Curriculum Vitae

Technical Proficiencies

Commercial experience in the following areas:

• Application security penetration testing
• Development of e-mail and web security as managed services
• Development of ETL on a multi-terabyte data warehousing system
• Unix and Linux system administration

Commercial experience with the following languages and technologies:

• Interpreted scripting: Perl, Unix shell (ksh, bash)
• Programming: basic working knowledge of C
• Web technologies: REST, AJAX, HTML, CSS, SOAP, LAMP
• Databases: ANSI SQL, MySQL and Oracle
• Data warehousing: Trillium, SAS (base and macro)
• Virtualisation: VMware ESXi and Server, Xen
• Message queuing systems: beanstalkd, RabbitMQ
• Configuration management: Puppet

Other:

• Software release management
• Redhat kickstart provisioning and package management systems (RPM)
• CVS, Subversion and git source control systems
• Firewall configuration; OpenBSD pf and Linux iptables
• Working knowledge of Cisco IOS and HP ProCurve configuration
• Mail server configuration; knowledge of e-mail protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP)
• Maintainer of the File::MergeSort module on CPAN

Work Experience

Evaluated systems for vulnerabilities and design weaknesses as part of application penetration testing, using a combination of manual and automated test methods before providing recommendations to help clients improve application security.

Introduced an automated server provisioning infrastructure and associated processes to allow engineers to easily build and maintain consistent environments.
Administered and upgraded the company's internal network and server infrastructure - replacing a mix of legacy systems with modern, standardised systems. Built the company's virtualisation platform then migrated services and applications from legacy systems. Introduced an LDAP infrastructure to simplify account management.

Carried out software maintenance and development tasks.

Mentored junior technical staff and carried out peer reviews with more experienced engineers.

Developed and maintained the company's MailControl managed e-mail security service, working on the LAMP platform using Perl with Mason.

Designed and implemented software to allow the automated enrolment of new customers, including functionality manage customer assignment to MailControl clusters. This work has significantly reduced the workload of Customer Services and Operations.

Implemented changes to the licensing and accounting subsystem of the company's portal, including facilities to automatically control the customer's enabled services, removing the need for Customer Services to manage the process.

Worked as technical lead and was involved with interviewing and mentoring new technical staff.

Defined the process to build system and integration test environments, allowing developers to build consistent environments representative of production.

Worked on the company's multi-terabyte data warehouse, maintaining ETL code and specialising in data cleansing and customer matching applications using Perl, Trillium, SAS and Oracle.

Re-architected and refactored a batch process to cleanse Centrica's multi-billion row customer database and merge updated Post Office address information. My new system corrected all known issues with the previous system and could be run unattended within a weekend, whereas the previous system took up to a fortnight and required considerable manual intervention.

Enhanced a mission critical matching application to consistently execute in minutes rather than days, adding system capacity and reducing hardware costs by a quarter of a million pounds.

Managed weekly released to the production environment, and introduced the CVS source control system to manage the department's code repository.

Led a group of helpdesk analysts supporting several thousand users by telephone.

Acted as a system administrator for the company's proprietary inventory database on Unix.

Education

1997 - 1999. Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, Midlothian
Studied for two years towards a BEng (Hons) Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

1996 - 1997. Cricklade College, Andover, Hampshire
Achieved A-levels in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, all grade D.

1993 - 1994. The Clere School, Burghclere, Berkshire
Awarded nine GCSEs including Science (double award) at grade BB, English and Mathematics at grade C.

Hobbies and Other Activities

I used to play rugby, although these days I'm more likely to be found watching games in the stands or the pub with friends.
I enjoy attending gigs, listening to music of various genres, particularly progressive rock and metal.
I'm a keen amateur photographer, preferring street and landscape photography.