About Me
I’m Tristan — a DevOps engineer with a rare shape: deep, hands-on automation expertise, forged in some of the most security-constrained environments there are.
Security-first by training, automation-first by instinct.
My career has two beginnings. The first is security — eleven years embedded in Royal Holloway’s Information Security Group, one of the world’s leading cyber-security research groups, where data protection was the starting point for every decision. The second is automation — which began when I learned Infrastructure-as-Code at the University of Surrey and never looked back.
Those two threads became one, and led somewhere unusual: secure systems for critical national infrastructure at Vodafone, sovereign cloud for UK government and defence at UKCloud, classified air-gapped platforms for the RAF’s combat-cloud programme at SiXworks — work that contributed to the capabilities IBM acquired the company for — and now secure, governed infrastructure for genomic research at VIB, one of Europe’s leading life-sciences institutes. Different domains, one philosophy: build it once, build it right, make it auditable, and automate the rest.
I came to DevOps from the Ops side — systems-rooted, infrastructure-as-code (more on what I mean by that) — and I build platforms that work, and keep working long after I’ve moved on.
What I bring#
My technical foundation is Linux systems administration, infrastructure automation (Ansible, Terraform, Vault), and platform engineering — built on more than a decade of doing the work by hand before I ever automated it. Alongside the engineering runs a governance thread that’s followed me my whole career: from learning ITIL, to working inside formal change control, to authoring Change and Major Incident Management processes from scratch and chairing a Change Advisory Board as a FitSM Process Owner at VIB.
I believe the best infrastructure teams are built on trust, clear ownership, and a culture where automation is the default, not the exception.
Beyond the day job#
Outside work, I’m a photographer and filmmaker with credits on several independent productions (IMDb) — something I’m actively getting back into. I run a homelab that doubles as a testing ground for the tools I use professionally, and I write about what I learn on my blog.
I’m also into motorcycling, martial arts, skiing, travel, and coffee.
Explore#
- Professional Experience — the full career story, role by role
- Skills — what I work with, and how I work
- What People Say — recommendations from colleagues and managers
- Training & Qualifications
- Photography & Creative Work
- Reading List
- FAQ