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

SoCode Recruitment 

Award-winning Tech Business Development Consultant and (for want of a better expression) Headhunter, specialising in Senior Sales, Business Development, GTM, Customer Success, and Operations Recruitment.

Work with both established organisations and PE and VC backed Technology Start-ups and Scale-ups looking to source Strategic Commercial Executives (to C Level) across Cambridge and the East of England.

Specialist areas include Wireless Technologies, Telecoms, 4G/5G, RF, IOT, Automotive, Aerospace, Defense, Satellite, Energy, Batteries, Power, 3D Printing, AV, Electronics, Photonics, Robotics, Sensors, Semiconductor, Chemical Engineering, and Materials.

🏆 Winner of SoCode Best Business Developer 2023
🏆 Winner of SoCode Most Valuable Person 2023
💹 Billed over 170K in first year of building out new Commercial Division
💹 Scaled the IT Desk from cold to billing over 260K within first twelve months
💵 Billed nearly 70K in January 2023
🏆 Winner of SoCode Best New Consultant 2022
🏆 Winner of SoCode Service Champion 2022
😆 Winner of SoCode Top Shanter Award (let's not go into that)
📨 Author of ChatPT©️ Newsletter

Senior Recruitment Consultant

SoCode provides a range of RPO, Exclusive and Bespoke Recruitment Solutions to candidates and clients operating within the Technology sector across the East of England.

Passionate about recruitment and the brands we represent, SoCode was formed to address the challenges that our clients face in today's recruitment environment in a time and cost effective manner.

Technical Recruitment Consultant

Pure Vehicle Leasing

• Aid personal and business customers with contract hire enquiries
• Identify individual needs and requirements of each customer
• Work with multiple finance companies to find the right deal for each individual
• Work with SMEs and effectively guide them towards multi-vehicle solutions
• Manage and build relationships remotely through the use of telephone and e-mail
• Utilise CRM systems to manage diary and plan daily/weekly/monthly activities
• Ensure the timely and successful delivery of new vehicles in line with customers’ requirements
• Use contacts, networking, marketing and my own initiative to proactively generate new leads

Account Manager/Leasing Consultant

EMG Motor Group

Sales Executive

Game Devils

• e-commerce fashion accessory retail business, built from the ground up
• Maintain exceptional level of customer service (eBay Top-Rated seller for over five years)
• Research markets and monitor market trends and insights into customers and competitors
• Create effective marketing strategies to attract new business
• Prospect potential business partners and regularly attend trade shows
• Manage/develop supplier relationships remotely and through monthly/quarterly meetings
• Reduce operating costs through negotiation with trade accounts
• Fully responsible for owning relationships with all third-party providers
• Purchasing and inventory management, and maintaining stock levels at all times
• Financial management

Manager, Proprietor

Desira Group Plc

Sales Executive/High Performance Specialist

Hi! I'm Paul.

I'm an award-winning Tech Business Development Consultant and (for want of a better expression) Headhunter, specialising in Senior Sales, Business Development, GTM, Customer Success, and Operations Recruitment.

I work with both established organisations and PE and VC backed Technology Start-ups and Scale-ups looking to source Strategic Commercial Executives (to C Level) across Cambridge and the East of England.

My specialist areas include Wireless Technologies, Telecoms, 4G/5G, RF, IOT, Automotive, Aerospace, Defense, Satellite, Energy, Batteries, Power, 3D Printing, AV, Electronics, Photonics, Robotics, Sensors, Semiconductor, Chemical Engineering, and Materials.

If you fall into any of the above categories, please get in touch, and let's have a chat. 😊

🏆 Winner of SoCode Best Business Developer 2023
🏆 Winner of SoCode Most Valuable Person 2023
💹 Billed over 170K in first year of building out new Commercial Division
💹 Scaled the IT Desk from cold to billing over 260K within first twelve months
💵 Billed nearly 70K in January 2023
🏆 Winner of SoCode Best New Consultant 2022
🏆 Winner of SoCode Service Champion 2022
😆 Winner of SoCode Top Shanter Award (let's not go into that)
📨 Author of ChatPT©️ Newsletter

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Giles Hinchcliff

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