Joining MOO as a Senior Platform Engineer, I have helped lead the team in developing high standard infrastructure and tooling to deliver exceptional service to both our internal & external customers. I have flourished in the role - mentoring other engineers, leading big-picture projects, and established a friendly, approachable reputation cross-company for the team.

• Self-hosted Kubernetes migration to EKS

  Initially at MOO, we were hosting our own Kubernetes clusters, built leveraging kops. It was out of date, significantly lagging behind the release cycle of Kubernetes and had gained some stigma around the dangers of upgrades, due to failed attempts in the past. I banded together with other senior engineers and formulated a plan for migrating to Amazon's EKS, with a major overhaul of our software delivery pattern; adopting GitOps. As part of the migration, we took it upon ourselves to introduce best-in-practice solutions, such as: ArgoCD & the “app-of-apps” model, the Prometheus Operator, OIDC token leasing for AWS IAM role assumption/resource access, descheduler to automatically manage workload distribution.

• Improvement of legacy service auto-provisioning

  Legacy components of the MOO infrastructure are provisioned using a large and complex Ansible codebase. As one of my first projects, I restructured the automatic provisioning mechanism to use concurrent, local provisioning. This was low-touch, eliminated bottlenecks, and had a tech-wide impact - minimising deployment time - allowing for faster deployments and quicker rollbacks.

• Cross-crew federation for service migration

  Part of our team's drive in tech was to influence other engineers to develop their services with high quality, self-service platform operation in mind. To aid in this goal, I joined one of our software teams for a week to help migrate one of their services from a legacy deployment model to Kubernetes. I facilitated this federation with pairing practices, ensuring the knowledge and workflow were shared with the team, so they could adopt this approach for future projects.

• GitLab Merge Request dashboard

  On Friday, fortnightly, our team enjoys “Free Time Fridays”, in which we get to work on a project of our liking, so long as it is loosely related to work. One such project I created was a web frontend, written in Go, to consolidate a team's collective open Merge Requests in GitLab. This was to tackle a problem with tracking which Merge Requests required reviews, spanning other team's projects, with a rich front-end displaying essential information around each request. I have since made it Open Source, with acompanying best-practice deployment mechanisms for Kubernetes. It is now widely adopted across MOO tech teams.

I joined Blink as their sole DevOps engineer, tasked with transforming the infrastructure their engineers had built into a robust, declarative, highly available set of systems, and developing tooling to enable the engineers to deliver their work in a fast, safe, and scalable manner.

• Moving Blink to declarative configuration & CI/CD

  When joining Blink, all of the infrastructure in place had been created using the AWS web dashboard. I endeavoured to capture the entirety of the platform in Terraform. This includes the development of many in-house modules for easy deployment of software and infrastructure components. This has enabled version control, and developers to get their own services deployed with next-to-no effort. Taking their code from their laptop to a fully declarative service out in the cloud in varying environments in just a few lines of configuration that lives directly in their project's repository.

• Automated UI integration test system

  Working closely with our QA engineer, designed and implemented a UI test automation workflow to integrate into our development pipelines. Utilising Go to build a custom launcher that integrated with a 3rd party service to inject data from the build environment into the remote UI testing environment, and finally report back into our messaging platform with the results.

• Messaging analytics framework

  Collaborating with developers to design and deploy an in house analytics stack based on Open Source software like Kafka, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch to index & expose rich metadata for the Blink platform. It slowly evolved over time to become an intricate, dynamic system utilising Consul for service discovery, configuration, and self-repair.

• Dynamic secrets management

  Initially, Docker services hosted on ECS at Blink were using environment variables for their configuration and secrets. This was clearly a security concern. I designed an integrated secrets management framework leveraging Vault, Consul, IAM & STS. This allowed for seamless secret/config consumption - any services using the framework automatically authenticated with Vault & Consul.

Maintenance & development of self-hosted compute, desktop, and network systems.

• Design and implementation of system and network deployments for both private infrastructure and hundreds of client systems
• Technical support for global systems and networks of varying environments (production, staging, demo, development, local office)
• Identifying bottlenecks in workflow and systems efficiency and providing solutions
• General support of all staff systems within the office
• Resident Ansible/Puppet/Git adept

Frontline Technical Support Agent for British Midland International/Vodafone

• Providing technical support for the telephony and IT systems of various locations around the world for over 3000 members of staff
• Liaising with various departments of the company and 3rd parties to assist with managing projects for the IT systems
• Triaging of particularly technical faults highlighted by other agents