved in Mimecast’s ISO 28000:2007 certification.
It was very much a platform and language agnostic role and I got to work day-to-day with a wide variety of tools and platforms including Java, C# and Ruby on both Linux, Windows and all major mobile platforms. I continue to believe that it is hugely important to remain flexible and to be able to pick up new languages and skills as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Feb 2009 - June 2010: Saga Holidays Ltd (Folkestone, Kent)
:: System Consultant (Java Developer)
Sept 2006 - Aug 2007: Nexor Ltd (Nottingham)
:: Placement Student
Education
- University of Kent at Canterbury - Bsc Computer Science with Year in the Industry