cv@matstace.me.uk
+44 7506 002 772
A Web Operations / Linux Infrastructure Engineer with a keen interest in technology, and in particular how the infrastructure / systems department can fully integrate with the entire business to improve communication and processes throughout the whole company.
Working remotely as part of a globally distributed team, I was brought in to lead and architect a cloud migration, utilising Terraform and Azure, I replicated the existing on-prem VFX studio into the cloud to facilitate a rapid roll-out and expansion of a new office in India, avoiding the delays associated with a physical site. I have also applied my knowledge of monitoring and telemetry to improve and expand coverage of systems and services monitoring, whilst also combining multiple disparate sources to give the TechOps support team a “single pane of glass” to view issues.
Working within a globally distributed team, developing and supporting the existing hybrid infrastructure (AWS and data centre), as well as supporting the rest of the engineering organisation. Outside of the reactive support tasks, there was a strong focus on expanding and improving automation, including bringing existing infrastructure into terraform. The role also required strong verbal and written communication skills, to communicate with colleagues from a wide range of technical experience and knowledge.
Key systems and technologies used included AWS, Jenkins, Terraform, Docker, Chef, as well as various scripting languages including python and bash.
Support and improve the existing web application infrastructure, remove single points of failure, improve processes, work with the development teams and product owners, improve and maintain deployment process, responsible for monitoring and maintaining system performance. This was a primarily AWS focussed role, with a wide variety of AWS services in use, additional technologies included Ansible, Terraform, Jenkins, MySQL, PostgreSQL.
Initially employed as a member of a newly formed global systems engineering team, with a focus on unifying and improving the in-house infrastructure across geographically diverse facilities, including upgrading the workstation/render farm operating system. After a reorganisation, the global systems team were incorporated into the local teams, where my tasks and responsibilities have included continuing to maintain and improve the configuration management system, as well as storage and backup systems.
Day to day technologies used and supported include Ubuntu and CentOS based systems, Puppet and Foreman, Ansible, Docker, GPFS, TSM, Cisco and Arista networking, and Zabbix.
Part of a team of web operations engineers working in an agile/devops environment, who are responsible for running the infrastructure which powers the company’s web applications stacks, including traditional websites, APIs, and streaming media delivery, across a heterogeneous environment of physical and virtual linux and windows servers, using both KVM and VMWare ESXi for virtualisation.
My projects included leading the successful build and roll out of a new logging platform, based around the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), and working as part of a team to bring a test-driven approach to the deployment and configuration of various infrastructure components, using Jenkins, Vagrant, bats, and Serverspec.
Technologies supported include Windows servers running IIS, Nginx, and MSSQL, and both Debian and Red Hat based linux servers running a wide range of services and daemons, including Apache, Nginx, HAProxy, Varnish, MySQL, Memcached, Redis, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Bacula, PowerDNS, Exim, Postfix, Sendmail, Zabbix, Statsd, Graphite, ProFTPd, and KVM and VMWare ESXi for virtualisation. We use CFEngine, and have also evaluated Chef and Puppet.
While at Research Now, my time was spent building, deploying, and maintaining a new email infrastructure, for a system which sent between four and five million emails per day. This was achieved using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and PowerMTA for the outbound emails, and exim/ClamAV for the incoming email servers.
I originally joined Distilled as a LAMP web application developer, but when the system administrator left, I took on this role in addition to my web development work. As the sole system administrator for a small agency, this work covered everything from commissioning and maintaining servers, through office intranets and phone systems, to desktop support for a heterogeneous Windows, Linux, and Mac environment. The servers were a mix of Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS, and the technology stack included (but was not limited to) Apache, Varnish, NGinx, MySQL
Although my role at Colewood was that of web application developer (using the LAMP stack), Colewood was a company of three people, and as “the techie one”, I also dealt with the servers (although we used a semi-managed hosting solution, so there was a lot of hand holding from the hosting companies we used). In addition to the LAMP development and dealing with servers, I also designed and built a VoIP system based on Asterisk, with the dual objectives of reducing the operating expenditure with BT, and also allowing the creation of a virtual office, to begin the transition to remote working.
Information Technology, Matematics, Physics
Ten GCSEs including Maths, Science and English.
Outside of work I hold a full amateur radio licence with a particular interest in satellites and digital modes, and am an occasional bicycle tourist. I also have an interest in sim-racing, and have altogether too many arduinos, raspberry pis, etc. sitting in my solutions drawer, waiting for me to find their problem.