Managing a team of 8 DevEx and Platform Engineers maintaining and evolving the Internal Developer Platform at Funding Circle.This role involves many of the same team leadership responsibilities as my team lead role, but with additional responsibilities for management of the team and ownership of work, ensuring it is prioritised and scheduled to deliver on our quarterly commitments.The management of the team includes:* Regular 1:1 meetings with each team member* Addressing any issues in a timely way* Setting performance goals with each team member, and tracking this throughout the quarter / year* Managing on-call schedule* Defining and reporting on roadmap for the team, including defining OKRs and executing on these with the team* Ownership of strategic direction of Internal Developer Platform, working with colleagues across Funding Circle to evolve the platform for the needs of FC engineers* Regular catch-ups with stakeholders throughout the rest of Funding Circle* Working with engineering teams across FC ensuring our platform meets the needs of developers, and engaging specialist engineers where required to help with complex projectsAn example project is organising and prioritising migration of containerised applications from a legacy Apache Mesos/Marathon platform to an AWS EKS hosted Kubernetes platform. This has included mentoring junior members of the team in performing migrations (including pair programming), reporting status to stakeholders and planning resource requirements throughout the project.

Worked as part of the Core Platform team at Funding Circle, providing the platforms FC developers need to build, test and run applications.This role involved the maintenance (including participating in an on-call rota), and continuous evolution of a number of technologies including a wide range of AWS services, for example, IAM, VPC, EC2, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, etc.I especially focused on delivering the Kubernetes platform using the AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This includes the management of monitoring and observability stacks (Graylog, Prometheus, Grafana, Alert Manager), node management (using Managed Node Groups), networking (Istio) and much more. Management of the platform used Infrastructure as Code, written in Terraform, and creating deployment pipelines in Drone CI, CircleCI and Jenkins.I engaged with development teams in migrating apps from legacy container orchestration platforms to Kubernetes, through creating Helm charts and deploying using ArgoCD.All of this work led me to contributing to internal documentation and publish blogs on our use of container orchestration and Kubernetes.

Worked as part of the IBM Systems / IBM Z division, on the Open Mainframe Project and Zowe projects.I led and developed a solution for hosting Zowe within a Kubernetes environment. This involved taking components of the Zowe architecture, containerising them, and hosting these containers in Docker Compose (for development) and in Kubernetes. The components that were containerised were Spring Boot and Node.js apps, and included developing Helm charts as a deployment mechanism into a Kubernetes cluster.In this role I performed additional roles including evaluating and advising on the Developer Experience when using the Zowe tools, in particular when using the CICS and Db2 extensions for Zowe. This included leading a team investigating how the Zowe Explorer could be extended with CICS functionality.

Team lead for the delivery of multi-cloud capabilities for the IBM Cloud Pak for Automation.This role involved coordinating a team in testing the capability of the IBM Cloud Pak for Automation on multiple cloud environments, with a focus of delivery of the Cloud Pak products on the Red Hat OpenShift platform, as well as developing and extending our capability in multiple cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (EKS) and Google Cloud Platform (GKE).The team lead role involved managing the day-to-day running of the team and coordinating our work with stakeholders, assisting team members resolve issues, mentoring new team members, and providing technical expertise and assistance to the team.

At Westpac I worked as part of the Consumer Online and Mobile Banking development team, specialising in the continued development, improvement and support of the DevOps systems. Our technology stack included a number of IBM technologies including MobileFirst Platform, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Liberty and IBM HTTP Server, as well as additional frameworks and services such as the Spring Framework and Apache Kafka.Our pipeline utilised technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes, Chef, Jenkins and BitBucket, and I primarily focussed on evolving our use of Docker containers and hosting services on internal Kubernetes clusters. A notable project I have worked on has taken a Java Spring Boot multi container application and deploying this throughout our test and production environments, hosted on our on-premise Kubernetes cluster. To support this hands on experience I personally undertook a 21-hour Docker and Kubernetes course on Udemy, which proved to be a very useful base of knowledge for my work.As well as continuously developing and improving our infrastructure I also worked to support our environments. An example of this was taking my knowledge of WebSphere Liberty and Docker to help identify and implement a solution for issues in our platform.In addition to my role as a DevOps Developer, I utilised my Enterprise Java Development skills to restructure parts of the core architecture to enable future development of microservices. Part of this has been to learn elements of the Spring framework and identify opportunities to transition from a traditional Java EE applications to microservices built on Spring.

My primary role was as a Java developer for Blueworx Voice Response (BVR) for Linux, developing new features based on customer requirements and longer term strategic goals of developing the Blueworx platform. BVR for Linux is an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (including CentOS) and Cloud. The role also included developing and supporting the BVR for AIX offering running on the IBM AIX UNIX-based operating system. As part of the support role I held a “call-out” phone, for out of hours support of BVR for Linux and BVR for AIX.A major development project I led at Blueworx was the adoption of Apache Kafka to support the strategic "Event Pipe" concept, where users could act based on events put onto the pipe.

In addition to my development role I led the adoption of DevOps practices at Blueworx. The first phase of this was to migrate the Source Code Management of BVR for Linux from legacy SCM and defect management applications to the Git SCM. As part of this migration I also migrated the product build from legacy software to Jenkins, allowing for further adoption of DevOps in the future. Once Git and Jenkins were in place and in use I extended this to include the use of Docker in the build process to eliminate the requirement for several specific build VMs to build elements of the code (specifically building Linux kernel modules), to using containers, making the build process portable across possible platforms.A large portion of the DevOps adoption was to educate and support the development team in moving from Agile, to adoption of DevOps through the whole Software Development Life Cycle. As well as education of the principles, this also involved technical support of the new tools suite.Lastly, I administered the development and test resources for Blueworx, which consist of dedicated Linux (RHEL-based), Windows and IBM AIX servers, and VMware ESXi Linux servers, constantly evolving the infrastructure to make best use of resources.

On secondment from IBM to Blueworx as part of the IBM Champions for Growth scheme. Champions for Growth allows IBM Technical Experts to work for an IBM Business Partner for a given period (usually for 12-24 months).5 months into my secondment to Blueworx I transferred to Blueworx as a permanent employee.

Working as part of the CICS Transaction Server development team, focusing on programming language support in CICS Transaction Server for z/OS.This role involved developing the CICS Transaction Server runtime for support of CICS application programming languages.I led a project demonstrating interaction between CICS and Node.js through the use of Node.js for z/OS. This included producing a sample Node.js application, running in z/OS batch, and a sample node module, which demonstrated native (z/OS) interaction with CICS programs from Node.js.

Working as part of the 1st Customer in Production team insuring we deliver a product that is reliable and to the excellent standard that is expected of CICS Transaction Server.In the 1st Customer in Production (CiP) team we aim to use and test CICS in the way that CICS customers would, running simulated workloads against a core banking infrastructure, simulating the types of Operational Scenarios that customers face every day.Three main areas of focus in CiP were:- Implementation, configuration and testing of WebSphere Liberty Java EE applications hosted within the CICS runtime. This ranged from writing applications (using technologies such as JAX-RS, JAX-B and JSON APIs to create REST APIs in Java) to then testing these applications in a production environment.- Designing and implementing workloads using Integration technologies such as IBM z/OS Connect to create REST APIs for traditional applications hosted in CICS.- Using DevOps tooling such as the IBM CICS Build Toolkit and IBM UrbanCode Deploy to modernise deployment of applications in a CICS environment.Working in these three areas led to presenting to a number of conferences including the SHARE mainframe conference and to individual customers on Java EE in CICS, IBM z/OS Connect and API Connect, and DevOps tooling with CICS.

Software Engineer working on the IBM CICS Configuration Manager and IBM CICS Deployment Assistant tooling products.My main focus was developing the Eclipse/IBM CICS Explorer Plug-in's for the above tools.

Developing new features and functionality for WebSphere Voice Response. I was also responsible for support activities and maintaining over 200 internal development and test Windows, Linux and AIX based systems.