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

IAG Tech

Consultant - DevSecOps/Security solution architect and an engineer on the Global Data Platform division of the business.

I'm working with the SecOps team to deliver security and operational improvements to client's global data platforms. The solutions I've built are optimising delivery, minimising security risks and decreasing costs.

• Designed architecture, usage patterns and solution designs for Terraform, code testing, binary files/artefact management.
• Built Python library vulnerability scanning tool using Prisma Cloud, Checkov and AWS CodeArtifact services.
• Built encryption/tokenisation solution for data leaving the security domain using Lambda, AES encryption, and AWS S3.
• Defined operational and security processes for SDLC and DevOps like branching strategy, releases etc.
• Delivered SCA and security scanning capabilities for IaC tools with Palo Alto Prisma Cloud
• Collaborated with customers on improving security posture and contributed to a positive reception of the Global Data Platform.

DevSecOps Engineer

DataPhoenix

DataPhoenix helps businesses unleash the value of their data. We aid positive and lasting change by delivering robust implementations of data platforms built on AWS ( like data lake, data mesh and lake house) enabling data analytics and ML capabilities. Our skilled and personable team provides consulting and professional services. Contact us to learn how we can help make to make a difference.

Director & Co-Founder

JD Blayer Ltd

I saved 60% of customer’s budget and lowered security risks by migrating application from RackSpace to AWS and implementing latest security standards.

•	Lead small team of consultants and onboarded customer’s Software Engineers to new solution
•	Created budget comparison between existing and proposed solution including operational costs 
•	Delivered AWS environment, application/service and security architecture
•	Developed and implemented tech stack based around AWS, Docker containers, K8s + helm + TF, CI/CD with CircleCi

DevOps Product Owner & Architect

Richemont

Consultant - Product Owner for DevOps within Group Technology.

Delivery highlights 
•	Developed vision, strategy and roadmap for DevOps platform product
•	Responsible for DevOps product backlog prioritisation, based on maximising business value (ROI)
•	Lead development of target operating model
•	Improved service demand process by introducing Service Catalogue
•	Established fruitful communication channels with clients
•	Managed relationships with internal and external stakeholders, evangelised DevOps vision
•	Unified cross department service delivery model
•	Organised DevOps community of practice (CoP)
•	Built Centre of Excellence (CoE) for DevOps
•	Improved hiring practices

DevOps Product Owner & Platform Owner

IHS Markit

I was a consultant embed as part of the AWS professional services team, leading critical service migration effort (AWS with CI/CD Gitlab/Terraform/Git/EC2).

Delivery highlights
•	Developed Terraform/GitOps architecture & standards 
•	Helped develop platform architecture in AWS that would be used to migrate on-prem application (web service + oracle db with 16TB)
•	Brought improvements to the security and deployment process
•	Helped to structure Scrum practices and coached team on Agile methodologies 
•	Contributed code for GitLab CI/CD pipeline, Terraform modules and implementations (S3, IAM, EC2, ALB, ASM, ORACLE RDS, EFS, VPCE)
•	Implemented integration testing (AWSpec) and unit testing (pre-commit, chekov) via docker image

DevOps Consultant - Lead

Consultant on Data Team. Delivering Data Platform in AWS with CI/CD Jenkins/Terraform/Git.

Delivery highlights
• Implemented product and business value-oriented Platform delivery in co-operation with Platform Owner and Product team
• Brought improvements cantered around security and deployment for Data Lake
• Structured Agile ceremonies and coached team on scrum practices, achieved better sprint delivery predictability 
• Contributed code for Jenkins CI/CD pipeline, Terraform modules and implementations (S3, IAM, EMR, ECS, EMR, EFS, VPCE, KM, Git repos pipeline and CODEOWNERS) 
• Implemented integration testing (AWSpec) and unit testing(pre-commit, chekov)
• Collaborated with Data Engineers and Data Scientists to optimise end user experience
• Provided training goals for junior Engineers and strategy for on-boarding to new joiners

Senior DevOps Consultant - Lead

Gold and Black IT

Director & Founder

Hive | Centrica Hive Limited

Lead team of engineers to deliver and maintain Data Platform and Data Lake in AWS environment. My responsibilities were split 60/40 between leading and hands on.

Delivery highlights
•	Managed stake holders and team delivering Data Lake project
•	Provided training goals for junior Engineers and strategy for on-boarding to new joiners
•	Developed Terraform modules for Data Lake service, launched into production and maintained it
•	Implemented code testing and documentation as code (Test Kitchen for TF and pre-commit-terraform) 
•	Implemented CI/CD pipeline with self-service workflow based on GitHub/Atlantis/Terraform
•	Collaborated with Data Engineers and Data Scientists to optimise Data Lake solution workflows

Head of DevOps Consultant

Ladbrokes Coral

Worked on cloud migration project for LadbrokesCoral, enabling software engineers to port their services to new platform. Utilising AWS and CI/CD with Jenkins on a customer workflow.
Projects delivered:
- Implement Jenkins and CI/CD pipeline for application deployment
- Implement Terraform workflow for deployment of ECS services
- Manage and continuously improve ECS cluster with DEV to PROD workloads

DevOps Consultant

Consulting on AWS architecture and DevOps engineering in a finance industry organisation.
Delivered following projects:
- Cisco CSR implementation connecting AWS sub accounts and on-prem
- AWS Managed Microsoft AD with trust to enterprise directory

Principal Consultant (Cloud Architecture)

Technical enthusiast and entrepreneur specialising in Data and DevOps solutions on AWS.

Focused on IT Operations and Data Services ( data lake, data mesh etc)

Key skills in Data Lakes, Data Platforms, DevOps, Agile, AWS, Linux, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, docker, shift left, SDLC.

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Giles Hinchcliff

SoboL Sobieski

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