Automation & Service Reliability Engineer (Jan 2020 – Jul 2022) DevOps Engineer, Pastoral Manager, Scrum Master (Jul 2022 – Jan 2023)
A member of the Automation Service Reliability team (later renamed Core Delivery Platform), providing automation, infrastructure deployment, management and monitoring services across both internet-connected and air-gapped environments. The team’s focus was delivering methodologies, tools and processes to improve the quality, availability and speed of delivery of UKCloud’s management platform and services through automation, with resilience and availability at the forefront.
UKCloud was a significant period of professional growth for me. It was here that I consolidated and refined my Ansible skills, expanded into Terraform and CMDBs, and experienced working in a highly agile DevOps team with shared goals. It was also where my formal journey into people leadership began.
Pastoral Manager#
In 2022 I took on a formal Pastoral Manager role, responsible for the day-to-day wellbeing of four undergraduate students on the company’s undergraduate programme.
The purpose of the pastoral management role was to separate technical and pastoral responsibilities – creating a boundary that gave employees an opportunity to discuss work issues and have them resolved independently of the technical demands of their team lead or project managers. As a pastoral manager, I worked with each staff member to understand their needs, how they were integrating with the business, any issues or frustrations they were experiencing, training or opportunities they wanted to pursue, and helped build their Personal Learning Plans.
While I was not responsible for their their technical day-to-day, through one-to-one meetings I coached them through navigate the demands of their positions and gave them tools and processes to manage challenges. For example, if someone was stuck on a technical problem for an extended period, I would help them analyse what they were stuck on, how it was affecting them, and identify approaches they could take in the future – such as setting a personal deadline for being stuck before reaching out to a team member for help.
When UKCloud entered administration in late 2022, I prioritised my team. I worked to find all four undergraduate students new positions with other companies, ensuring they had continuity in their careers despite the circumstances. Putting my people first during that period is something I’m proud of.
Scrum Master#
I served as Scrum Master for a project to deliver a DevOps Management Dashboard for the ASR team. The dashboard would provide API calls to the various tools we used, displaying their status in a single view (similar to a basic monitoring system) with direct links to each tool. It was designed to be SSO-enabled, so users would authenticate once and have seamless access to all backend tooling.
I led a team of four on this project. This was my first experience leading a technical project where I was not contributing technically – acting purely as a go-between for the project team and the product owner. In many ways this was project management, and it was a formative experience in understanding the difference between technical contribution and technical leadership.
Training#
In 2022 the opportunity arose to undertake an apprenticeship course through the Chartered Management Institute. I applied for and was accepted onto the People Leadership Programme, which required me to be actively managing at least one person – this led directly to my pastoral management responsibility for the four undergraduate students.
When UKCloud entered administration, I agreed to continue my studies with the CMI. I completed the qualification with a Distinction in October 2023 while at SiXworks. The active training and practical experience I gained through this programme was a major contributor to my opportunity at SiXworks, where I was given the chance to build and lead my own team from scratch.
Responsibilities#
- Build and maintain infrastructure using Ansible, Terraform and CI/CD pipelines, with availability and resilience at the forefront
- Deliver solutions in both internet-connected and highly secure offline environments, ensuring compliance and stability
- Deliver services in highly-available configurations using cluster deployments and HAProxy/KeepAliveD
- Collaborate across teams to align service development with shifting organisational needs
- Support virtualisation and containerisation services including VMware and OpenShift
- Manage and implement changes using ITIL-compliant change control processes
- Oversee monitoring systems and respond to alerts using internal and third-party tools
- Provide in-hours and out-of-hours support for key services, with proactive and responsive diagnosis
- Work closely with Software Engineering to deliver the customer portal
Technology#
- Automation: Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines
- Containerisation: Docker, Docker Swarm
- Virtualisation: VMware (ESX, vSphere, vCloud Director)
- Infrastructure: Linux (RHEL), Windows Server, HAProxy, KeepAliveD
- Monitoring: Opsview (Nagios)
- Security: ISO27001
- Ticketing & ITSM: Ivanti ITSM, Atlassian Jira
- Documentation: Atlassian Confluence
- Practices: Agile/Scrum, ITIL change management, TDD, Infrastructure as Code
Notable Projects#
- Patching as a Service – delivering automated patching solutions for Linux and Windows
- Platform Migration – migration of supported services from old to new infrastructure
- Portal Deployment – automation of the portal deployment process using Ansible across Development, Integration and Production environments
- Integrate TDD framework into existing Ansible roles
- Mail Relay infrastructure – replacement of the outbound mail relay infrastructure
- Maintain and upgrade internal ticketing and documentation platforms
- Maintain and upgrade customer-facing ITSM