CV
Location: Ardley, Bicester, Oxfordshire
Driving License: Full, current
Email: [email protected]
Website: This one!
Profile
I am an experienced Lead Platform / Site Reliability Engineer with extensive experience designing, building and operating large-scale hybrid infrastructure platforms across Kubernetes, cloud, virtualisation, storage and event-streaming systems. My work combines technical leadership with hands-on engineering, enabling high-performing teams, improving reliability and building modern platform capabilities that scale with organisational needs.
Key Skills
Leadership and Delivery
- Team leadership, mentoring, and developing high-performing engineering groups.
- Product-based delivery, project ownership, stakeholder communication and cross-team collaboration.
- Proven ability to lead complex infrastructure programmes from concept to completion.
- Kubernetes (multi-cluster, hybrid cloud and remote/edge deployments).
- Apache Kafka via Strimzi, including multi-site event-streaming architectures.
- Observability platforms: Prometheus, Grafana, exporters, SLIs and alerting.
- CI/CD automation using GitHub, Azure DevOps and ArgoCD.
Infrastructure
- Virtualisation platforms: VMware, Hyper-V and KVM.
- Enterprise storage (petabyte-scale), disaster recovery and backup design.
- Enterprise networking and hybrid identity: AD, Entra ID, OAuth2, SAML.
- Windows and Linux administration across on-prem and cloud (Azure, AWS).
Automation & IaC
- Terraform, Ansible, PowerShell
- Automated build and delivery pipelines
- GitOps working practices
Analytical and Operational
- Incident response, performance tuning and root cause analysis.
- Designing systems for reliability, predictability and operational clarity.
Employment History
Lead a team of six engineers responsible for three foundational organisational pillars: Containerisation, Storage, and Virtualisation, spanning on-premises data centres and cloud platforms.
Highlights
- Designed and operated a multi-site Kafka platform (Strimzi), handling millions of events per hour with multi-customer authentication, authorisation and replication.
- Delivered a petabyte-scale file storage transformation, migrating many petabytes of data and retiring multiple legacy systems as part of the move.
- Built deep automation and observability with dashboards, SLIs, alerts and runbooks.
Principal Site Reliability Engineer (2020-2024)
Owned the technical and strategic delivery of hybrid infrastructure systems, focusing on container orchestration and systems integration. Led an engineering team while managing well-being, development and operational workloads.
Highlights
- Designed and deployed a multi-cluster Kubernetes platform across on-premises, cloud and remote sites with integrated DNS, secrets, monitoring, logging and CI/CD.
- Introduced product-based delivery approaches across teams, embedding SRE and platform engineering practices into the wider organisation.
Digital Enterprise Applications Systems Engineer (2018-2020)
Delivered the company-wide migration from legacy on-prem software to Office 365 while improving desktop reliability and Dassault 3DX design system performance. Supported the organisation’s shift to modern, cloud-enabled ways of working during the pandemic.
Coretek Group Ltd - Senior Systems Consultant (2017-2018)
Designed, planned and delivered complex IT projects for national and international businesses across cloud migration, virtualisation (Microsoft stack), hyper-converged solutions and improvements to shared service-desk performance reporting.
Responsible for building and supporting Microsoft-based infrastructure in a fast-paced motorsport environment. This included 3rd-line support across servers, core services and related networking. I collaborated with Microsoft engineers to deliver key business systems, ensuring technical robustness during periods of public-facing organisational and branding transitions.
Natures Way Foods - Infrastructure Engineer (2013-2015)
Worked as part of a 24x7x365 operations environment supporting a high-availability food production business. Responsibilities included server, network and infrastructure maintenance with a strong emphasis on redundancy and resilience. Delivered major projects including multi-site enterprise voice services and centrally managed client provisioning, management, reporting and updates.
Chichester College - Systems Engineer (2008-2013)
Initially supported lecturers and students by assisting with complex technical topics and classroom technologies. Progressed into a 3rd-line engineering role with responsibility for backups, patching, security updates, and operational maintenance. Contributed to systems architecture and service provisioning to deliver scalable, reliable infrastructure to large, geographically distributed user groups using both traditional and virtualised platforms.
Disking Computers - Computer Technician and Shop Manager (2004-2008)
Handled all aspects of retail computer workshop operation, including hardware diagnosis, repair and customer support. Managed day-to-day shop functions while ensuring reliable technical service delivery.
Qualifications
- City & Guilds Level 3 Award in Leadership & Management (ILM) - 2023
- ITIL 4 Strategist Direct, Plan and Improve - 2022
- ITIL 4 Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management - 2021
- HND - Computing (Software Development), Chichester College (2005-2007)
- National Diploma - Computing & Business, Chichester College (2003-2005)
- 8 GCSEs, grade C or above - Bourne Community College
Hobbies & Interests
- Cycling, reading, model building and music (bass guitar)
- Motorsport and sim-racing
- Space, physics and technology
- Technical blogging and community knowledge sharing
- Technical reviewer for:
- Mastering Active Directory (ISBN 9781787289352)
- Active Directory with PowerShell (ISBN 9781782175995)
- Getting Started with Windows PowerShell (ISBN 9781783558506)
- Speaker at PSDay UK 2018 and other user groups