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

Trustpilot

VP Technology, Trust

101 Ways

Technical Director

Zoopla

Created a programme with four teams around an Objectives and Key Results structure to modernise an enterprise dotnet application and reduce the lead time for changes from weeks to days.
Modified the branching and merging strategy, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipeine and dependent applications to move Zoopla's flagship CRM product from twice-monthly releases to release-on-demand.

Principal Software Engineer

Created a new frontend tech stack hosted on AWS ECS Fargate using React, Next.js, GraphQL and a component library using Storybook.
* Engineer onboarding time reduced from two weeks to one day.
* Product delivery was reduced from months to weeks.
* An Optimizely integration meant multiple experiments running every week

Consultant at Zoopla (via 101Ways)

JUST EAT

Created a Serverless Scorecard application that gamified reliability, security and best practice ensuring all microservices maintained consistently high standards.

Implemented a Serverless and SAAS strategy for SRE products that liberated savings in excess of 1M GBP and improved reliability and performance across the network accessibility, monitoring, and alerting products.

Interim Director of Reliability Engineering

Transformed the Service Operations and Assurance department into a product-focussed Site Reliability Engineering department. The transformation, including hiring a director, clarifying and streamlining the team's roles and responsibilities led to significantly improved productivity and better relationships with the development teams.

Led a multi-million pound project to implement AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring which led to a significant reduction in mean-time-to-respond and improved the performance of the build, deploy, test cycle for microservices.

Delivered a 1.5% availability improvement on the Just Eat platform allowing Just Eat to confidently sponsor X-Factor in 2018.

DevOps Consultant

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Created a two-year DevOps and Cloud Strategy, transformation roadmap and architecture guide to enable the DWP's digital transformation journey and cloud first strategy.

Built a DevOps team to lead Infrastructure Automation which led to a reduction in environment provisioning from over a week to just a few minutes.

Created a Capability, Training and Mentoring Strategy to guide the formation of a DevOps Engineer training programme.

Head of Strategy and Architecture, DevOps

Next Gen DevOps

Author of the Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework. Published July 2015. Available on Github: https://github.com/grjsmith/NGDO-Transformation-Framework

The Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework is an attempt to provide organisations with a structured approach to a DevOps transition.

The framework is presented so that anyone reading it can understand the nature and complexity of a transition to DevOps. It also allows organisations to choose which challenge to tackle first. Each project has been structured to provide clear benefits. In addition to this the framework presents further capabilities that can be made available to an organisation with a little extra work by combining the capabilities delivered by multiple projects.

Author of Next Gen DevOps: Creating the Devops Organisation. Published October 2014. Available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/1VCPZnj

Next Gen DevOps: Creating the DevOps organisation looks at the history of computing and the latest trends in technology, management theories and psychology and proposes a new way to build, launch, management and operate the next generation of online services.
“Next Gen DevOps is a must read for the modern technology leader looking to build a sustainable, healthy, change-supportive organisation.” by GLS, amazon reviewer
“If you want to know more about DevOps and what it means to your business, read this book.” By Christopher L, amazon reviewer

Author

Hive, by British Gas

Delivered a large scale, high performance, maintainable Internet of Things platform for Connected Homes, resolving a number of widely reported performance and reliability problems.

Built a DevOps team to develop and maintain the heterogeneous infrastructure consisting of Amazon Cloud instances, managed hosting and dedicated servers that supports the Hive Active Heating (https://www.hivehome.com/) product and the platform.

Delivered a continuous integration solution for the platform allowing integration with the front-end web services.

Head of Operations

Electronic Arts (EA)

Led an Operations team running over 3,000 Amazon Cloud instances supporting 20M Daily Active Users across the portfolio. Created a collaborative DevOps environment by exposing Operations data and capabilities to the product teams.

Created 50%, 20% and 33% Amazon Cloud cost savings in years 1, 2 and 3 respectively with intelligent use of Reserved Instances, improvements in architecture and design and investment in tools and process.

Created and implemented a run-time Configuration Management systems using Opscode Chef scaled for 3,000 instances.

Created a culture of running the business using real-time information presented on custom dashboards. Provided all staff with real-time billing transaction, active player, product metrics and system availability on context sensitive displays.

Created tools used EA wide providing better visibility into Amazon Cloud costs and highlighting where Reserved Instances could would be most efficient.

Launched: Madden NFL Superstars, released on August 31, 2010, World Series Superstars, released March 30, 2011, Monopoly Millionaires, released on January 31, 2011, The Sims Social, released on August 9, 2011, NHL Superstars, released on October 5, 2011, RISK: Factions, released on January 11, 2012, SimCity Social, released on June 25, 2012, JetSet Secrets, released on September 20, 2012
Madden NFL Social released on October 16th 2012

Director Of Operations

Managed AOL’s technical relationship with Carphone Warehouse (CPW).

Senior Technical Account Manager

As an experienced technology leader I spend equal time building and leading teams, delivering projects,, stakeholder management and software and system architecture. In recent years I have specialised in digital transformation, cloud, DevOps, Platform Operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) transformations.

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The Battle

Giles Hinchcliff

Grant Smith

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