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

ABSC (Absolute Business Solutions Corp.)

Subject Matter Expert teaching and implementing sustainable value delivery. This was specifically for the companies flagship software "Syntasa". I eliminated toil related to deployment, upgrading, and securing the product across multiple federal security enclaves with some air gapped. Identified bottlenecks, implemented a robust CI/CD pipeline, wrote flexible and modular IaC, and implemented a secure vendor agnostic secrets management solution. Reduced product upgrade time from 2 weeks to 10 minutes. Discovered flaws in software and deployment process instantly, instead of weeks later through strong systems of work. This enabled 5x + deployments per day and dramatically reduced unavailability risks. Taught peers about ex-nihilo deployment methodologies, Ansible and Terraform best practices.

Once above work was at end, performed as a Sustainable Value Delivery SME for the DIA DTP program. Using Test Driven Development, implemented a GitLab project migration tool that migrated over 900 public, private, and personal repos, LFS, and all other associated data required in airgapped and non-airgapped situations. Attempted to teach prime communication best practices, psychological safety, systems level thinking, conways law, good culture, and the importance of well implemented CI/CD.

Sustainable Value Delivery SME

Everbridge

SRE for the JARVISS Army program via Everbridge. Leading migration effort from traditional legacy administration to modern DevOps in the cloud. Implemented and taught peers basics behind git, trunk based code management, Terraform, Ansible, and best practices for building idempotent infrastructure in an ex nihilo fashion. Significantly reduced complexity and difficulty of deployments, while increasing reliability through IaC. Resolved hundreds to thousands of STIG controls through the use of IaC. Solved issues using powershell, python, and bash as required. Focusing on blue/ green deployments and auto CI/CD via gitlab. Act informally as SCRUM master, Agile Coach, Senior DRE II, ISSM, Platform Architect, and Federal DevSecOps Implementation lead. 

Brief executive leadership on threats, business management efficiencies, cost saving models.

Provide one of the best uptime metrics in the DoD to keep DoD members safe.

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Pueo Business Solutions LLC

Responsible to administrating secure Windows, Solaris and Linux servers capable of transferring data to domains of various sensitivity. Maintain, improve, and develop automated solutions to complex and abstract issues vital to maintaining the DHS I&A intelligence lifecycle. Technical accomplishment of tasking is primarily achieved by leveraging functionality of built-in scripting languages, integration with enterprise logging tools (Splunk), and Infrastructure as Code (IaC via Powershell & Ansible). As a subordinate I successfully introduced an Agile and Dev/Ops for Engineering framework, to ensure more consistent work, higher quality work and best security practices as a priority. Make recommendation to customer as required & develop/ implement architectures to satisfy requirements.​

Consultant (Site Reliability Engineer)

ManTech International Corporation

Ensure DFS namespaces are available, and replication is consistent across the entire Marine Corps Enterprise Network (Spanning 17 time zones) via Microsoft Distributed File Service. Proactively upgrade, maintain, de-conflict and provide subject matter expertise on DFS matters. Integrate, and leverage Active Directory, Group Policy, and Powershell, to minimize administrative overhead and maximize utility. Primary concerns and duties revolve around user data having the highest degree of availability.​

Windows System Engineer

Defense Intelligence Agency

Administrate Linux architecture on an enterprise level used by tens of thousands. Utilize configuration management tools to administrate dozens of servers at a time. Troubleshoot obscure problems with few clues on proprietary and non proprietary software. Provide reporting on status of systems and networks using system monitoring tools. Collect, communicate, and resolve tickets generated by users at other government agencies. Maintain infrastructure and multiple information feeds, with multiple varying network protocols. Administrate and provision machines via AWS services (C2S, S3).

Linux System Administrator

United States Marine Corps

Accountable for users accounts, networks, and functionality of assets. Using Active Directory for a wide range of uses including creation, configurating permissions, and deleting accounts. Additionally troubleshooting any problems in functionality to include Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, and any network/hardware errors.

Internet Service Co-ordinator

Administrating windows server versions 2008, 2012. Maintain functionality of and troubleshooting services and features such as ADDS, ADFS, IIS, WDS, WSUS, GPO, SQL, DNS, WINS, DHCP, proxies, VPN connections,  and IPSEC issues. Accomplished particularly using symmetric load balanced server clusters and the aid of Hyper V. Maximizing server automation to create efficient time and financial management.

Windows Server Administrator

Primarily work with CISCO routers and switches utilizing IPV4, IPV6, and INE devices to connect local and geographically distant networks. Harden networking devices by applying latest firmware patches, securing ports, and configuring who has access to the network, while minimizing sniffing potential. Consult to determine appropriate devices, security, and limitations of networks by leadership, also maximize bandwidth and minimizing downtime by writing policy and emergency action plans.

Networking Specialist

Oversee and ensure continuity of operations across Non-Classified, Secret, and Top Secret networks. Administrate server in coordination with external agencies, troubleshoot proprietary applications, and build server/ workstation images. Delegate tasks as appropriate to subordinates, with appropriate information. Preemptively modify information systems, networks, and paperwork to ensure continued communications.

Network Operations Manager

Account for and maintain millions of dollars in Satellite Communications (SATCOMM) equipment. Consulted by leadership on limitations of equipment, timeliness, and de-conflicting scheduling of equipment utilization. Teaching subordinates about qualities and limitation of SATCOMM, and how to operate equipment.

Satellite Communications Manager

Provide IT support to students, teachers, and later Marine recruiters/ poolees in the form of multiple services. This includes laptop/ desktop repair, Apple Itouch and Iphone customization (jailbreaking), gaming server creation and hosting (Minecraft/ Unreal Tournament), software & OS troubleshooting, recommendations on hardware, gaming desktop builds, computer optimization, Microsoft local security policy security hardening and other like IT support functions.

IT Support Technician

I engineer technologies, procedures, and cultures primarily in the DOD.

Over 18 years my work has received awards, commendations, and acclaim from peers, customers, and management.

Examples include

- Migrating a DoD SaaS with XX,000 users to Agile & DevOps
- Enabling said SaaS to perform at a greater than 99% availability
- Migrating a flagship product to CI/CD and IaC in one quarter
- 2,300 code contributions over two years
- Top Performer Award (top 50 of 2,600)
- LOV Award (Peer nominated)
- Architected, engineered, lead and developed an enterprise grade, drift-less air gapped private cloud
- Automated myself out of a position in 3 months
- Resolved tens of thousands of STIG via Compliance as Code
- Migrated multiple applications from VM workloads to container based workloads
- Invented the term and practice of Ex-Nihilo deployment strategies
- Invented the term and practice of Constant Reference Engineering (CRE)

Founder Oxtail Labs LLC We spun up a page as well if you'd want to join 

https://www.linkedin.com/companies/oxtail-labs

Investing in my reputation and past performance can turn the tide on failing programs - and push successful programs towards escape velocity 🚀

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The Battle

Giles Hinchcliff

Timothy Kaczynski

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