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

Noah Cantor Ltd

I coach technology leaders. Together, we explore possibilities and enable growth, drawing from my background of technology, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, and people.

Executive Coach | CTO

I act as a CTO (providing strategy, planning, transformation, roadmaps, scaling, leadership, etc) to organisations which may not need, or do not yet need, a full-time CTO. I provide guidance, mentoring, and the bridge between business requirements and technical capabilities and needs.

I specialize in building (and rebuilding) teams and software which are flexible, adaptable, and capable of scaling with demand.

Fractional CTO

Equal Experts

Associate

Conflux

Principal Associate

myED App

Chief Technology Officer

Technology Advisor

CTO Craft

CTO Coach

Hawke's Bay Montessori Education Trust

Trustee

Successfully transitioned Trust from exclusive relationship with local primary school to community focus and ownership.

Shifted focus to be community wide and inclusive of Montessori teaching, in all its guises, within Hawke's Bay. Left the Trust in the capable hands of Montessori practitioners with more than 40 years combined Montessori teaching and administration experience.

Chair of the Board of Trustees

HYPR NZ

* Coached leaders, from C-suite (including CTO, CIO, CDO) to senior practitioners.
* Helped leaders identify what change they wanted to make
* Coached them through organisational change
* Enabled technical teams to be more effective
* Brought clarity on what change meant, and how to achieve it, to leadership teams
* Aligned executives to development teams through workshops and coaching
* Developed internal coaching and mentoring programs
* Mentored and coached internal staff, from junior to staff levels
* Taught internal programs on feedback, systems thinking, and more
* Acted as practice lead, trusted advisor, vCTO, mentor, and coach
* Engaged with SaaS, insurance, banking, B2B, and B2C companies

Change Agent / Coding Architect / Transformation Consultant

Buildit.

Partner with organizations to help them become the sorts of places that can compete in the 21st century.
We build software. We build teams. We build new ways of working. We build better organisations.

* Solved previously unsolvable problems by identifying hidden connections between Individual
* Contributor behaviours and management policies
* Clarified systemic effects and unintended consequences of organisational behaviours
* Increased productivity at clients by more than 10%
* Re-engaged disengaged staff by removing blockers to their growth and effectiveness
* Unlocked previously inaccessible client demand, opening a market worth £500,000,000
* Transformed engineering approaches by introducing systems thinking, cross-functional teams, and choosing the right metrics to measure for success
* Long-term engagement and improvements that came from ICs and managers
* Reduced bugs and quality problems by reducing handovers
Increased automation and predictability
* Created new type of off-shore development teams that were able to connect with customers and develop products autonomously, which reduced time-to-go-live by 90%.
* Grew and mentored internal staff
* Applied systems thinking principles to large UK charity, enabling them to improve performance by more than 20%, with no additional costs

Transformation Partner

Cantor Consulting Ltd

Working with organisations to help them improve their IT. Inclusive service including SMT consulting around organisational strategy, and how it ties into IT; agile transformations to bring IT and the business into sync with each other; implementing specific IT projects that will help the organisation get things done.

A rare combination of technical experience, communications expertise, and coaching ability makes it possible for changes to be made in such a way as to encourage organisations to continue improving after the initial work is done.

Managing Director

Raising IT

Provide advice and consulting services for strategic, technical, digital, transformational, and operational decision making.

Technical Advisor

I work with executives and technology leaders who want their organisations to do better. I am a coach and technology leader who has spent 20+ years in and around technology, working with technical folks and leaders, and providing coaching and mentoring to people at all levels of an organisation. 

I bring a unique mix of skills, combining people, technology, and systems thinking, that makes me well-suited to helping people better understand themselves and their environments.

Over the years, I have helped numerous companies who were faced with seemingly intractable problems: people who appeared unwilling to change; technical debt that couldn't be tackled; work that was always late; software that was always full of bugs; leadership teams who couldn't agree on which problems to solve; organisational priorities that made sense to the people who put them together but still created irreconcilable conflicts. In every one of these cases, there's a key point or two which lead to the friction and what look like a myriad variety of problems. Being able to identify the key point, help everybody understand it, and then work together to solve the challenge is where I shine.

Speaker:
Creating Unity Through Systems Thinking - Agile on the Beach 2023

Teacher:
Visualising Systemic Dysfunction

taplio

The Battle

Giles Hinchcliff

Noah Cantor

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