CV/Resume

Overview

Over 25 years experience working in system administration, software development, infrastructure, operations and cyber security.

Since 2013, contractor (own Limited Company) with extensive experience and skills across multiple areas:

RHEL, Debian/Ubuntu, Alma, Rocky, CentOS
Bash, C, Perl, Python
Virtualisation: AWS, OpenStack, VMware, Linux KVM, Docker, Kubernetes
DevOps / Infrastructure as Code/Automation: AWS CDK/CloudFormation (python, typescript),
Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, terraform, packer, Jenkins, Maven
AWS: ec2, S3, lambda (python/typescript), route53, Security Hub
Big Data: Splunk, ELK
Source version control git, github, gitlab
Agile (Scrum, Kanban)
Atlassian tools (bitbucket, jira, confluence)
Server management, patching, migration
Networking: Routers, protocols (TCP/IP, IPv4/v6), wireshark, nmap
NCSC Cyber Essentials and Protective Monitoring experience
Security: Monitoring & Alerting; SecOps – manage and operate SOC/SIEM/Intrusion detection/protection (snort)
SIEM/Protective Monitoring: Splunk, Huntsman, TrendMicro DDAN, Nagios, Zabbix,
CIS Benchmarks / Hardening
Experience working in globally distributed teams
Regulated and secure environments

Contract Placements (2013-)

April 2024 – present | Senior Cyber Security Engineer (Linux)

Supporting analysts in a global Security Operations Center.

November 2023 – April 2024 | Senior Linux Systems Administrator | University of Glasgow

College of Science and Engineering through major transformation project.

Migration of CentOS 7 to RHEL/Rocky/Alma Linux 8/9 in a mixed environment of physical and virtual servers (KVM, VMware ESXi). Proof-of-concept OpenStack private cloud/Hyperconverged Infrastructure. Kubernetes HPC cluster. Integration of Linux servers with MS Windows AD/Azure AD, networking.

RHEL, CentOS/Rocky/Alma, Ubuntu; Networking, OpenStack, VMWare ESXi, bash, ansible, puppet, python

July 2023 – October 2023 | Senior Linux Operations Engineer

Secure environment. Linux server administration and automation. Red Hat, Ansible, bash, VMWare ESXi

October 2019 – July 2023 | SOC / SecDevOps Engineer | Disclosure Scotland, Glasgow

SOC/SecDevOps engineer in Disclosure Scotland’s Security team’s. Responsible for developing and managing organisation’s SOC functionality: created dashboards, alerts and reports for Protective Monitoring using SIEM tools (Splunk) with data from logstash, OpenSCAP/wazuh, snort intrusion detection, and AWS Security Hub.

Worked with Security Analysts to ensure the organisation met GPG13 and NCSC Cyber Essentials standards/certification. Conducted security audits and code reviews, as well as advising and mentoring Devops and software engineers on security best practice.

Investigated and resolved issues across the full range of tools, languages and services deployed by DS. These include instances (EC2), storage (EBS,S3), networking (VPC, NLB/ALB, SecGroups, DNS/Route53), containerisation (Docker, EKS), automation tooling (Terraform, Ansible Tower, Puppet), logging (Cloudwatch,Cloud logs), and security monitoring.

As part of DS Security, undertook independent proof of concept projects: AWS Cognito with TOTP MFA authentication and wireframe UI for managing user accounts’ MFAs, defined and deployed using AWS CDK and Python.

Linux (Amazon Linux 2, CentOS,RHEL7/8, Ubuntu), Ansible, Docker, EKS, Puppet, Foreman, Bash, Python, Java, Splunk (SIEM), HIDS/AVS; Atlassian tools: bitbucket, jira, confluence.

AWS, CloudFormation, CDK, Terraform,

July 2018 – Sept 2019 | Senior DevOps | The Student Loans Company, Glasgow

Automated deployment of ElasticStack (ELK) cluster to datacenter VMs. Created Ansible playbooks, roles, jinja2 filters, Jenkins pipelines to fully automate deployment.

Created and deployed virtualised infrastructure to automate Java build pipelines (GoCD, Maven); achieved 20x efficiency gains and delivered six-figure+ financial savings to the business.Setup and management of AWS resources (S3, Cognito, SES) using AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK/Python) for CloudFormation Templates.

AWS (CDK/CloudFormation), Ansible, Bash, VMware, Virtualbox, Vagrant, GoCD, Jankins, Gitlab, Terraform, Packer, Python, Jira, Confluence.

Mar 2018 – May 2018 | Senior DevOps | DXC (Procter & Gamble account), Newcastle

Technical lead in automating infrastructure deployment and configuration of VMware servers and networking hardware to be rolled out across Procter & Gamble’s global estate of over 130 factories. Supported the ongoing transformation of the global team into Agile/DevOps practice; technical advice to account management and mentoring of junior team members. Agile (Scrum), Ansible, Bash, git/github, Linux (RHEL7/Centos), VMware Vsphere/Vcenter, HP iLO automation.

Jan 2018 – Mar 2018 | Senior DevOps | DXC – Vodafone HQ, London

Develop and deploy automation of manual QA scripts. Jenkins,Bash,Linux(RHEL),VMWare.

Jan 2017 – Nov 2017 | Senior DevOps | DXC – Tesco Bank EHQ, Edinburgh

Project to demonstrate functional ingest-to-analysis “Data Loch”. Integrated open source tools (kafka, hive) on AWS to ingest into S3 and deployment of applications in a sandpit environment for data analytics (RStudio,Jupyter Notebooks). AWS ec2 deployed with BlueData EPIC orchestration stack which we security hardened, added user authentication and access to AWS S3 bucket storage.
AWS instances running Rstudio, Jupyter and Spark, Nginx reverse proxy, user accounts with AD integration and auto-mounting S3 buckets with fusefs. AWS (S3, EC2), RHEL/CentOS, bash, Perl, BlueData EPIC, bitbucket/git.

Sep 2016 – Dec 2016 | Senior Systems Engineer (DevOps) | William Hill (International), Leeds

Working with development teams, responsible for the ongoing support and maintenance of the williamhill.com international development and live production environments. Tasks include system upgrades, documenting and auditing, deploying buildings to dev and live virtual environments and automating deployment tasks and routine activities; assisting in migration to William Hill’s bespoke cloud infrastructure. Red Hat, Oracle Linux, VSphere, Brocade Stingray, bash, Perl, Python, Jenkins, Maven, Github, Confluence, subversion.

Apr 2016 – Sep 2016 | Senior Systems Administrator | Orange Bus Ltd, Sheffield, UK

Working on government agency projects. Day-to-day management and operational support of systems in multiple UK data centres, primarily on Linux (Debian; CentOS) running XenServer VMs (RHEL/CentOS, Debian/Ubuntu, Windows). Guest VMs and application services deployed using Chef Server from Git repositories. Applications supported largely written in Java on Tomcat with Oracle and MySQL. SDLC management through Jira, Confluence, Slack. Management of core services, including DNS, DHCP, SMB, LDAP/AD, Jenkins. Monitoring across multiple data centres with Nagios, CheckMK and Shinken. Multi-site service redundancy and disaster recovery using DRBD. Automation scripting and data munging in Perl and bash.

Sep 2015 – Apr 2016 | Software Defined Infrastructure Tech Lead | Linaro Ltd

Lead engineer for Software Defined Infrastructure, working on complete OpenStack deployment on Linux (CentOS,Debian,Ubuntu,Red Hat) to the ARMv8 64-bit server environment. The team has deployed OpenStack on AArch64 servers in data-centres in Austin, Texas and Cambridge, UK with rollout to other countries, including China, planned. Working with OpenStack upstream developers and maintainers, Linux kernel maintainers, hardware manufacturers (AMD, HP, Qualcomm, etc). As part of a globally distributed organisation, the SDI team members are in countries as diverse as India to USA and regular interaction with colleagues in Asia, Europe and, North and South America.

Linux, ARMv7/v8, x86, Kubernetes, OpenStack (Liberty/Mitaka), scripting (bash,perl,python)

Jun – Sep 2015 | DevOps Engineer | Sky Betting and Gaming International, Sheffield

A new greenfield project to build and launch new platform into International markets. DevOps role writing Chef cookbooks, provisioning VMs and deploying dev/test/production environments to AWS/MS Azure (dev) and Docker with CloudStack on Interoute’s infrastructure (production).

Chef, Vagrant, Berkshelf, Ruby, Microsoft Azure, CloudStack, Linux (CentOS/Red Hat), Jenkins, Jira, Confluence.

2015 – 2016 | Technical Consultant / Software Developer | Kielowatts Ltd, Lincoln

Provide technical advice and support to home automation and electrical installation business. Work includes programming in C and bash on Linux, website development/hosting and advising on IP infrastructure and security. Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, Arduino, Raspberry Pi

Mar 2014 – Jun 2015 | Linux Systems Engineer / Administrator | BBC News, London, W12

Member of Broadcast Systems Development team. Support of Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Centos) and MS Windows servers; VMware, XenServer virtualisation clusters. Develop and deploy backup solutions. Infrastructure monitoring (Nagios). Integration, and single sign-on of CIFS/SMB and ssh on Linux servers through MS ActiveDirectory environment. Handling support requests from software engineers. Extensive Bash and Perl automation scripting.

Worked with developers supporting television news broadcast infrastructure used by the BBC’s 2000+ journalists across the UK and international bureaus. Applications include live streaming via mobile phone, video editing and transcoding servers, on screen graphics overlays for BBC News channel and metadata management systems.

Jan – Mar 2014 | DevOps Engineer | Travis Perkins PLC, Northampton

Integration of Travis Perkins brand platforms. Linux (Red Hat, Ubuntu). Docker, Bash and Perl.

Jun – Dec 2013 | Perl Software Engineer | NTT Comm Security (Integralis), Munich, Germany

Developing new monitoring and backup code for this global company’s Managed Security Services appliances. Appliances include Cisco, NetApp, Juniper, BigIP. Development tools: Linux (Red Hat, Debian), Perl, Template Toolkit, Moose, Catalyst; Bash scripting.

Employment History

2006-2013 British Broadcasting Corporation,

2011 – 2013 Lead Systems Engineer, BBC MediaCity,Salford

Lead engineer for internal cloud infrastructure project: I proposed, designed and implemented a Debian/Ubuntu hosted OpenStack (Alamo v2/3) private cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service for hosting development/test VMs and virtualised network services. This allowed developers and QAs to directly manage network properties: ie, DNS spoofing/masquerade, traffic shaping/throttling, HTTP proxy, VLAN re-configuration. Investigated and tested alternative cloud solutions (AWS, Eucalyptus).
Infrastructure role implementing and supporting IP network infrastructure and servers for 100+ software engineers and testers for Television and Mobile Platforms development team (now named “Platforms”). TV&Mobile Platforms develops applications for TVs, Set-top-boxes, Android, iOS and game consoles. Products include BBC iPlayer, Glastonbury interactive, the BBC Red Button.

Supported closed broadcast delivery network with video ingest, multiplexers and matrices from multiple sources including cable, satellite and terrestrial DVB television networks.
On a daily basis I managed the IP networks and servers supporting engineers in IPTV, mobile device and application development teams. Provided support, documentation, network management, security and reporting. Supported development and QA teams include Television Platforms, BBC iPlayer, Mobile apps, Homepage, Central Editorial, Sport and Children’s. Service Level Agreements for day-to-day operational support of infrastructure. Procurement of equipment and asset cataloguing.

Installation, configuration and management of Cisco VLAN switches, rack-mounted servers, VMWare ESXi 4.x, VLAN’d Wifi, physical and virtual server, SAN/NAS. Additionally worked alongside department’s broadcast engineer supporting RF networking and set-top-box test farm infrastructure.

2006 – 2011 Software Engineer, BBC, London/Manchester, England

Started at the BBC as a Perl Developer working on a BBC iPlayer project, building backend data processing system that pushed content to the frontend website. Moved to BBC FM Operations (2008), supporting production and legacy code, and developed monitoring tools for BBC iPlayer that report on user experience and national network performance. Provided 2nd/3rd line support of the BBC website and intranet. The team directly supports and maintains 40+ applications. Perl, HTML, CSS, MySQL, Apache Server Side Includes, Linux.Joined Television Platforms and relocated to BBC North (based in Manchester) in August 2009. Developed applications for set-top-boxes and TVs in Actionscript, including for the Commonwealth Games 2010 with data feed generator written in Perl and Ruby.
Linux (Red Hat/CentOS), Sun Solaris.

1999 – 2006 | Perl Developer / Linux System Administrator

1990 – 1993 Junior Software Developer (DataBasic), Sheffield

Education

B.Sc. Archaeological Science, University of Sheffield (1994-1997)