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Tristan Findley
  1. About Me/
  2. Professional Experience/

Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie

Automation Engineer (DevOps), Change Manager, Major Incident Coordinator

06/03/2024 - Present

I joined VIB as a DevOps engineer within the Data Core division, responsible for designing, building and maintaining critical infrastructure to support high-performance scientific research. My role combines platform engineering and site reliability responsibilities, including designing a new secure compute infrastructure for Secure Data Processing, and helping the organisation implement and align with NIS2 standards through both system design and governance process development.

The Context
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VIB is a world-leading life sciences research institute based in Flanders, Belgium. The Data Core team provides the compute, storage and platform infrastructure that underpins research across multiple VIB centres. I relocated to Belgium in 2024, and while the move was a personal decision, the role has given me the opportunity to apply my process design experience in an entirely new domain – European biotechnology research infrastructure.

Although my title is Automation Engineer, the scope of my role extends well beyond engineering. I chair the Change Advisory Board, coordinate Major Incidents, coach team members, and have authored governance processes from scratch – responsibilities that draw directly on my team leadership experience at SiXworks and UKCloud.

Governance & Process Design
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Since starting with Data Core in 2024, I have designed and implemented the following policies, procedures and working practices in accordance with NIS2 standards:

  • Change Management – authored the process, procedure and policy; chairing the Change Advisory Board
  • Major Incident Management – authored the process, procedure and policy; serving as Major Incident Coordinator during service outages, leading impact assessments and resolution efforts
  • Solution Development – establishing a structured approach to solution design and delivery

Achievements
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  • Authored and implemented the Change Management and Major Incident Management processes, procedures and policies
  • Designed and deployed the Data Core SIEM stack, integrating Wazuh, OpenSearch, Graylog and MongoDB for enhanced monitoring and compliance
  • Implemented a highly available HashiCorp Vault solution, configured to:
    • Act as an intermediary certificate authority with automated certificate issuing and renewal using Certbot
    • Provide S3 storage encryption in conjunction with MinIO
  • Built a highly available Docker Swarm cluster with dedicated environments for development and customer testing
  • Developed service endpoint monitoring and alerting to support active incident response and feed into the Major Incident process
  • Developed a sensitive data storage and compute platform for handling Human Identifiable Data securely
  • Automated virtual infrastructure deployment using Infrastructure as Code principles, reducing VM deployment to two commands:
    • <90 seconds for provisioning any number of virtual machines
    • <5 minutes for fully configured, updated and ready-to-use VMs

Responsibilities
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  • Manage, maintain and improve existing infrastructure using expertise as an Automation Engineer and Site Reliability Engineer
  • Identify and automate manual processes to introduce input validation, error checking, logging and reporting
  • Provision virtual infrastructure for internal and adjacent teams to support their daily functions
  • Enhance and maintain the Configuration Management Database (NetBox) as the authoritative source of truth
  • Act as a Subject Matter Expert, providing technical authority for code reviews and risk analysis to prioritise user experience, uptime and reliability
  • Serve as Change Manager and Chair of the Change Advisory Board, championing and updating processes aligned with ITIL best practices
  • Function as Major Incident Coordinator during service outages, leading impact assessments and resolution efforts
  • Leverage ISO27001 and ITIL expertise to implement processes and procedures that meet emerging NIS2 requirements
  • Triage daily service issues and coach team members in Linux, automation and IT best practices
  • Manage the onboarding of researchers to VIB Data Core by provisioning object storage and account services
  • Develop and maintain the VIB Data Core storage infrastructure

Technology
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  • Automation: Ansible, Terraform
  • Containerisation: Docker, Docker Swarm
  • Virtualisation: VMware
  • Infrastructure: Linux (RHEL), HashiCorp Vault, MinIO, NetBox
  • SIEM: Wazuh, OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, Graylog
  • Databases: MongoDB, PostgreSQL
  • Monitoring: Uptime Kuma
  • Source Control: Gitea
  • Scripting: Bash, Python
  • Practices: ITIL, NIS2, Infrastructure as Code, Agile