Rebel Astronaut

Co-Founder

Featurespace

Principal Site Reliability Engineer

DOPS  DIGITAL

Consulting as the Director of the DXOne program for the London Stock Exchange Group.

- Delivered a Developer Platform (DXOne) that would provide a single experience across the whole Org (12k technologists).
- Ran a program with ~50 engineers, architects and BAs.
- DXOne was the first program to successfully deliver their transformation objectives on time, since the merger with Refinitiv.
- Reduced time from idea to market on average by 67% for Lines of Business.
- Delivered an analytics platform to ensure CIOs and their reports get visibility on their areas.
- Designed and Implemented a new operating model to break down the flow of work across teams.
- Designed a community engagement model that was elevated to become the standard for all developer focused comms.
- Liased with Regulators to ensure that changes were approved to the same level as nuclear power plants. 
- Presented and sold the vision of DXOne to numerous CIOs, Heads of Department and Developers.

Principal Transformation Consultant

- Won the company wide ‘Raising the Bar’ award for innovation. 
- Designed and implemented new operating model in a department of 150 employees, driving a more product focused approach.
- Implemented Agile processes in 5 teams to increase velocity by over 100%.
- Owned and implemented the roadmap for IG’s new platform, based on kubernetes.
- Increased resilience for platform by 50% through repeated testing and iteration.
- Designed engagement model for onboarding new teams to the platform.
- Evangelised new platform and created excitement and momentum around the initiative.

Technical Architect - Platform

Contino

- Provided security assurance for FTSE 250  enterprise.
- Enabled Transformation to go live with a goal to double profit within 2 years.
- Developed a “Security First” Culture within the org. 
- Built in-house security team and empowered them to set their own agenda.
- Compiled a report of recomendations for the C-Suite to empower their transformation.
- Developed the consultancy’s internal security practices.

Principal Consultant

Pearson

- Designed and built a platform to support 600+ developers
- Leading architectural decision making and being the voice of security within the team.
- Leading a team of 20 DevOps engineers, training where needed and ensuring the team’s
velocity steadily improved.
- Decreased application onboarding from 3 months to 1 week.
- Decreased overhead for application teams reducing or removing non business workloads to
enable them to decrease cycle time.
- Designed and deployed an automated detection and remediation system within all Pearson AWS
accounts (~200) reducing risks by up to 80%.
- Worked with stakeholders to define account strategy for whole of Pearson.
- Implemented regular vulnerability scanning and remediation for both containers and AMI’s.
- Spearheaded migration to improved CI infrastructure, reducing run times by over 50% and
increasing stability by 30%.
- Implemented Incident response and reporting precedure and ran weekly drills, resolving
incidents 50% faster than before implemented.
- Redesigned kubernetes control plane to support multi-master and regular deploys.
- Responsible for defining and creating a contract between DevOps teams and application teams
to be able to deliver 99.999% uptime to their applications and reduce friction between teams.
- Decreased cost by 200% within development environments, by utilising automated cleanup,
elastic scaling and simplifying the architecture.

DevSecOps Lead/Architect

UK Home Office

- Leading a team of 20 within to deliver a platform supporting 300+ developers.
- Working within highly secure environment empowering critical national infrastructure.
- Implement Vault/Consul workflow for secrets and certificate management.
- Design/Implement the ability update AMI’s without data loss or downtime.
- Standardise engineering practices to increase stability across the whole environment.
- Educate security teams around the differences between cloud infrastructure and on prem.
- Work with team leads to promote containerisation within the team.
- Built out splunk for security monitoring of environments.

Lead Devops/Security Consultant

PhotoBox

- Responsible for taking a dysfunctional team with no leader and low velocity, motivating them,
clarified working procedure and increased velocity by over 100%.
- Designed new kubernetes cluster based around kops for Photobox to migrate all legacy systems
onto.
- Began work on constructing full feature monitoring and security systems.
- Worked closely with the SOC team to manage the security risks and implementing fixes,
including basic secrets management system, and cloudformation creation pipeline.
- Worked with development teams to enable them to manage their own pipelines securely within
Jenkins framework.
- Took stability from 60% uptime in the first month, over all environments, to 100% uptime in the
last.
- Liased with development leads and managers, to ensure that all goals were aligned.
- Implemented agile, to ensure that the workload was measurable, and changes were data-
driven.
- Descreased cycle time by over 40% development teams, allowing features to get shipped faster
and more frequently.

Lead Devops Consultant

- Built and Managed multiple kubernetes clusters as PAAS’ for all Home Office Digital Projects, ie.
- Consulted on the migration of highly sensitive projects onto kubernetes.
- Audited projects on security and worked with apps that were deemed vulnerable to remediate
those threats.
- Built and managed monitoring platform based on Sysdig running on premise on kubernetes and
monitoring over 200 nodes across 3 different cloud providers.
- Built and extended multiple tools to allow teams to avoid reuse of work and ensure time to
production was as low as possible.
- Worked with Neo4j to spearhead their approach to kubernetes and ensure they were able to
support it.
- Worked to ensure all users of the PAAS were able to utilise its self service offering.
- Built relationships within numerous areas within the Home Office to ensure that getting things
done was as easy as possible.
- Supported teams with running kubernetess on bare metal using PXE-boot technology.
- Interviewed and hired multiple other DevOps engineers to build the team from 5 to 15.
- Main point of contact for developers, evangelising best practices and training, both on and
individual and team level.
- Reduced onboarding time from 1 month to 1 day, through automation.
- Increased the number of development teams utilising the platform from ~10, to ~50 over a 6
month period.
- Implemented chargeback system to ensure that all costs were being allocated to respective
development teams, and ensured they still saw at least a 40% reduction in cost.

Senior Devops Engineer

Style.com

- Designed and built Kubernetes platform on AWS
- Adapted scala application to run in a scalable manner, broke application into microservices.
- Designed ci pipeline to deploy code within 5 mins of git commit.
- Dockerised and redesigned application to run on docker, be fault tolerant and scale limitlessly.
- Worked to design a tolerant solution for running Datomic on kubernetes without losing state on pod restart.

Giles is a co-founder of Rebel Astronaut, a startup that aims to make companies more dynamic, flexible, and profitable by speeding up the time from idea to product release. He is also a principal site reliability engineer at Featurespace, a leading provider of adaptive behavioral analytics and fraud detection solutions. 

With over 8 years of experience in DevOps, security, and cloud computing, he has successfully delivered and implemented multiple transformation projects for various organizations, such as the London Stock Exchange Group, Pearson, and the UK Home Office. He has extensive knowledge and skills in infrastructure as code, Amazon Web Services, and DevSecOps methodologies. He is passionate about helping companies achieve their goals by increasing their security, efficiency, and agility.

Giles Hinchcliff

HashiCorp

Responsible for the development, build, pilot, and assisting with packaging of new advanced professional services offerings. Collaborating closely with cross-functional teams to design and implement innovative solutions that address customer needs, improve operational efficiency, and drive business growth

Snr. Advanced Services Engineer

Snr Implementation Services Engineer

The Real Ghostbusters inc

"Doing virtually no work. Ranked for performance at less than one-tenth the productivity of a median software engineer, a definition of ghost engineering is emerging that details an employee who may have multiple jobs and a finger in several presumably less-than-productive pies." 

Responsible for day-to-day enquiry handling of community tools, Q&A. and Dev advocacy for a variety of tools, platforms, products and roles. Answering those questions, you probably shouldn't ask ChatGPT, but you probably could have googled or visited Serverfault to find out. 

Successful delivery, development and deployment architect and implementation specialist, responsible for being the sounding board for colleges, system integrators and customers enquiries again when the documentation and their google fu has all but failed them.  Otherwise, it is known as RTFM as a service. 

I serve along side a cohort of colleges and communities that all provide extensive Ghost engineering capabilities and experience.

Snr Ghost Engineer

Puppet

Now Pulling Strings behind the scenes to help build and standardize robust, deliverable services and tools to support service delivery for the wider organisation of Customer Success at Puppet. 
Responsible for use case research, development, delivery and tooling development.
Remote working with distributed stakeholders and customers.

Principle Service Solutions Engineer

Back to "Pulling the Strings" around anywhere I land, flavored with experience, sarcasm, and coffee! 
Currently working in professional services with a focus on Pipeline design, integration, and development, platform and solution design and delivery throughout EMEA region. Including configuration management, provisioning, and automation, with DevOps principles. 
Opinionated about both Test and Behaviour Driven Development, application delivery, change management and security principles. 

A proven public speaker, presenter, and event coordinator, participating I PuppetConf 2014 and various DevOps community meetings throughout my time at PuppetLabs, and in the Public sector.

Principal Prof. Services Engineer

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Responsible for providing service continuation and SME overview on a program migration. Managing stakeholder requirements,  and client relationships with internal customers and external providers.
Responsible for providing a wide overview of chosen technology, working practices, and previous project goals, deliveries and motivations to current project team.

DevOps Consultant  (intrim PM)

Product Owner responsible for centralised operations delivery of automation, tooling and service catalogue products.
Providing architectural and technical program management guidance for cloud adoption, Dev Ops practices and Operations SRE and Service management. 
Managed delivery and relationships with external contractors engaged to deliver tooling and platform support.
Promoted agile methodology in a DevOps based team, within the bounds of strong ITIL and Change Management practices.

Product Owner IOS Cloud Operations Delivery

Responsible for cloud-based management infrastructure with integration, configuration management and continuos delivery.
Oversee research and development team providing functional research into suitability, implementation, and delivery of service based applications for infrastructure management and delivery.

Snr Platform Delivery Engineer

Digital Adept Services LTD.

Specialties: Puppet, Continuous Intergration and Delivery, Cloud based infrastructure design, Server architecture for application management and deployment. Web application design and development. Solution design. Training design and delievery. Culture development and promotion.

Consultant

Puppet Labs, Inc.

Currently working in professional services with a focus on platform and solution design and delivery throughout EMEA region. Including development, configuration management, provisioning and automation principles. In addition, assisting in the development and delivery of course materials for both public and bespoke private classes. Responsibilities for mentoring and interviewing when not in the field. 
A proven public speaker, presenter and event coordinator, participating I PuppetConf 2014 and various DevOps community meetings throughout my time at PuppetLabs.

SNR Professional Services Engineer

Electronic Arts

Systems Admin for EA Games, based in London formerly playfish operations. Responsible for Live services support in the AWS cloud infrastructure. Working with agile methodologies in a growing Devops role, supporting a internationally distributed team and customer base.

Responsible for delivery management that build upon the current platform of operation products and services. Configuration management with chef, managing a linux infrastructure in AWS. 
Also responsible for infrastructure management and full end to end product cycle support.

DevOps System Engineer

Launch & Incident manager for Operations and Infrastructure at Electronic Arts Digital Platform. Formerly Playfish studio. Dealing with Digital Platform games and services launch and Incident management around the globe.

Launch and Incident Manager

ABC Development

ABC development, formerly vagabond solutions.

A bespoke web development and software company. responsible for delivery of large and medium SME projects to private and government partners including NHS, Dept of education and Local government. As well as a selection of private businesses.

Projects ranged from bespoke web development, wordpress development, cms development (drupal, joomla, moodle), VLE development, bespoke SMS solutions. IT hardware and network support. Marketing, Search engine optimisations. 

responsible for product delivery to budgetary and time constraints, as well as advising social network managment and advertising.

Owner

Manchester Metropolitan University

I placed in the department of computing and maths as a web developer server admin, system engineer and IT services technician.

System admin

Currently developing service offerings and supporting enablement and implementation services for partners and employees. Advocating service practices and developing best practices through leading delivery and delivery practices. 

Experienced with a wide number of enterprise-level platforms across several sectors, from start-up mobile gaming to FTSE100 companies across the globe. 

Community and culture-driven DevOps and Open Source advocate, with experience presenting to international audiences across the globe. 

Strong technical skills and experience with physical and cloud-based systems, AI, LLM, data analytics, and service architectures. Linux system administration, configuration management, behaviour and test-driven development, scripting language skills and development experience.

Strong personal skills, varied management experience including product management, budgetary requirements and full product life-cycle and delivery.

Never take yourself too seriously; try to die laughing not dying to be free to laugh, coffee in hand either way. 
Always remember DevOps breaks down to communication, responsibilities and capabilities the thousands of tools are just the providers.

taplio

The Battle

Giles Hinchcliff

Adam Buxton

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