About
CTO and principal cloud architect with over twenty-five years in infrastructure, from early public cloud work to leading platform engineering, DevSecOps and cloud programmes for airlines, national public services and regulated organisations. At Amach Software, progressed from DevOps Consultant to CTO, leading a technical organisation of around 300 people with 10 direct reports, and took Aer Lingus from half-yearly releases to daily deployments on a GitOps platform used by 30 teams. Now builds secure environments for AI coding agents and developers, alongside DevSecOps and infrastructure-as-code work across AWS, Azure, GCP and bare metal. An open source contributor from an early age, and a mentor in the community ever since. Available through Unicorn Operations for remote contract work and fractional CTO engagements.
Skills
- Cloud and Networking
- Infrastructure as Code and GitOps
- Containers and Orchestration
- CI/CD and Developer Platforms
- Security and Compliance
- AI, Agents and Data
- Observability and Reliability
- Languages
- Leadership and Delivery
Experience
-
Founder, Principal Consultant and Chief Unicorn
Ireland
- Built MCP servers and AI agent tooling
Client: Triton One
- Managed hundreds of Bare Metal servers across multiple data centres and providers worldwide, and multi-region Nomad environments, as code using OpenTofu, with changes planned and applied through Atlantis
- Deployed developer tooling, including Coder, to provide contained and secured environments for AI agents and developers, used by tens of developers and operations engineers
- Secured AI coding agents, including OpenAI Codex and Claude used through Zed and Orca, with network isolation, RBAC and SSO, audit logging and secrets handling
- Worked with Vault, Consul and etcd alongside GCP and AWS cloud environments
Client: Allianz Ireland
- Hardened five Azure-hosted Kubernetes environments, each with its own cluster, using DevSecOps practices, and provided wider DevSecOps consulting
Client: HSE
Ireland
National Organ Donation Opt-Out Register, introduced under the Human Tissue Act 2024
- Worked within Scrum teams to deliver national services using Azure, ensuring compliance with HSE security and data protection (GDPR) requirements
- Provided technical leadership to operations team on Azure and Terraform best practice, including security hardening and lifecycle management of cloud resources
Client: Aer Lingus
Ireland
- Enabled the data team to use data tools such as Databricks, Monte Carlo and Atlan, managed with GitOps, to manage data across Aer Lingus and apply ML models to Aer Lingus data
- Ensured security controls, access governance and GDPR compliance were applied across the data platform
Amach Software
–
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
– Ireland
- Led a technical organisation of around 300 people, with 10 direct reports
- Provided strategic guidance to Amach during a critical growth phase from a small consultancy to the leading Cloud Aviation Specialist it is today
- Advised three airlines on GenAI tooling, including RAG chatbots on Amazon Bedrock and GitHub Copilot, and implemented it at one
- Worked on both existing client management and provided technical advice on new sales
- Managed multiple teams across multiple clients
Director of Technology
– Ireland
DevOps Consultant
– Ireland
Client: Aer Lingus
Ireland
- Introduced SRE and GitOps to Aer Lingus
- Designed and implemented cybersecurity architecture across AWS including WAF, GuardDuty, Security Hub and network segmentation to protect customer-facing and internal services
- Designed multi-cloud networking architecture using AWS Direct Connect and managed migration to an SDWAN, ensuring secure and resilient connectivity across environments
- As part of DevOps pipeline introduction, helped performance testing teams using JMeter and other tooling make performance testing part of the deployment pipeline
- Migrated away from single AWS accounts to a full AWS Landing Zone of 20 accounts, including Control Tower, all managed with Terraform, establishing security baselines and lifecycle management across all accounts
- Instituted full change control process moving from manual control to full GitOps/DevOps using Terraform, Terragrunt and Atlantis, run as an internal platform used by 30 teams (around 300 people)
- Ran a Backstage developer portal proof of concept
- Led DevOps and Software Engineering efforts within Aer Lingus focused on DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics and increasing deployment speed, moving from half-yearly releases to daily deployments
- Designed isolated networking model for microservices to increase security posture, enforce least-privilege communication and simplify developer access
- Introduced Grafana, managed by Terraform, for service monitoring, security event visibility and management
- Managed Amazon MQ deployment for communication between AWS and on-prem hosted services
- Introduced service-to-service communication using mTLS, ensuring encrypted communication across all internal services
- Introduced containerisation in the development tools stack using ECS and Fargate, managing the full container lifecycle and later migrating to Kubernetes via EKS, including security policies and image scanning
- Managed migration and network design for the entire estate, from existing data centres of Windows, Linux and IBM zOS mainframe and legacy AWS accounts into the new AWS Landing Zone, Azure and Kyndryl zCloud, designing secure connectivity and ensuring reliable communication between AWS, Azure and zCloud
- Migrated first databases from on-premise to AWS RDS, introducing managed databases with encryption at rest and in transit
- Automated service testing with Capybara, a Ruby frontend to Selenium
- Migrated from legacy on-premise Bitbucket to GitHub.com and provided a fully GitOps/IaC managed system for managing GitHub access and configuration
- Provided teams access and mentoring on usage of GitHub Copilot
- Created Cloud Security model for operating microservices and developer access across AWS and provided security consulting across IAG
- Migrated legacy databases and data warehouse from on-premise to Snowflake
- Enabled usage of Databricks, facilitating access to cloud data sources, management via IaC, security controls and building data pipelines
- Replaced manual data access requests with fully automated access for the data science team across Databricks and Snowflake
- Migrated the estate from plain-text secrets with no rotation to AWS Secrets Manager with encryption and fully automated rotation, eliminating long-lived credentials
- Provided third-line on-call for service escalation, including security incidents
Storm Inc.
–
Principal Consultant
Client: HMPPS
Sheffield, England
National probation system used by every probation office in England and Wales
- Worked as a DevOps consultant and Product Owner in HMPPS to migrate the national Probation system from an existing entrenched supplier to AWS, delivered on time and on budget, covering all areas of the project, from contract negotiation to technical architecture, security design and stakeholder management
- Designed secure and reliable AWS environment for the national probation system, meeting UK Government security standards and handling sensitive offender data
- Integrated with services on the MoJ-managed Kubernetes platform with appropriate network security controls
- Designed migration from legacy on-premise Oracle products to modern cloud-native solutions for authentication and data management, implementing secure identity and access management
- Worked within a high-security environment handling sensitive and confidential data related to the national probation service
Nationwide Building Society
–
DevOps Consultant (contract)
Swindon, England
- Brought DevOps ways of working to an existing set of development teams within Nationwide Building Society and managed a kops Kubernetes deployment on AWS, integrating with existing DC-based banking system and designing secure connectivity between DC and AWS
- Managed Jenkins infrastructure providing CI/CD for development teams
- Introduced service-to-service communication using mTLS
- Ran performance testing using JMeter
- Configured Jenkins using Groovy
- Helped service teams deploy apps using Helm on kops-managed AWS Kubernetes deployment
- Operated within a regulated financial services environment with strict security and compliance requirements
Scrumconnect
–
Head of DevOps
Fractional from May 2018, alongside Storm Inc.
Client: HMPPS
Sheffield, England
- Designed secure network access from Azure and AWS into the UK prison estate, working with sensitive environments and classified network boundaries
- Built new deployment pipeline for Digital Hub content delivery service and learning platform deployed into multiple UK prisons
- Provided DevOps and security consultancy across the HMPPS Digital Studio and wider MoJ
- Managed infrastructure on both Azure and AWS using Terraform for deployments, including security hardening and compliance with UK Government standards
- Provided teams CI/CD pipelines using CircleCI
- Deployed services into MoJ-managed Kubernetes platform
- Consulted across many UK Government departments on DevOps and security practices, providing guidance to Scrumconnect teams helping Scrumconnect scale
Client: DWP
Preston, England
- Took Carer's Allowance live digital service from manual checklist deployments to a continuous delivery pipeline using Jenkins DSL Pipeline and Saltstack
- Ensured deployment pipeline met UK Government security standards for handling citizen data
Kainos
–
Solutions Architect
–
DevOps Consultant
–
Client: DVSA
UK
National MOT testing service, used by around 60,000 testers in 22,500 garages and recording up to 150,000 MOT results a day; the first national government service hosted at scale on AWS
- Trained and mentored Kainos staff on DevOps working practices
- Managed operations teams across suppliers and delivery programmes
- Provided technical thought leadership across the organisation
- Worked to rescue the MOTMP programme from certain failure by independently diagnosing systemic issues and bringing together Development, Test and Operations functions to fix performance issues and create a successful service
- Migrated from legacy service in data centres to VMware-based virtualisation provider and then further migration into AWS, which became a landmark project for both DVSA and AWS and won Cross-Sector Digital Collaboration at the DL100 Awards 2016
- Migrated from manual deployments to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
- Ensured service met all UK Government security standards including penetration testing and vulnerability management
- Used Prometheus and Grafana to provide debugging, security monitoring and health overview of the national MOT service and debugging of performance issues
Client: RPA/DEFRA
UK
Rural Payments service (CAP Delivery programme), paying over £1.5 billion a year to around 105,000 claimants in England
- Trained and mentored Kainos staff on DevOps working practices
- Provided business cases for radical government department change
- Provided DevOps and security expertise to multiple teams and projects across RPA/DEFRA
- Central to launching the RLRV service on time and on budget
- Instrumental to saving the CAPD project after failure, independently identifying root causes and bringing teams together from different suppliers to deliver on the user and business needs
- Managed deployment pipelines in TeamCity
- Provided local development infrastructure with Packer/Vagrant and infrastructure automation with Terraform
- Ensured services met all UK Government security standards
Paragon Internet Group
Head of Systems Operations
– Maidenhead/Slough, England
- Designed and deployed new service provider network using Cisco routers and Juniper switches
- Deployed configuration management and centralised authentication into existing systems using Puppet and FreeIPA
- Documented all existing systems and put in place documentation procedures using RackTables and Subversion
- Mentored a placement student and existing staff
- Created and managed a small operations team of fewer than 10 people
- Managed customer environments, including Hadoop
Namesco (Dada group)
EU Lead Infrastructure Developer
– Maidenhead, England
- Developed multiple new cloud products based on Hyper-V, Virtuozzo and OpenStack virtualisation platforms
- Supported existing Cisco/Juniper/Extreme networking and systems infrastructure managed by Puppet/LDAP/Subversion
- Merged disparate infrastructure from previously acquired companies, collecting all systems under one Puppet/LDAP/Subversion instance
- Mentored other staff through the migration to new automated infrastructure
The Server Market
Founder
– Falkirk, Scotland
TomTom
–
Senior Systems Administrator
– Edinburgh, Scotland
- Carried out new product research and development instrumental in shaping the TomTom PND platform
- Built DevOps and CI using Cobbler, Puppet and an in-house developed CI system
- Automated systems deployment using Cobbler
- Automated systems healing using Puppet
- Developed systems tools with Red Hat ET on open source systems automation
Systems Administrator
– Edinburgh, Scotland
XCalibre Communications
–
Systems Architect
– Livingston, Scotland
- Developed and launched Flexiscale, the first public cloud platform in Europe
- Managed projects
- Led the team
- Automated systems deployment
- Administered shared and dedicated hosting
- Deployed configuration management using CFEngine
Systems Administrator
– Livingston, Scotland
Pulsant (formerly edNET)
Systems Administrator
– Edinburgh, Scotland
Technical Support
– Edinburgh, Scotland
Scotweigh
Consultant
– Falkirk, Scotland
Public speaking
- Launching an airline into the cloud HashiConf 2023
- DevOps: Supporting aircraft from hanger to take-off DevOps Days London 2024