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Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie

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

06/03/2024 - Present

My primary role is as a DevOps Focused Automation Engineer, building critical infrastructure for the Vlaams Institute of Biotechnology (Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie) Data Core. My function is similar to that of a Site Reliability Engineer in that I am required to envision, design and prototype new services and ways of working, and implemenent a production version with Resiliance, Redundancy and Availability as key aspects.

Since starting with Data Core in 2024, I have designed and implemented the following policies, procedures and working practices in accordance with NIS2 and ISO27001:

  • Change Management
  • Major Incident Management
  • Solution Development

Key Responsibilities
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  • Manage, maintain, and improve the 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 prioritize 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 Datacore by provisioning object storage and account services.
  • Develop and maintain the VIB Datacore storage infrastructure, including designing and building a sensitive data storage and compute platform for Human Identifiable Data.

Achievements
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  • Authored and implemented the Change Management Process, Procedure, and Policy.
  • Authored and implemented the Major Incident Management Process, Procedure, and Policy.
  • Designed and deployed the VIB Datacore SIEM Stack, integrating Wazuh, OpenSearch, Graylog, and MongoDB.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Technology Shortlist
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Automation
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  • Ansible
  • Terraform

Infrastructure
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  • VMWare
  • Docker / Containerisation
  • Linux (RHEL)

Core / Backend Services
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  • NetBox
  • Hashicorp Vault
  • MinIO Key Encryption Service
  • MongoDB
  • Postgresql
  • Gitea

User Services
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  • MinIO
  • Compute

SIEM Stack
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  • Wazuh
  • OpenSearch / ElasticSearch
  • GrayLog

Scripting
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  • Bash
  • Python

Monitoring
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  • Uptime Kuma