About

I am an IT professional with a passion for cloud, infrastructure-as-code and everything DevOps. I have over 8 years experience in technical roles including software development, system administration and development operations.

Like a lot of technical people, I love to learn and solve problems. I respect and strive to support my team members, as well as help foster growth of knowledge and skills as a collective. On a more personal level, I’m an easy going and positive person.

Experience

DevSecOps Engineer

Jan 2020 - Present
Genie Solutions, Brisbane

DevSecOps role with a focus on empowering developers and breaking down silos. Simplicity over complexity to help drive DevSecOps adoption throughout the teams and business.

Achievements

  • Designed, planned and executed large migration of core Cloud product from various open source offerings to native AWS offerings.

    • From Terraform, Consul DNS, Consul KV, Vault, Nomad, HAProxy, RDS
    • To CDK, Route53, Parameter Store, Secrets Manager, ECS Fargate, ALB, RDS Aurora
  • Deployment and management of highly available Observability platform. Services including Grafana, Cortex and Loki.
  • Implementation of CodeDeploy BlueGreen deployments for ECS Fargate
  • Build, deploy and maintain custom Windows AMI with HIPS (Health Identifier and PCEHR System) to allow developers to interface with My Health Record by Australian Digital Health Agency.
  • Collaborate with developers in building a common library of CDK constructs to help enforce best practices and consistency when deploying resources to AWS
  • Implement a consistent tagging strategy across all development teams to allow better cost allocation and reporting
  • Participate in fortnightly architecture workshops as well as yearly AWS Well Architected reviews

DevOps Engineer

Oct 2015 - Dec 2019
Console, Brisbane

A platform approach with a centralised DevOps team to manage all cloud based infrastructure with fully automated, self-service stacks.

Achievements

  • Collaborated on the planning, architecture and execution of two lift and shift projects into AWS. Built from the ground up using Jenkins, Ansible and CloudFormation.
  • Reduced AWS costs for WebChoice/ClientManager products by 30% within the production account and 72% in the development account.
  • Deploy monitoring platform to gain better application insights. Built using TIG stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana).
  • Deploy Kapacitor to existing TIG stack, integrate with on-call software OpsGenie, and create a development pipeline to facilitate easy tuning of alerts.
  • Design and implement data obfuscation pipelines to allow the consumption of redacted data in BI and development environments for Console Cloud.
  • Automate the restoration of ElasticSearch snapshots to provide development and operations historical logs on demand for faster troubleshooting and analysis of incidents.
  • Develop custom resource for CloudFormation that allows deployment of Aurora (MySQL) clones, and saving several hours in restore time.
  • Orchestration of CloudFront CDN and Nginx Image Resize service migration to new AWS accounts.
  • Deployment of a VPC, Network Load Balancer and VPC endpoint services, to allow other VPCs to use SOCKS server container running in Fargate.
  • Planning, architecture and execution of reducing corporate IT footprint of on-premise servers by leveraging AWS IaaS and PaaS offerings.

Travel

Apr 2014 - Oct 2015
Latin America

From Mexico to Colombia! Feel free to ask me anything about my trip, I love talking about it.

IT Operations Specialist

Jan 2013 - Apr 2014
Console, Brisbane

With less internal development work, my role at Console evolved into everyday IT Operations. Everything from user account management to managing server room infrastructure.

Achievements

  • Planning and testing of multi-stage upgrade from MS Dynamics CRM 2011 to 2016 roll out.
  • Planning and implementation of standard operating environments across different company departments using System Centre Configuration Manager and Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.
  • Complete hardware and software audit of 3 offices and 4 data centres.
  • Implementation of mobile device management using Cisco Meraki.
  • Migration of VMWare ESXi virtual machines to Hyper-V.
  • Improve security by implementing AppLocker/SRP, LAPS, automated rotation of switch/firewall logins, disabling SSH on root accounts, replacement of AD users with service users.

Internal Systems Developer

Jan 2012 - Jan 2013
Console, Brisbane

Promotion to Internal Systems Developer to help improve processes for our Brisbane support and finance teams

Achievements

  • Complete audit of MS Dynamics CRM 4 customisations, refactor and implementing deployable projects in preparation for upgrade.
  • Migration of CRM customisation projects and all other internally developed tools from TFS to Git.
  • Planning, testing and roll out of MS Dynamics CRM 2011 upgrade.
  • MS Dynamics CRM customisation allowing call centre workers to process customer payments through Westpac PayWay API as a part of PCI DSS compliance.
  • Liaising with clients and scoping requirements for the design and implementation of .NET data migration tools for onboarding.

Customer Support Specialist

Mar 2010 - Jan 2012
Console, Brisbane

Provided software and technical support to our customer base of over 3500 rental agencies across Australia and New Zealand.

Achievements

  • Promoted to Tier 2 support.
  • Invited to represent company on multiple occasions at the Australian Real Estate Conference.
  • Developed a .NET plugin for an in-house support tool that restored lost data for one of our iOS apps.

Support Desk Officer

2009 - 2009
British Telecom, Preston, UK

First level support for BT business customers, mostly troubleshooting broadband, telephone and mobile phone issues.

Skills & Proficiency

  • AWS - VPC, EC2 ,ECS/Fargate, Route53, S3, DynamoDB, RDS/Aurora, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Lambda, CodeDeploy, CloudFront, CloudMap, IAM & WAF
  • IaC - CloudFormation, CDK and Terraform.
  • Config Management - Ansible, SaltStack, Packer
  • CICD & Source Control - Git, Bitbucket, Jenkins & GitLab
  • Programming & Scripting tools - Python, Bash, Powershell, Typescript & Groovy. Some exposure to Kotlin, Java, .NET, Go.
  • Observability & Monitoring - Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana, Cortex, Prometheus, Loki, ElasticSearch, Kibana, Logstash, CloudWatch
  • Containers - ECS on EC2, ECS Fargate, Docker
  • Web Server/Proxy - IIS, Apache Tomcat, Nginx
  • Databases - MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL
  • Other - Atlassian suite, Agile Methodologies

References

References available upon request.