Findmypast is the tech company behind online genealogy and history brands Findmypast, the British Newspaper Archive and Genes Reunited. Based in Shoreditch, right in the middle of the Silicon Roundabout that is Old Street, we're a privately owned British company with the perfect mix of cutting edge technology and history at our core. With additional offices in Dublin and Dundee, our websites are home to billions of historical records, many exclusive to us, and attract 2 million page views a day from 70,000 unique visitors.Responsible for maintaining the IT budget including managing the technical operations and SRE teams who ensure our hosting and pipeline platforms are fit for purpose and working well for our development teams.

Brightsolid provide a range of products ranging from Enterprise Cloud, to Colocation services to Public Cloud offerings and it is my teams role to ensure that we work with the customer and design platforms to meet their requirements. This requires an attention to detail and a good knowledge of security concepts in order to ensure the solution works for the customer and is also secure. The team has a good knowledge of virtualisation technologies VMware and Hyper-V as well as Cisco, Dell and Fortinet network solutions and server platforms from Cisco and Dell.Reporting to the CTO we work in conjunction to set the technical strategy of Brightsolid ensuring that our solutions continue to meet the needs of our existing and future customers. In addition to this I liaise with our technical partners to ensure we are aware of any updates to their products that may provide a future offering to our customers.

As Head of Development Operations, I ran a team dedicated to running the infrastructures of Brightsolid’s largest customers such as Findmypast, Lloyds and TCS. The team members were located in three locations, Dundee, Aberdeen and London. Working in conjunction with our customers the team would delve deeper in to the customer application stack to ensure the infrastructure services running it was fit for purpose and designed to provide good value.

Infrastructure design for our internal(online publishing) and external customers ranging from single instance servers to private cloud implementations. Specialities include VMware, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Solaris.This year we provided the hosting for the hugely successful Scotland's Census online questionnaire on which I served as the DA. Due to its high profile I was also part of the team that provided support during live running.

VMware ESX/vSphere, Solaris and Red Hat Linux systems support from Infrastructure design to troubleshooting.Skills include installation, configuration and troubleshooting of Exim, BIND, DRBD, Apache HTTPD, MySQL, Nginx, Apache Tomcat, Dovecot, Cobbler, Squid, Xymon etc.

Providing advanced support to point of contact agents who are advising customers on services such as antivirus, Firewall, Online Backup solutions hosted Exchange and many more. The role also included creating support documentation to be used in the training of new agents and also to be used for reference.

Providing support to BTs Business customers supporting a large range of products and services. Quickly moved into a more technical back office position utilising my diagnostic skills to find and resolve technical issues which proved difficult for 1st line analysts to resolve.