About
Technical cloud architect and consultant with over twenty years in infrastructure, from systems administration and early public cloud work to leading DevOps, cloud and security programmes for Aer Lingus, UK Government departments and regulated organisations. Specialises in infrastructure as code, container platforms and DevSecOps across AWS, Azure and GCP, and is currently a Principal Consultant at Unicorn Operations.
Skills
- Technical
- Management
Experience
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Principal Consultant
Ireland
Client: Triton One
- Managed Bare Metal and Nomad environments as code using OpenTofu, with changes planned and applied through Atlantis
- Deployed developer tooling including Coder to provide contained and secured environments for AI agents and developers
- Worked with Vault, Consul and etcd alongside GCP and AWS cloud environments
Client: Allianz Ireland
- Hardened Kubernetes environments hosted on Azure using DevSecOps practices, and provided wider DevSecOps consulting
Client: HSE
Ireland
- Worked within Scrum teams to deliver national services using Azure, ensuring compliance with HSE security and data protection requirements.
- Provided technical leadership to operations team on Azure and Terraform best practice including security hardening and lifecycle management of cloud resources.
Client: Aer Lingus
Ireland
- Enabling the data team to use data tools such as Databricks, Monte Carlo and Atlan managed with GitOps to manage data across Aer Lingus and apply ML models to Aer Lingus data.
- Ensured security controls and access governance were applied across the data platform.
Amach Software
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Client: Aer Lingus
Ireland
- Introduced SRE and GitOps to Aer Lingus
- Designed and implemented cybersecurity architecture across AWS including WAF, GuardDuty, Security Hub and network segmentation to protect customer-facing and internal services
- Designed multi cloud networking architecture using AWS Direct Connect and managed migration to an SDWAN, ensuring secure and resilient connectivity across environments
- As part of DevOps pipeline introduction helped performance testing teams using JMeter and other tooling make performance testing part of the deployment pipeline
- Migrated away from single AWS accounts to a full AWS Landing Zone including Control Tower all managed with Terraform, establishing security baselines and lifecycle management across all accounts
- Instituted full change control process moving from manual control to full GitOps/DevOps using Terraform, Terragrunt and Atlantis
- Led DevOps and Software Engineering efforts within Aer Lingus focused on DORA metrics and increasing deployment speed moving from deployments measured in months to multiple deployments in a single day
- Designed isolated networking model for microservices to increase security posture, enforce least-privilege communication and simplify developer access
- Introduced Grafana managed by Terraform for service monitoring, security event visibility and management
- Managed AmazonMQ deployment for communication between AWS and on-prem hosted services
- Introduced service to service communication using mTLS ensuring encrypted communication across all internal services
- Introduced containerisation in the development tools stack using ECS and Fargate, managing the full container lifecycle and later migrating to Kubernetes via EKS including security policies and image scanning
- Managed migration and network design from existing data centres of Windows, Linux and IBM zOS mainframe into AWS, Azure and Kyndryl zCloud, designing secure connectivity and ensuring reliable communication between AWS, Azure and zCloud
- Migrated first databases from on-premise to AWS RDS introducing managed databases with encryption at rest and in transit
- Automated service testing with Capybara, a python frontend to Selenium
- Migrated from legacy on-premise Bitbucket to GitHub.com and provided a fully GitOps/IaC managed system for managing GitHub access and configuration
- Provided teams access and mentoring on usage of GitHub Copilot
- Created Cloud Security model for operating microservices and developer access across AWS and provided security consulting across IAG
- Migrated legacy databases and data warehouse from on-premise to Snowflake
- Enabled usage of Databricks facilitating access to cloud data sources, management via IaC, security controls and building data pipelines
- Migrated away from static secrets to dynamic secrets management using AWS Secrets Manager, eliminating long-lived credentials
- Third line on-call for service escalation including security incidents
- Provided strategic guidance to Amach during a critical growth phase from a small consultancy to the leading Cloud Aviation Specialist it is today
- Helped advise and deploy GenAI tools to other Amach aviation clients
- Worked on both existing client management and provided technical advice on new sales
- Managed multiple teams across multiple clients
Storm Inc.
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Client: HMPPS
Sheffield, England
- Worked as a DevOps consultant and Product Owner in HMPPS to migrate the national Probation system from an existing entrenched supplier to AWS covering all areas of the project from contract negotiation to technical architecture, security design and stakeholder management
- Designed secure and reliable AWS environment for the national probation system, meeting UK Government security standards and handling sensitive offender data
- Integration with services on MoJ managed Kubernetes platform with appropriate network security controls
- Designed migration from legacy on-premise Oracle products to modern cloud native solutions for authentication and data management, implementing secure identity and access management
- Worked within a high-security environment handling sensitive and confidential data related to the national probation service
Client: Nationwide Building Society
Swindon, England
- Brought DevOps ways of working to an existing set of development teams within Nationwide Building Society and managed a kops Kubernetes deployment on AWS integrating with existing DC based banking system and designing secure connectivity between DC and AWS
- Managed Jenkins infrastructure providing CI/CD for development teams
- Introduced service to service communication using mTLS
- Performance testing using JMeter
- Jenkins configuration using Groovy
- Helped service teams deploy apps using Helm on kops managed AWS Kubernetes deployment
- Operated within a regulated financial services environment with strict security and compliance requirements
Scrumconnect
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Client: HMPPS
Sheffield, England
- Designed secure network access from Azure and AWS into the UK prison estate, working with sensitive environments and classified network boundaries
- Built new deployment pipeline for Digital Hub content delivery service and learning platform deployed into multiple UK prisons
- Provided DevOps and security consultancy across the HMPPS Digital Studio and wider MOJ
- Managed infrastructure on both Azure and AWS using Terraform for deployments, including security hardening and compliance with UK Government standards
- Provided teams CI/CD pipelines using CircleCI
- Deployed services into MoJ managed Kubernetes platform
- Consulted across many UK Government departments on DevOps and security practices, providing guidance to Scrumconnect teams helping Scrumconnect scale
Client: DWP
Preston, England
- Took Carer's Allowance live digital service from manual checklist deployments to a continuous delivery pipeline using Jenkins DSL Pipeline and Saltstack
- Ensured deployment pipeline met UK Government security standards for handling citizen data
Kainos
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Client: DVSA
UK
- Trained and mentored Kainos staff on DevOps working practices
- Managed operations teams across suppliers and delivery programs
- Technical thought leadership across the organisation
- Worked to rescue the MOTMP program from certain failure by independently diagnosing systemic issues and bringing together Development, Test and Operations functions to fix performance issues and create a successful service
- Migrated from legacy service in datacentres to VMWare based virtualisation provider and then further migration into AWS which became a landmark and award winning project for both DVSA and AWS
- Migrated from manual deployments to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
- Ensured service met all UK Government security standards including penetration testing and vulnerability management
- Used Prometheus and Grafana to provide debugging, security monitoring and health overview of the national MOT service and debugging of performance issues
Client: RPA/DEFRA
UK
- Trained and mentored Kainos staff on DevOps working practices
- Provided business cases for radical government department change
- Provided DevOps and security expertise to multiple teams and projects across RPA/DEFRA
- Central to launching the RLRV service on time and on budget
- Instrumental to saving the CAPD project after failure, independently identifying root causes and bringing teams together from different suppliers to deliver on the user and business needs
- Managed deployment pipelines in TeamCity
- Provided local development infrastructure with Packer/Vagrant and infrastructure automation with Terraform
- Ensured services met all UK Government security standards
Paragon Internet Group
Head of Systems Operations
– Maidenhead/Slough, England
- Designed and deployed new service provider network using Cisco routers and Juniper switches
- Deployment of configuration management and centralized authentication into existing systems using Puppet and FreeIPA
- Documented all existing systems and put in place documentation procedures using RackTables and Subversion
- Mentoring of placement student and existing staff
- Creation and management of operations team
- Managed customer environments including Hadoop
Namesco
EU Lead Infrastructure Developer
– Maidenhead, England
- Developing multiple new cloud products based on Hyper-V, Virtuozzo and OpenStack virtualisation platforms
- Supporting existing Cisco/Juniper/Extreme networking and systems infrastructure managed by Puppet/LDAP/Subversion
- Merging disparate infrastructure from previously acquired companies collecting all systems under one Puppet/LDAP/Subversion instance
- Mentoring other staff through the migration to new automated infrastructure
The Server Market
Founder
– Falkirk, Scotland
- Developed cloud aggregation platform to allow customers to scale across cloud providers
TomTom
Senior Systems Administrator
– Edinburgh, Scotland
- New product research and development instrumental in shaping the current TomTom PND platform
- DevOps and CI using Cobbler, Puppet and an in-house developed CI system
- Automated systems deployment using Cobbler
- Automated systems healing using Puppet
- Systems tools development working with RedHat ET on Open Source systems automation
XCalibre Communications
Systems Architect
– Livingston, Scotland
- Development and launch of first public cloud platform in Europe, Flexiscale
- Project management
- Team leadership
- Automated systems deployment
- Shared/Dedicated hosting administration
- Configuration management deployment using CFengine
edNET
Systems Administrator
– Edinburgh, Scotland
- Shared and Dedicated hosting administration
- Linux Cluster administration
- NetApp NAS administration
- ISP Network administration
Technical Support
– Edinburgh, Scotland
- Phone and email based technical support and systems operator duties for an ISP
Scotweigh
Consultant
– Falkirk, Scotland
- Systems integration on Forestry Commission program to meet EU regulations
Public speaking
- Launching an airline into the cloud HashiConf 2023
- DevOps: Supporting aircraft from hanger to take-off DevOps Days London 2024