Velo Payments was the global smart data network for business disbursements.Managing SRE and Platform Support, I had an international team of DevOps Engineers/Site Reliability Engineers and Platform Support engineers reporting into managers, or directly to me.I founded the “DevOps” department, latterly Platform Engineering, and built the team from scratch to implement an Infrastructure as Code based methodology, with full, multi-tier monitoring, auditing, change management and incident management processes, and a security-first architecture. Successfully led the efforts to implement solutions across multiple cloud providersManaged the merger of Platform Support and SRE functions from the acquired Yapstone business into the SRE functions of Velo.Defined a strategy for mass cost savings and modernisation of the acquired legacy infrastructure.

To build up some experience in the high frequency trading area, I decided to get my hands dirty in this role, providing operational support for the QST/HFT side of the business, dealing with highly customised/overclocked servers and bleeding edge high frequency trading technology (hardware, networking, microwave networks, etc.), highly optimised software and embedded software applications over a fleet of around a thousand servers across multiple exchanges and datacentres around the world. Primarily, I focused on automation and simplifying manual processes to create a smooth, effortless release process within the compliance and risk constraints of a financial/trading environment.Within this DevOps Engineer role, you will find the elements you'd expect - python development against RESTful APIs, automating Jira, database/application configuration, configuration management (Salt, in our case), release management, statistical performance monitoring. I have a growing knowledge of exchange technologies, terminologies and constraints which adds to my already deep and extensive knowledge of unix, networks, infrastructure and software engineering.KCG was acquired by Virtu Financial, who not have a London office, which cut this particular adventure a little short.

Responsible for all systems, security, networking, IT procurement, and support both in production and in 6 offices/2 production centres distributed between in the US and the UK and a member of the company's leadership team, I helped build MOO from a handful of people and a handful of sales to a 400 person business with substantial (9-figure) income and a serious impact on the online printing market and a global brand. Reporting directly to the CTO and a key part of the technical leadership, I helped design our systems architecture and designed our network infrastructure, our security policies and provisions and even engineered some of the core software that provided stability and scalability to the platform. Primarily, I'm proud to have demonstrated a consistently pragmatic attitude that has saved the company millions in the provisioning of a stable and powerful platform, embracing new technologies were appropriate, while resisting fads and distractions. I have grown with the company from a directly hands-on one man army, to the leader of a small team that supports this substantial business. I have built a technical operations department that works closely with developers and likes to say "yes" (if occasionally "yes, but") and which tries to abstract operational concerns so that developers can concentrate on feature delivery, whilst providing facilities to all other departments. I am not afraid of a little DIY, either literally or systemically, and combine engineered solutions with open source and commercial software, with a preference for the first two of these.I am a passionate advocate of Debian as a platform, but whatever my personal language preferences I am a polyglot and believe in allowing people to always use the right tool for the right job.Several of my in house solutions resulted in substantial R&D tax credits.

Providing services for a 500 person department engaged in a £150M product development activity, utilising 130 virtualised server environments on a dozen or so boxes by squeezing the very best from several off the shelf virtualisation technologies and a swathe of heavily customised and bespoke supporting tech, I was also responsible for providing all departmental needs, including revision control systems, fileshare, development and testing environments from its humble beginnings to its closure.

This was a contract position to aid Bulldog with its sudden growth,following its purchase and subsequent investment by Cable and Wireless.The role included day to day administration of FreeBSD and Solaris boxes,the building of replacement and additional servers and managing transfer of24/7 production services, plus some systems programming in perl, awk, shell and the usual tools, all in a large scale network environment.

As lead developer my responsibilities were to delegate work to the SriLankan team and handle the complex areas of maintenance, architecture andthe more challenging new development. During this time, I handled variousdiverse clients, dealing with both bespoke and off-the-shelf productdevelopment, with a heavy perl bias and some php, with a refresher in DHTMLand javascript technologies. The role was to be a cross-platform, multi-language and long-term permanent position, but due to the sad loss of a keybusiness partner to the tsunami disaster and the subsequence collapse ofthe Sri Lanka side of the business, the decision was taken to shut the company downand the remaining staff, including myself, were made redundant.

During the first four months of the contract, I was a software engineer forthe group. My main achievement was to revamp the CV search engine for theonline division’s websites with a view to a performance increase. Theexisting system was taking some three minutes to search the database forcomplex criteria. I wrote a complete free-text searching engine, based onmy experience in the field, with a view to reducing this search time to sub-second. The final engine returned results in just a few thousands of asecond, without placing any restrictions on high-frequency words, and witharbitrary depth Boolean expression and phrasal searching. The main andincremental indexers for this system are written in perl, with the searchengine being written in pure C. The engine has been 100% stable, andcurrently powers the cv searching for dozens of Hot Online sites.During the final phase, my role switched to systems administration andsystem architecture work, where I was responsible for taking severaldisjoint systems and creative a coherent scalable, redundant and fault-tolerant architecture. This role also involved migration from aging RedHat systems to Debian, day to day admin, data centre installations,capacity planning and networking, for all production systems for a rapidlyexpanding Plc.

My duties at Corpex were to manage the technical department, manage anetwork of internal and customer servers, project manage the development of the newCorpex “anti-spam” product, oversee re-engineering of their anti-virusproduct, liaise with Corpex Germany and handle customer services at a high-end technical level. During this time, I managed the development of theanti-spam product to its completion, developed parts of the system andprovided an insulating layer between rapidly changing requirements and thedevelopment team. Managing hardware changes and upgrades, theadministration of FreeBSD, Debian, Redhat, Solaris systems, design andmanagement of firewalls, handling large scale clients. Managing of severalmysql and postgresql databases. I also wrote the technical proposal for asuccessful application for a government grant for technical innovation.

Brought in to help remove some... uninvited guests ... I oversaw the migration from an out of date red hat installation Debian on the company's servers and generally provided love and support for the management and development teams.

I founded Parasol Solutions Ltd, a software house and IT consultancy. In addition to the management of the company, recruitment marketing and so on, I also served as company’s systems architect and administrator, designing and implementing the company’s networkinfrastructure to provide extranet coordination of staff activities,systems to remotely access and web and email services. The companyprovided collocation and hosting, so the building of environmentally controlledmachine room facilities, with appropriate infrastructure redundancy,firewalling and backups was designed and implemented by me. I providedcomputing facilities for all aspects of the business and implemented acustom and highly advanced multi-level firewall to protect all systemsincluding external services. I developed systems for in-house software development,provided mentoring, had a hand in software engineering, plus providedcommercial support for SSH for LIFFE. I wrote technical specifications,technical documentation and RFT proposals and documentation. I provided administration of postgresql and mysql databases for both in-house and production systems for clients.Naturally, I learned much about the pros and cons of running a startup and made plenty of mistakes to learn from and not repeat.

Seconded to assist withthe migration of users from LDAP to Sybase, which involved integrating withthe java servlet based front end and the java based middleware. Wrote theconversion software using perl and the unix toolkit on Solaris, workingwith a large international team Worked closely with Sybase, providinginformation theory and security advice. Worked over the Christmas periodwith an emergency team located within the collocation centre at CanaryWharf providing twenty four hour cover for the switchover.

Designer and author of 2webpages' online business directory search engineback end. Design of library interface, then a custom client-server protocolwith a search engine server. Main server utilised custom indexingtechniques for extreme speed of request servicing whilst implementingdenial of service protection, redundancy, fault tolerance and scalability.Full authoring of custom index builders, the server and the libraryinterface. First release of this 100% bespoke solutions was ready in 20days, and already exceeded any competitive product in ease of use, speedand reliability. Working with the company to help them identify their needsin their new marketplace, and provide advice and support beyond the mere technical.

Development on the *unlimited.co.uk sites' production system, involvingextensive perl development, oracle DBI usage, design and implementation ofpersonalised web presentation system, using multithreaded C, Solaris doors,Berkley DB and Apache module technologies. Cleanup and processing of datafor the Guardian Century project.

Development of Korn shell scripts, C and Pro/C applications from detailedspecification, on a large scale development project for Post OfficeCounters Ltd. involving Oracle, HPUX, Visual Basic, Business Objects,PL/SQL, Oracle ProC, Constellar Hub and Designer 2000. Complete andrigorous testing of components written to fluid designs, under tight timeconstraints.

Translation and adaptation of client data for loading via SQL. Exposure to"big data", corporate datasets and procedures, and massively parallel databaseimplementations. Highly performance oriented C development for processingvery large scale data sets. Automation and tolerant control systemsimplementation in perl and C. Telco data exposure. Programming to, and someinvolvement with tailoring of, specification.

Aiding addition of SGML based content into object oriented database bymeans of manipulation of SGML files, by DTD, script automation of mirroringand processing, by bespoke perl and korn shell script development. Roleinvolved bespoke development, input into design decisions, test planauthoring, specification authoring, peer reviews of code and documentation,implementation from specification, all in team environment, working closelywith contract and permanent staff. All work undertaken on Linux or Solarissystems.

Work involved administration of all machines including mail, news, dns andwww. Jointly responsible for creation and administration of the United News& Media Intranet infrastructure and services. Designed -and implemented ascalable, fault tolerant mail system to meet the group's needs and workedon cgi scripts for many sites. Worked directly with graphics designer toimplement his design for a large scale Financial Markets internet product.Mainly general systems and firewall administration amidst development work.

Initially, all aspects of systems administration of SunOS and AIX network(including mail, news, dns). Later, work involved assisting the company inporting its systems firstly from AIX to Solaris, and then from SunOS toSolaris, and finally the introduction of Linux to the organisation.Towards the end of the contract, development of a client-serverimplementation of the company's corpus analysis application (most closelyanalogous to a database) to improve maintainability, portability andefficiency. Solely responsible for the implementation of the server and theformal specification of the client-server protocol. Finally, porting ofsystem to Solaris. Massive performance gains achieved.Last task was to implement a API client for the world wide web.

Responsible for all aspects of running a computer consultancy business,including Unix systems administration of the company systems.Business was founded to enter the Unix bespoke software engineering market,but refocused into sales of preconfigured custom designed Unix systems.