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

Omnistrate

Your SaaS operating system, leveraging the best cloud native tech.

Building the DevRel program from ground up, advocating for cloud native SaaS, producing written and video content, documenting features, showcasing the platform capabilities through demos, contributing to GTM strategy, product growth, DevEx and more.

Developer Relations Engineer

Supporting Omnistrate customers (ranging from startups to large enterprises) who are building their Control Plane and SaaS offering via the Omnistrate Platform. 

Introducing the overall technical vision, collaborating with cross-functional teams to translate business requirements into robust architectural designs and finally, leading successful project implementations.

This role requires reliability, customer empathy, deep knowledge about multiple cloud native products, verticals and business domains.

Customer Solutions Architect

SyncTune

Volunteering to organize KCD, KubeTrain, contribute to CNCF events and the Cloud Native Landscape, speaking and educating about Cloud Native.

- CNCF Blog - published x1
- DevOps Days Amsterdam 2024 🇳🇱 - speaker
- University of Turin (CS course) 🇮🇹 - guest lecturer
- Cloud Native Rejekts EU 2024 🇲🇫 - speaker
- KubeCon EU 2024 🇲🇫 - Program committee
- Kubetrain NL 2024 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 - Organizer
- DevOops Amsterdam Meetup  🇳🇱 - Speaker
- Kubernetes Community Days Utrecht 2023 🇳🇱 - Organizer and host

Cloud Native Contributor / Speaker

Advising startups (pre-seed, seed, series A) operating in the DevTools, AI, Healthcare and Fashion verticals.

- Breaking (in) their products (testing, security, feature requests)
- Cloud infrastructure architecture and emergency operations
- Strategic advisory on product roadmap and UX
- Guiding the adoption of team topologies
- Improving DevEx by coaching about DevOps, Platform Engineering and modern engineering practices

Technical Advisor

Coaching teams of engineers about DevOps, SRE, Platform Engineering, Kubernetes and Cloud Native.

Mentoring junior and new grads on how to achieve relevant industry experience and landing their first roles.

Need 1:1 mentoring? Book a session 👉 mentors.to/mbianchidev

Need a company-wide coaching? Let's talk! 👉 mb-consulting.dev/service/modern-devops-adoption

Cloud Native Trainer / Career Coach

Leading companies towards Cloud Native, providing a range of specialized services since 2021, ranging from software engineering to DevOps coaching, Kubernetes training, fractional CTOing and so on.

The main driver of success is the trust built between me and my clients. Together we can overcome the challenges your company faces.

Sounds right?

👉 mb-consulting.dev/services

Cloud Native Consultant

The Netherlands Cancer Institute

Designing and building Azure Cloud Infra for a gamified annotation tool.

Support Computational Pathology and ML/AI Workloads to train an image pattern recognition algorithm on biopsy data.

Objective of the project is to increase the efficiency of diagnosis in breast cancer.

Lead Cloud Native Consultant | Data Manager

KubeLab

Laying down the foundation of the internal Kubernetes Platform, from idea to MVP, driving both tech and business strategy.

Engineering management of 7 remote engineers, external relations with potential investors and stakeholders.

We couldn't onboard investors and having limited bootstrap resources, we could not go on with the project nor find the Product Market Fit.

Chief Technology Officer

ROAR Customer Intelligence

Enabled Roar DevOps culture in all aspects of the company, starting with CI/CD processes on Azure DevOps, leading Infrastructure as Code initiatives, improvement of Kubernetes deployments on AKS and impmenentation of GitOps pipelines.

Responsible for the DevOps culture and the overall quality of the company's cloud infrastructure.

Greenchic

Handling suppliers and the whole IT side of the company, including but not limited to infrastructure and operations. Built from ground up a new cloud infrastructure on AWS for their sustainable fashion e-commerce migration while hardening policies and solving critical security issues on their AWS Lambda deployed APIs.

Transitioned the company to a new leadership structure.

Fractional CTO

D-Share S.p.A.

Managed their multi-cloud (Azure, AWS) infrastructure via Terraform and CloudFormation for both their innovative news and media platform and multiple digital products. 
This infra hosted services that were consumed by their customers, which were most of the major italian media outlets at that time, mainly newspapers and publishing companies.

I was responsible for the whole infrastructure, production deployments, cloud security, privacy (GDPR) and more.

COOPOLIS S.P.A.

Enabled them to better understand DevOps culture by teaching classes about it and delivering a hands-on workshop on Gitlab and CI/CD processes.

They transitioned to DevOps structures and greatly improved their DORA metrics (also started measuring those) during the following 6 months.

Cloud Native Trainer

Ministero dell'Economia e delle Finanze

Guided the Guardia Di Finanza, IT joint command of Rome to improve DevOps practices by delivering a DevOps course and an in-depth technical workshop on Azure cloud and Azure DevOps.

MVC-TECHNOLOGY SPA

Delivered DevOps course to one of their clients helping them to better understand the DevOps culture and Cloud Native.

CTO @ KubeLab | Bridging the gap between business needs and technology solutions.

Building stuff and deploy it in the cloud brings me joy but my main goal is much larger: I want to create something meaningful, with a positive impact. 
I don't know what (yet), it might be a community, an event, a library, a component or whatever! 
I'm doing my best to discover what I want and enjoying the process.

Talking about software, I prefer Open Source and agnostic tools whenever possible.
I love Kubernetes but I know it's kinda complex for developers, hence, l believe Platform Engineering is the future.

I'm always eager to try breaking something new, preferably in a production environment, to learn how it works (for real).

Every day I wake up (possibly later than 9 AM) and I try to become a better engineer, 1% at a time.

To learn more about who I am
👉 mb-consulting.dev/about

🕹️ eSport enthusiast, former player
🎹 Metal singer and music producer
💲 Personal Finance enthusiast
🥊 Combat sports amateur
🎤 Memes and stand-up (agile) comedy
🍝 Italian living abroad

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