About
Senior DevOps and Platform Engineer. Twenty-plus years in software, infrastructure and security. Startup veteran, several times acquired. Senior individual contributor by choice.
I have been part of multiple companies that were built and then acquired: Invapay became Optal became Wex, and HMSL became part of Bottomline Technologies. I was one of the first hires at Invapay and ended up running cloud operations through the acquisition and the integration that followed, including migrating physical data centres, payment card handling and all, onto a greenfield AWS platform without dropping a security control.
Today I am a platform SME at a 7,000-person payments company. My team is the enablement arm of an internal Platform-as-a-Service: we get dropped into other teams' applications with no prior knowledge, onboard fast, and do whatever it takes to get them running on the platform. Containerising, rebuilding CI/CD in GitHub Actions, upgrading frameworks, writing Terraform for whatever the platform does not cover yet. The applications span C#, Go and Java, so a lot of the job is getting productive in unfamiliar codebases quickly. I also designed and built the multi-region failover system for our authorisation API end to end, including the testing that proved it.
Before that I was the sole DevOps engineer at Closed Loop Medicine, a clinical-stage healthtech startup, where the infrastructure, the compliance evidence and the 3am pages were all mine. Before that, penetration testing at Blackfoot, which is why I still think about access and secrets before I think about anything else. Before that, a long run as a Java developer building document processing and payments systems.
What I am good at
- AWS, deeply. Kubernetes (EKS and AKS), Helm, ArgoCD. Terraform as a first language.
- CI/CD that developers can own themselves. GitHub Actions mostly.
- Observability that catches problems before customers do.
- Security built in rather than bolted on: least privilege, secrets, audit trails, PCI-DSS.
- Walking into an unfamiliar codebase and being useful within days.
- Directing coding agents to do real engineering work, with the review discipline to trust the result.
What I am honest about
My scripting languages (Python, Go, TypeScript) are working familiarity, not fluency. I read them well, I write them with help, and I will tell you that in an interview rather than let you find out later. Java is where the fluency lives.
Outside work
I run a NixOS home lab and a worldwide ADS-B flight data system that ingests about 37 million position reports a day and keeps 9.2 billion of them queryable on one server. There is a receiver pointed at Stansted, an ATC simulator in progress, and an unreasonable interest in who owns which helicopter. Also photography, sim racing, cooking, Formula 1. Mountains over beaches. Star Trek over Star Wars.