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101 Ways

Technical Director

Zoopla

Created a programme with four teams around an Objectives and Key Results structure to modernise an enterprise dotnet application and reduce the lead time for changes from weeks to days.
Modified the branching and merging strategy, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD pipeine and dependent applications to move Zoopla's flagship CRM product from twice-monthly releases to release-on-demand.

Principal Software Engineer

Created a new frontend tech stack hosted on AWS ECS Fargate using React, Next.js, GraphQL and a component library using Storybook.
* Engineer onboarding time reduced from two weeks to one day.
* Product delivery was reduced from months to weeks.
* An Optimizely integration meant multiple experiments running every week

Consultant at Zoopla (via 101Ways)

JUST EAT

Created a Serverless Scorecard application that gamified reliability, security and best practice ensuring all microservices maintained consistently high standards.

Implemented a Serverless and SAAS strategy for SRE products that liberated savings in excess of 1M GBP and improved reliability and performance across the network accessibility, monitoring, and alerting products.

Interim Director of Reliability Engineering

Transformed the Service Operations and Assurance department into a product-focussed Site Reliability Engineering department. The transformation, including hiring a director, clarifying and streamlining the team's roles and responsibilities led to significantly improved productivity and better relationships with the development teams.

Led a multi-million pound project to implement AppDynamics Application Performance Monitoring which led to a significant reduction in mean-time-to-respond and improved the performance of the build, deploy, test cycle for microservices.

Delivered a 1.5% availability improvement on the Just Eat platform allowing Just Eat to confidently sponsor X-Factor in 2018.

DevOps Consultant

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)

Created a two-year DevOps and Cloud Strategy, transformation roadmap and architecture guide to enable the DWP's digital transformation journey and cloud first strategy.

Built a DevOps team to lead Infrastructure Automation which led to a reduction in environment provisioning from over a week to just a few minutes.

Created a Capability, Training and Mentoring Strategy to guide the formation of a DevOps Engineer training programme.

Head of Strategy and Architecture, DevOps

Next Gen DevOps

Author of the Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework. Published July 2015. Available on Github: https://github.com/grjsmith/NGDO-Transformation-Framework

The Next Gen DevOps Transformation Framework is an attempt to provide organisations with a structured approach to a DevOps transition.

The framework is presented so that anyone reading it can understand the nature and complexity of a transition to DevOps. It also allows organisations to choose which challenge to tackle first. Each project has been structured to provide clear benefits. In addition to this the framework presents further capabilities that can be made available to an organisation with a little extra work by combining the capabilities delivered by multiple projects.

Author of Next Gen DevOps: Creating the Devops Organisation. Published October 2014. Available on Amazon: http://amzn.to/1VCPZnj

Next Gen DevOps: Creating the DevOps organisation looks at the history of computing and the latest trends in technology, management theories and psychology and proposes a new way to build, launch, management and operate the next generation of online services.
“Next Gen DevOps is a must read for the modern technology leader looking to build a sustainable, healthy, change-supportive organisation.” by GLS, amazon reviewer
“If you want to know more about DevOps and what it means to your business, read this book.” By Christopher L, amazon reviewer

Author

Hive, by British Gas

Delivered a large scale, high performance, maintainable Internet of Things platform for Connected Homes, resolving a number of widely reported performance and reliability problems.

Built a DevOps team to develop and maintain the heterogeneous infrastructure consisting of Amazon Cloud instances, managed hosting and dedicated servers that supports the Hive Active Heating (https://www.hivehome.com/) product and the platform.

Delivered a continuous integration solution for the platform allowing integration with the front-end web services.

Head of Operations

Electronic Arts (EA)

Led an Operations team running over 3,000 Amazon Cloud instances supporting 20M Daily Active Users across the portfolio. Created a collaborative DevOps environment by exposing Operations data and capabilities to the product teams.

Created 50%, 20% and 33% Amazon Cloud cost savings in years 1, 2 and 3 respectively with intelligent use of Reserved Instances, improvements in architecture and design and investment in tools and process.

Created and implemented a run-time Configuration Management systems using Opscode Chef scaled for 3,000 instances.

Created a culture of running the business using real-time information presented on custom dashboards. Provided all staff with real-time billing transaction, active player, product metrics and system availability on context sensitive displays.

Created tools used EA wide providing better visibility into Amazon Cloud costs and highlighting where Reserved Instances could would be most efficient.

Launched: Madden NFL Superstars, released on August 31, 2010, World Series Superstars, released March 30, 2011, Monopoly Millionaires, released on January 31, 2011, The Sims Social, released on August 9, 2011, NHL Superstars, released on October 5, 2011, RISK: Factions, released on January 11, 2012, SimCity Social, released on June 25, 2012, JetSet Secrets, released on September 20, 2012
Madden NFL Social released on October 16th 2012

Director Of Operations

Managed AOL’s technical relationship with Carphone Warehouse (CPW).

Senior Technical Account Manager

As an experienced technology leader I spend equal time building and leading teams, delivering projects,, stakeholder management and software and system architecture. In recent years I have specialised in digital transformation, cloud, DevOps, Platform Operations and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) transformations.

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