CV

My CV is available on GitHub.

I’m an experienced operations engineer with a focus on automation and tooling. Most of my career has been spent working with Linux systems, and I cut my teeth working in customer facing support.

I enjoy writing Go and Ruby. I have a lot of experience with continuous integration (CI) and deployment systems, and have a strong interest in using automation to solve problems. I particularly enjoy making the lives of my colleagues better with intuitive tools.

Much of my work in the last few years has been in an AWS environment. I feel comfortable working within the huge Amazon ecosystem and using the AWS SDK.

October 2021-present: Site Reliability Engineer for Ably

I work in the Infrastructure team to help scale the global platform as Ably continues to grow rapidly.

Ably is a distributed system that runs thousands of servers across multiple regions in AWS. The Infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining and ensuring uptime of the system, as well as providing tooling and support for the engineering teams, and leading on improvements to legacy parts of the system.

July 2021-October 2021: Systems Development Engineer for Amazon Web Services

I briefly worked at Amazon, but chose to leave because it didn’t feel like the right fit for me.

March 2018–June 2021: Site Reliability Engineer for FutureLearn

As the sole SRE at FutureLearn, I was responsible for improving the development workflow, the CI and deployment methods, and the core infrastructure of the site.

Achievements in this role:

January 2017–March 2018: Senior Web Operations Engineer for the Government Digital Service

As technical lead for GOV.UK Infrastructure, I led a team of web operations engineers and software engineers, and worked alongside the delivery and product managers in moving GOV.UK toward a modern infrastructure. GOV.UK is made up of over 50 microservices, mostly using Ruby on Rails, and the platform includes MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Jenkins (deployment and CI), Varnish, NGINX, and Redis. It is a critical national resource, and so it is essential that the general public are able to reliably access content published on the site.

Achievements in this role:

May 2014–January 2017: Web Operations Engineer for the Government Digital Service

This position involved maintaining and supporting the ongoing needs of the evolving GOV.UK infrastructure. As part of this, I provided out-of-hours and in-office second-line support.

Achievements in this role:

June 2008–May 2014: Linux Systems Administrator for Pulsant (formerly DediPower Managed Hosting)

I joined DediPower as an intern on work experience, and was then hired full time as part of the systems administration team, working with customers, other members of the support team, and other parts of the business including the networking, sales, datacentre, and provisioning teams. Our services were primarily Linux-based, but we also supported a wide range of systems including Windows, VMWare, Cisco firewalls, and server hardware.

Achievements in this role: