Nick Barefoot Email & Phone Number

Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

High Wycombe, Gb

High Wycombe, Gb

London, London, Gb

At National Grid, I began as a DevOps lead with responsibility for building and managing Enterprise grade tools for a full DevSecOps platform running self-hosted in Azure, used by hundreds of engineers.I delivered an AKS multi-environment / multi-cluster system for hosting these tools, incorporating a GitOps deployment pattern.I quickly picked up more responsibilities, simultaneously leading the digital transformation for the Electricity Supply Operator business as the DevSecOps platform Product Owner - Open Balancing Platform, literally keeping the lights on in the UK.I managed relationships with, and influenced, teams from multiple simultaneous contract suppliers; onshore/remote/offshore, and teams internal to the organisation across Infrastructure, networking, dev and security departments across multiple time-zones and Operating Companies.I was responsible for team processes, ways of working and overarching approaches, best practices, solution designs to support High Availability and low RTO/RPO for use across an Enterprise of around 2000 users.I supported the team around me with technical leadership, setting a high bar for quality - leading from the front with my own deliveries.In my Product Owner role, I was accountable for building a multi-cloud / multi-cluster / multi-environment OpenShift platform, using Infrastructure as Code (Azure pipelines), Platform as Code (GitOps for cluster configuration), Deployment as Code (GitOps) and Security as Code (ACS/Stackrox and Open Policy Agent), providing a secure ‘as code’ platform for delivering a micro-service architecture for deployments into Critical National Infrastructure.As the Platform Lead, I built groovy scripted pipelines in Cloudbees Jenkins for building various types of source modules via shared/reusable, version controlled and testable scripts – npm/React, Java, Mulesoft, Salesforce, custom build agents via Docker, tool health monitoring and metrics collation.

Newbury Business Park, Newbury, Gb

At EValue I worked on several projects as a team lead and scrum master providing technical expertise and code contributions, whilst line-managing a small team of developers. I had responsibility for creating Continuous Integration pipelines for a range of different products; Polymer web components, a Java monolithic web app and a containerised NodeJS application.Most recently as a DevOps lead I administered a Jenkins, Bitbucket and Jira toolchain environment, and introduced an automated CI pipeline with Jenkins building npm packages from a mono-repo into Docker images to run on a Docker Swarm system internally, and was involved in transitions to use Kubernetes.Previous projects included responsibility for NodeJS and GraphQL based microservices that integrated with MongoDB via Prisma, and optimisation and JMeter performance testing of Java REST apis.

Abingdon, Oxfordshire, Gb

At Sophos I led and managed various projects and teams in a highly dynamic environment, covering hiring, appraisals, line management and project planning.My first significant project was delivering Sophos’ first full cloud-managed product targeted for the consumer market – Sophos Home (https://home.sophos.com/).I went on to manage several projects to extend the functionality of the Sophos Central SaaS administration console https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/sophos-central.aspx.One of these projects was leading the ‘RCA’ root-cause-analysis feature which fronts the Sophos Intercept-X anti-ransomware product (winner of Security innovation of the year 2017 in the Computing’s Security Excellence Awards). This involved constructing a pipelined data ingest architecture in AWS to allow ingest and processing of data files sourced from millions of customers’ computers combined with providing a “full Java stack” rich web interface for administrators to view and analyse that data (S3 buckets, SQS queues, SNS messaging, Elastic Search, MongoDB and D3 force-directed graph drawing).Most recently, I led a DevOps team providing infrastructure and tooling management, supporting several hundred developers and testers. Alongside administering Jenkins, Jira and Bitbucket systems, I maintained provision of 6000 virtual build and test machines across a 60 node blade server estate - including managing hardware refreshes and budget forecasting.I led the architecture and deployment of a modern Continuous-Integration software build pipeline formed using Ansible and Groovy config-as-code methodology; using Docker micro-services and Python functions orchestrated by Jenkins, running inside an “air-gapped” network designed to enhance the security of the company’s build process.This culminated in enhanced developer productivity and reduction in overall system maintenance effort.

Newcastle Upon Tyne, Gb

At Sage I was responsible for the full line management of mixed-function Scrum Teams of up to 8, including a tester, a technical author and software developers at all levels.My line-management duties included hiring into my own and other teams, regular 1:1s and annual appraisals. I also simultaneously matrix-managed up to 10 others including a team of testers.I led a number of initiatives including revitalising the department’s approach to Agile, bringing in new development tooling and evangelising best practices across the department.I attained certification as a Prince 2 Practitioner and gained a Level 3 Certificate in Management (QCF).

Slough, Berkshire, Gb

After just over a year at Iris, I was promoted to the position of Team Leader and was subsequently responsible for managing a team of developers working in C# and C++.As well as guiding the more senior members of the team and acting as a sounding-board for their development decisions, I also mentored junior members of the team and championed and led a cross-team effort tasked with implementing a code-quality improvement initiative.My duties were split between team management, development tasks in C, C++ and C# and project management; taking on the responsibility of large tasks such as the addition of iXBRL to the Charities module of the Accounts Production product, and ensuring that smaller ongoing team tasks continued to meet their deadlines.

Slough, Berkshire, Gb

At Iris I was instrumental in the development of the iXBRL solutions for both Tax and Accounts applications, taking the lead during the re-architecting of the core 'reporting' module to provide iXBRL output. This work led to the Best Technological Innovation award in the 2011 Taxation Awards.I worked in C, C++ and C# on various parts of the application suite and my continued goal of improved development practices culminated with the introduction of formal coding standards, use of BOOST and code analysis tools.

Languages used include C++ and Java. Software stacks used include Microsoft Visual C++ 2008, Eclipse, Clearcase and Jira. I enjoyed several roles whilst working at Quantel in a productive and agile environment; I performed the duties of a team leader for a small group of software maintenance developers which involved performing technical interviews, mentoring the new team members and providing team progress updates reporting weekly at the Director level.As a developer I was solely responsible for a product enabling customer specific workflow to transfer media between systems in the broadcast environment. This encompassed both existing software releases and their maintenance and also new feature and architecture developments, managing multiple software releases internally and externally simultaneously. I worked with various raw video essence formats, video file wrapper technologies, networking and comms protocols, custom UI development and multi-threading.

Reading, Berkshire, Gb

I was responsible for application development, planning and managing various projects; where timescales have been small and large, both internally and for external customers. I managed pre-sales specifications and analysis, and post-sales support with customers all-round the world. Version management and the ability to work on several large-scale projects simultaneously were key in my work.

I worked on pro-audio DSP software systems for high-end audio workstations such as DigiDesign's Pro Tools and TC-Electronic's PowerCore. I was involved in the cross-platform development of audio plugins that run within a variety of VST hosts on both the PC and MAC. The audio algorithms were written in 56k code, and the interface and control-logic ran under a cross-platform C++ VST-GUI api.

My duties involved responsibility for the design and implementation of an audio framework for Intent RTOS. This was similar in concept and use to Microsoft’s Direct Sound, but suitable for low power/footprint devices such as the Smartphone platform. Audio DSP, alongside cross-platform embedded coding for hand-held devices was foremost in my work. I worked alongside several development teams within the RTOS department, and maintained code to operate with proprietary systems in the RTOS at a low level. Particular attention was paid to design and optimisation in terms of size, memory footprint and speed of operation for use on hand-held devices.

Bsc (Hons), Computer Science

Education record