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

Conjurer Solutions Ltd

Head Of Consulting

LeaveWizard

LeaveWizard helps organisations streamline their leave and absence management by improving efficiency, extending visibility and automating complex calculations. 

LeaveWizard is SaaS leave, absence and overtime management solution designed for small business owners wishing to keep track of their people's whereabouts and for the small to medium company HR manager looking for more efficiency in managing and reporting on leave, absence and overtime. 

The product is hosted on the Windows Azure Cloud Platform and has been developed using ASP .NET, C#, HTML5, CSS and Javascript including the use of AngularJs for some more complex areas of the user interface and is built on top of a MS SQL Server database.

Developer South Coast - User Group

I am co-founder of the Developer South Coast user group which aims to bring its members great talks from the best speakers in the UK and where possible from around the world. Predominately we look at the Microsoft development stack, but we do have platform neutral and methodology based talks too.

My role here includes organising new sessions and ensuring the smooth running of each session as they happen. The user group helps me to stay up to date with the latest technologies and help to ensure that I am aware of the latest software development practices, techniques and technologies.

The GoLean Workshop

Whilst bootstrapping LeaveWizard.com we've learned a lot about how to apply lean startup principles and use tools such as the Lean Canvas, Traction Models and the Customer Factory to validate our business models and run experiments to test ideas.

We setup the GoLean Workshop with a goal of trying to help others learn quicker than we did and become better entrepreneurs faster.

PureGym

Software Development Consultancy (via Conjurer Solutions Ltd)

People Matter Technology Limited

Solutions Architect (via Conjurer Solutions Ltd)

Volution Technology Ltd

Volution Technology Ltd is an IT consultancy with a business head that focuses on helping companies to streamline their business processes by delivering joined up cloud technology. My role here was to use my existing .NET development skill set to provide key integrated solutions for clients looking to utilize the SalesForce/Force.com platform. 

This included becoming familiar with the nuances of Salesforce development platform and its complex licensing model whilst developing websites hosted in the Azure cloud platform using an Umbraco 7.2  CMS utilizing ASP .NET MVC, HTML5, CSS and Javascript that helped to capture leads into the client CRM systems.

I also played a key role in the introduction of the concepts of Kanban for project management that helped a number of clients to become more efficient in their business processes.

Fitness First UK

Underpinning the global re-brand and digital strategy for Fitness First were two core projects:

Global Web CMS
This project included the re-brand of 9 multi-lingual websites based upon EpiServer CMS 7.5 product. I played a key role in determining the architecture of the solution and helped to ensure the delivery of high quality software by working closely with the developers and testers to build a sustainable automated test framework built using Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) principles and the SpecFlow tool set combined with Continuous Integration builds and deployments. 

The websites were built using ASP .NET MVC, HTML5, CSS3 and various Javascript frameworks including Backbone.js with Marionette.  

Digital Platform
This project was a Microsoft Azure cloud based fitness data platform providing a high performance real time API and intelligence engine to underpin a major digital initiative. Using the technical skills adopted during the development of the Global Web CMS project I was brought into this team in order to further implement new capabilities utilizing MVC, HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.

i2O Water

Working in a fully Agile environment, this role was focused on developing back end services for an advanced water network monitoring platform. Utilizing Domain Driven Design (DDD) concepts and implemented using a CQRS message based design pattern that made use of Event Sourcing and No SQL databases such as RavenDb and Cassandra.

Active Navigation

Working together with the existing development team to provide a robust, BDD driven automation framework that will help make the team more Agile by improving application test coverage during development sprints and streamlining the process for adding new acceptance tests into the development process.

The role involves training and mentoring existing team members to ensure that the framework can be maintained and extended in the future.

Key technologies: .NET 4.0, C#, SpecFlow, Selenium, NUnit, Unity, WCF

BDD, SpecFlow and Test Automation Consultancy (via Conjurer Solutions Ltd)

LeaveWizard and I help organisations streamline their leave and absence management by improving efficiency, extending visibility and automating complex calculations. 

I am passionate not just about what I do but how I do it. I strive to add value to any company, team or individual by helping to introduce effective and efficient processes where ever possible.

I practice continuous improvement and actively look to find new and innovative ways of learning - I believe I can learn from anyone and everyone. I look to empower those around me, mentor younger less experienced colleagues and actively look to give credit to others.

I am a strong believer in the pragmatic use of automation to streamline repetitive tasks and I always look to bridge the communication gap between business teams and development teams.

Wherever possible I try to be an active community member by both running and attending business and technical meetups.

Useful tags:  #Lean #LeanStartup #RunningLean #GoLean #LeaveManagement #Agile

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The Battle

Giles Hinchcliff

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