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

Commercial experience with the following languages and technologies:

• Interpreted scripting: Perl, Unix shell (ksh, bash)
• Programming: basic working knowledge of C
• Web technologies: XML, HTML, CSS, SOAP, AJAX, LAMP
• Databases: ANSI SQL, MySQL and Oracle
• Data warehousing: Trillium, SAS (base and macro)

Other:

• Unix and Linux system administration
• Firewall configuration using Linux iptables and OpenBSD pf
• Mail server configuration; knowledge of e-mail related protocols (SMTP, POP3, IMAP)
• CVS and Subversion source control systems
• Working knowledge of Cisco IOS
• Maintainer of the File::MergeSort module on CPAN

Work Experience

Performed application penetration tests, evaluating applications for vulnerabilities and design weaknesses, using a combination of manual and automated test methods, before providing recommendations to help clients improve application security.

Introduced standardised, automated, server build and update processes to allow engineers to easily provision and maintain consistent environments. Introduced an LDAP infrastructure to simplify account management. Carried out routine system administration tasks.

Carried out software development and maintenance tasks as necessary.
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 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.

Sales role with technical focus. Position involved designing test and automation systems to match customer specifications, answering technical questions in addition to handling general sales leads.

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, Hants.
Achieved A-levels in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, all grade D.

1993 - 1994. The Clere School, Burghclere, Newbury, Berks.
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.