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

Swift

DevOps Specialist

Collibra

In order to enable CI & CD at scale at Collibra, I have:

* put in place metrics & dashboards about the performance of our delivery processes, based on data recorded throughout the CI/CD ecosystem
* implemented some automated propagation of versions between components based on quality gates ("auto versioning on promotion")
* increased the visibility & traceability of CI/CD processes using Ontrack
* drived the training, documentation & workshops about CI/CD awareness & processes
* interacted with the different teams in order to enable automation of deliveries
* reduced the delivery time by a 7x factor
* scaled the Jenkins platform in an automated way
* built a team that was able to grow the ecosystem and assist its users
* promoted the use of SaaS solutions in replacement of the on-premise ones.
* modernized the CI/CD infrastructure (infrastructure as code, deployment & test automation of all components of the ecosystem: GitHub, Jenkins, Nexus, Ontrack, JFrog, Gradle Enterprise, SonarQube, etc.)
* migration of the CI/CD ecosystem to SaaS or Kubernetes, to create sustainable, secure & scalable solutions

Continuous Delivery Expert

Clear2Pay

As a consultant, I help existing teams migrating their current build process toward continuous delivery. I put in place tools like Jenkins, Sonar and orchestrate all projects in a continuous and traceable delivery.

Scalability issues have been addressed since the beginning using "pipeline as code" principle, and furthermore as "pipeline as config", allowing to scale the number of Jenkins jobs to more than 9000, in a on-demand, extensible and secure way.

Multipharma

As a consultant, I help Multipharma to migrate their software factory process to a continuous delivery approach. In a hybrid environment (Cloud SaaS + In premises), I've setup tools like Nexus, Jenkins, and Sonar. I've automated the creation of delivery pipelines and I help the development team design a solution for the component pipelines.

Isabel

* Release management
* Software configuration and management
* Team leader

Release Manager

Senior Java Developer

VVKSM

IT Specialist

BRGM

* Software configuration
* Architecture &amp; Development around geographic applications

Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minières (French Geological Survey)

* Software architecture on international projects
* Development

Software Architect

[open to new opportunities, starting January 2023]

I’m helping companies grow and improve the delivery of their software. By interacting with all the different actors (engineering, ops, testing, release management), I put in place automated metrics which will drive the innovation and the improvements of the CI/CD ecosystem.

Fluent with many of the various technologies in the DevOps sector (AWS/GCP, Helm/Kubernetes, Docker, different CI engines like Jenkins or Github Actions, long experience in coding), I can:

* organise teams for the implementation of the different delivery processes
* manage the tooling ecosystem in a secure, scalable & sustainable way
* organise trainings & formations
* increase the visibility & traceability of CI/CD processes using Ontrack and the automated collection of Accelerate metrics

My focus is on transparency and documentation. Priority is given to a culture of quality awareness and shared knowledge.

I'm the author of the Ontrack application (https://nemerosa.github.io/ontrack/), which stores all events happening in your CI/CD delivery chain, allowing in turn this data to drive your pipelines in new directions (promotions, auto versioning based on quality gates, GitOps, etc.). Ontrack is used at scale in several companies.

I spoke about Ontrack and the traceability of the CI/CD delivery processes at All Day DevOps 2017, Devoxx Poland 2019 and CloudBees DevOps World 2021.

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Giles Hinchcliff

Damien Coraboeuf

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