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

Liqueo

Senior Delivery & Transformation Consultant

CPA Global

Scrum Master for the Renew team delivering a new Patent Renewals application, integrating several products across the CPA IP Platform to give users greater visibility and control of detailed information across their IP portfolio and the full renewals service cycle, reducing late fees and guarding against patent lapses and loss of IP. Establishing a common component library shared by all IP Platform development teams.
Coaching Renew delivery teams in Agile practices during a location-change related transition period and identifying training needs in the Renew delivery teams. 
Advising management on organisational level Agile process adjustments.

Scrum Master & Agile Coach

Barnardo's

Barnardo's Data Transformation programme consists of a number of initiatives whose aims are to:
- Understand the data needs and the data landscape of the organisation
- Improve data quality and increase confidence in data and analysis throughout the organisation
- Make data accessible, driving better insight and enabling data-driven decision-making; supporting Barnardo’s ambition to become an evidence-based Learning Organisation
- Ensure the use of data is properly governed and compliant (with a focus on GDPR and e-Privacy legislation)
- Create a cultural shift towards data integration into everyday practices and recognition as a critical enabler of commercial competitiveness
- Support the Corporate Strategy and business priorities

Agile Coach & Delivery Manager - Data Transformation

Delivery Manager working on the implementation, communications and organisational rollout of the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) Workplace by Facebook to 8,500 staff and 22,000 volunteers.

Coaching team members in Agile practices to improve transparency, deliver incrementally, and reflect and improve throughout.

Agile Coach & Delivery Manager - Workplace

adidas

Adidas Digital Brand Commerce (DBC) is responsible for delivering a premium digital experience on the eCommerce sites, via mobile apps and through CRM communications. DBC recently started their Agile journey. 

The Agile Coaches at DBC collaborate with the Management Teams, Tribes, Squads, Scrum Masters and Product Owners to identify (organisational) impediments, foster Agile awareness and propose improvements. 

Responsibilities included: one-to-one coaching for Scrum Masters and Product Owners, training larger groups on various Agile techniques, coaching teams to help them improve and achieve their potential, and helping senior management understand fundamental Agile principles, to embrace change, and empower their teams.

 Improving engagement with users within the business and external (customers)
 Improving team collaboration and forming more effective cross-functional teams
 Redefining product areas to improve team independence and empowerment
 Collaboration with all other Agile Coaches to define and encourage good practices across the organisation

Agile Transformation Coach

- Agile Coach and Scrum Master working with a Product Owner and a small team of developers to develop a team dynamic and introduce Agile practices as part of Barnardo's Agile Transformation

Agile Coach & Delivery Manager

Manifesto Digital

Manifesto is one of London's leading Agile agencies.
- Agile Coach for a team of Java and WCS (Web Centre Sites) developers and testers replatforming and delivering a new multi-lingual website for a large client account.
- Liaison with third party agency delivering HTML and CSS to Manifesto for integration with WCS and deployment to the client.
- Client liaison and facilitation to ensure priorities were being set and deliverables were clear.
- Running Learning Lunches to helping the teams improve processes and approach.

Agile Coach

- Scrum Master & Agile Coach for the Standard Media Player team, developing and improving the BBC video and audio players used across the BBC using Scrumban. 
- Working with the SMP Product Owner and Stakeholders in iPlayer, News, Sport, World Service, and Children’s to identify improvements and new opportunities, and agree release plans.
- Agile Coach across the wider Media Services department, helping development teams improve development and delivery practices, reduce waste, and deliver value.

River Island

Scrum Master working with a large cross-functional team on SAP Business Objects reports development. In addition to supporting the Product Owner in backlog creation and maintenance, helping the team to understand and estimate the backlog items, working towards greater team stability and reducing variability; the role was focused on coaching and education of the team and the wider business, as both were new to Agile practices.

Sainsbury's

Engaged as an Agile Coach & Scrum Master working with a large cross-functional team on a major overhaul of Sainburys.co.uk, moving to the cloud and creating micro-services to enable faster changes and remove dependencies on enterprise systems, as well as a redesign and implementation of the frontend to make it faster, more scalable and to add responsive behaviour.

Additionally worked with a cross-functional team to deliver the Christmas Food To Order website. This was a brand new website, hosted on AWS Cloud for scalability, and delivered using Continuous Integration and an automated test suite. It provided customers with the ability to pre-order their Christmas food for in-store collection.

Also worked with a cross-functional team, including two third parties, to convert and extend an existing offline tool to a web application in order to aid and inform the Range Planning teams in making decisions about which product choices to make each season using a number of metrics.

01/2014 to 12/2014: myBBC  - User Activity
My contract was extended on a project to develop the myBBC User Activity application. 	Responsible for managing the design, approval processes, development, and integration with iPlayer and data migration from the legacy systems.

05/2012 to 12/2013: BBC Online: Personalisation & Social Platform (PSP)
I was engaged as Project Manager & Agile Scrum Master. Responsible for managing the design, development and integration of pan-BBC favourites and updates, recommendations, and content sharing.

Senior Delivery Manager & Agile Scrum Master - Personalisation and Social Platforms 

Passionate about helping individuals, teams & organisations meet their full potential.

An Enterprise Agility Coach (ICP-ENT & ICP-CAT) & LeSS Practitioner (Large Scale Scrum), certified Scrum Master & Product Owner (CSM, PSM-I & II, PSPO-I & II), with a proven track record in helping organisations to deliver user-centric value iteratively & sustainably.  

Key areas of expertise include tailoring solutions for Agile Transformation & business change, & helping teams to embrace Agile practices & discover ways to innovate, improve & deliver products & processes. 

Excels at creating & delivering bespoke Agile training courses & workshops for teams, business & leaders.

Experienced in successfully troubling-shooting & re-energising teams & projects that have lost focus & motivation & are struggling to meet their goals, with an approach based on reducing unnecessary complexity, increasing transparency & bringing people together. 

Key Skills	 

Agile Transformation - Understanding the Enterprise context & customising an approach to optimise processes & change, from team structure, budgeting & prioritisation, through alignment & co-ordination practices, to implementation, delivery & beyond.

Agile & Waterfall Delivery Methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, Scrum of Scrums, Spotify model, XP, ScrumBan, Lean & PRINCE2 – plus many more frameworks & techniques) – drawn on as appropriate to reflect the diverse needs of the organisation &  the teams, helping them build their own Agile Toolkit.

Coaching, mentoring & creating bespoke training paths to create high-functioning, happy delivery teams, lean organisations & delighted customers.

Advising on best practice for ALM (Agile Lifecycle Management) tools such as Jira, Trello, Confluence, BigAgile.

Workshop Services:
Agile Maturity Assessments
Big Room Planning & Dependency Mapping 
Definitions of Ready & Done
Estimation & Story Pointing
Lean Value Stream Analysis
Retrospectives
Roles & Responsibilities
Story Mapping & Backlog Creation 
Story Writing & Acceptance Criteria (BDD) 
Story Splitting
Team Alliance / Working Agreement
Team Health Checks	
And many more...

Training Services:
Agile In A Nutshell
Agile For Business (HR, Finance, Legal etc)
Agile In Depth – PSM-I or PSPO-I Certification Prep
How To Run A Stand Up/Retrospective
Measurement & Metrics
Scaling Scrum 
Scrum Simulation – The LEGO™ Game
Team Structures	
And many more…


Favourite parts of the Agile Manifesto:

 - Individuals & interactions over processes & tools

 - Simplicity - the art of maximising the amount of work not done

taplio

The Battle

Giles Hinchcliff

Véronique Skelsey

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