Bob Walker Email & Phone Number

Croydon, Gb

After taking over management of dxw’s operations team, I hired more people to the team, defined a progression framework for the team members, and line managed and mentored the five people in the team. I restructured the team by splitting out workplace IT management to a separate role, in order to prevent the work of the operations engineers from being interrupted by tech support issues from other staff.I assisted our sales personnel by helping to prequalify bids and by providing information for answering bid questions and security questionnaires. I also worked with our directors and other heads of departments to place the correct people in roles for clients. In collaboration with our ISMS group, I led our successful ISO 27001 recertification process as the acting information security manager.I continued to product manage and work on our hosting platform, including monitoring our AWS bills and overseeing our migration from a legacy AWS platform to a new scalable one. I also continued to perform client work, including building the infrastructure for a new case law service for The National Archives.

In my first role at dxw, I helped to define and build our new scalable hosting platform on AWS using ECS and other AWS tools, with Terraform for configuration, as well as some custom tooling to control all our client infrastructure. I acted as product manager for this platform and also worked on client infrastructures where needed.I introduced the team to more agile ways of working, and improved our ways of working with CI and CD. I also improved our on call rota by ensuring the burden was spread over the full technical team, including myself. I hired and mentored our first junior engineer.

London, United Kingdom

Part of the team who as volunteers run DevOpsDays London every year.

London, United Kingdom

As head of the Web Operations community at GDS, I worked with the other technical heads of community to look after our community members. I provided mentorship and line management to around 20 other engineers, and made sure they were learning and developing. I empowered the community to self-organise events and to share learnings between teams, and I also helped organise several off-site events.I participated in the government-wide Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) effort to define a career path for people within the software engineering community. My position as the main point of contact for recruitment of Web Operations engineers within GDS helped me realise that this was a burden that needed to be shared, and so I created a rota of people to be main contact week-to-week.After a decison was made to change how we managed platforms, I was part of the team which enabled this transition. My main roles were liaising with my community and helping to define the work that the new central teams would do along with the existing product managers and delivery managers.While Head of Web Operations, for a time I was also the product manager for the GOV.UK infrastructure team and participated in the planning for the whole of GOV.UK. I worked with the Government PaaS team on planning the migration of GOV.UK to the governemnt PaaS.

London, United Kingdom

As a senior engineer on the GOV.UK infrastructure team, I worked with technical architects and senior developers to define the technical direction of GOV.UK. I continued to work on several large projects which provided the foundation for migrating us to a different hosting provider. I eventually became the technical lead and product owner for the team, helping to set our direction and make technical decisions. I also helped to mentor our new staff members.During this period, I was made Acting Head of Web Operations, at which point I relinquished my tech lead post but continued to manage the product.

I joined GDS as a member of the Infrastructure and Tools team within GOV.UK. I worked on several major projects including migrating GOV.UK to a new platform, leading technically on the setting up of a new logging infrastructure and helping with the procurement of a new CDN. I managed the team's backlog when we lacked a delivery manager, and facilitated several retrospectives. I participated fully in our second line support model and out of hours on call rota, and trained several of our developers so that they could contribute to second line support. I also helped maintain several environments and Puppet repositories

At TagMan I was responsible for maintaining and growing a platform serving approximately two billion hits a month spread over six points of presence across the world. During my time at TagMan I worked both in the Operations Team and in a development team focused on improving the scalability of our architecture.As part of the Operations Team, I introduced the concept ofconfiguration management with an initial install of Puppet, and latersupported a switch to Chef by writing cookbooks and managing thecontractor who did the bulk of the work. I also acted as team leaderduring periods when we had no Operations Director.My scalability work included identification of the inherentlynon-scalable parts of the codebase, helping the developers designreplacement code with an eye to scalability, and liaising with productmanagement during addition and prioritisation of the necessary tasksin the backlog. I replaced our legacy system of client configuration(which used a MySQL replication chain) with a more scalable solutionbased on Git and message queues. I also replaced our in-housedeployment tool with a system of packages and Chef cookbooks, both toimprove scalability and to bring our procedures closer to industrystandards.

At Ominor I set up and maintained over 30 servers for a range of e-commercewebsites developed in PHP and Ruby on Rails, spread across two data centresin several environments. One of my major tasks was to provision a new rackfor a client with a turnover of approximately one million pounds a month. Imanaged the servers with Puppet, and used Nagios and Munin to monitor theservers and collect usage data.Throughout my time at Ominor I worked closely with the developers as partof a team following an Agile methodology. As part of this I helped maintainthe continuous integration servers, and performed deploys as and when theywere signed off by the clients.

A 2 month contract providing Out of Hours cover and daytime support

At Fotango I was a member of a five-person team providing support for about200 Red Hat and Debian machines in our production, staging, development andoffice environments.One of my first tasks was to design and install a rack for a new product,including redundant routers, load balancers, web servers and databaseservers. The routers used VRRP for failover, and the load balancers used acombination of Heartbeat, ldirectord and IPVS to provide high-availabilityweb services. The database cluster ran PostgreSQL, and used DRBD andHeartbeat to provide a failover solution. I also set up monitoring andlogging for this product using Nagios and syslog-ng. The web servers wereorganized as Xen guest domains spread across a cluster of machines.I was also responsible, along with a co-worker, for investigatingalternative technologies for automatic provisioning of machines, to replacethe existing system based on CFEngine and a custom autoinstaller. Much ofour testing involved virtualization using Xen and VMware. Our eventualchoice was a combination of Puppet and FAI.As well as projects such as these, I was part of the on-call rota providingsupport for our legacy systems, including our IBM SAN and several largeMySQL databases.

While at Glu Mobile I installed and maintained over twenty internal and external systems which provided numerous services. My main duty was the administration of six Sun machines (3x280R, 3xv100) running Solaris which acted as a provisioning system for mobile games using Jboss and MySQL. I also administered machines running other services such as mail, DNS, samba for internal file shares, Checkpoint FW-1/VPN-1, HTTP (both barebones Apache/PHP and Jboss/Jetty solutions) and DHCP. I installed and administered a new backup system using Veritas NetBackup 4.5 and a Sun L8 and initiated the process of migrating to Veritas NetBackup 6.0 with a Sun L100. For most of my time at Glu I was also responsible for desktop support.

At Profero I was responsible for the administration of several Intel based machines running FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Suse Linux. These machines provided numerous services such as mail, DNS and file sharing using samba and appletalk. I also administered the machines that Profero's ad servers ran on. In conjunction with this I set up and maintained a firewall (StoneGate) which provided load balancing and clustering.

I joined Pepper Head Design as an HTML coder and progressed to become a PHP and JSP developer leading a team of two other developers. I also liaised with our outsourced Java developers, and was responsible for support of desktops and servers running a combination of Linux, OS/2 and Windows.

Bsc, Physics

Activities and Societies: ICSF, RCSUWas RCSU VP(C&E) in my final year

Education record