kieren.cv@hynd.org - postal address, telephone details and references provided upon request.
I worked in, and with various teams responsible for the design, deployment and ongoing maintenance of Ticketmaster's global B2C and B2B products, and their supporting infrastructure/platform services.
As a Linux systems engineer and subsequent manager (October 2009) of the International Web Systems team, I enjoyed a mixture of project and operational work, such as the monitoring of high demand ticket sales (often with unique traffic profiles), proactive maintenance and reactive troubleshooting to ensure the ongoing smooth running of a variety of highly available, transactional websites.
As Systems Architect ("Senior" to "Distinguished", March 2011-), I was responsible for working with global engineering, operational and product teams to evaluate, research and develop new and existing software and hardware technologies for use within the business, ensuring products were built to scale and perform well, whether running on dedicated hardware, virtualised or containerised in our private or 3rd party clouds.
The role often involved acting as an "integrator", bridging Engineering and Operational teams, particularly during our migrations technically to a Service Oriented Architecture, and organisationally to Product Delivery Teams. I evaluated new technologies, and ensured internal and externally written applications (including Kafka, HDFS, HBase, Solr, Elasticsearch, Prometheus, Nginx, Apache httpd, Tomcat/JBoss, ActiveMQ/ServiceMix, Couchbase/Memcache, MySQL and HAProxy) were deployed consistently and in a redundant, scalable and automated fashion.
I undertook frequent performance analysis and tuning at various layers, from lower-level kernel, TCP and NFS options, through core applications (including; Apache httpd, PHP, Elasticsearch, Solr, HBase/HDFS, MySQL) to the end user's browser (working with CDN's such as Akamai and Fastly), benchmarking both software and hardware for evaluation purposes and ongoing capacity testing (with tools such as Gatling.
I worked with a mix of bare metal, virtualisation (primarily Xen, a little KVM/Ceph, with forays into Openstack) and container (Docker, Kubernetes) technologies as part of a internally developed, private cloud and AWS. Other hardware includes installation/upgrading/tuning of NetApp filers, Citrix Netscaler and Foundry ServerIron loadbalancing devices.
Some recent projects include:
Good communication skills and flexibility are vital in maintaining effective working relationships with the various technical and non-technical global teams in the company, across multiple timezones.
At KeConnect I was responsible for planning, implementing and maintaining the systems of a medium-sized, business-oriented ISP. I enjoyed both working alone and as part of a team to engineer high capacity, resilient services and assist with the development of new products, whilst at the same time providing an excellent level of customer service.
Daily tasks included maintaining a variety of ISP-oriented services such as email, web hosting, RADIUS and DNS, and the underlying database, backup and monitoring facilities. I also worked as part of a team to maintain the core, distribution and access elements of the network spread across multiple datacentres, handling inter-AS peering and a variety of network merge operations
After progressing to Systems Manager (February 2005) at KeConnect, my role encompassed budgeting for future expansion, producing detailed technical reports for the board and liaising with other department managers to ensure the smooth-running of the company. I took care of staff employment in the department, from search and selection, through to appraisals, training, disciplinary and grievance issues. I dealt effectively with staff to ensure a positive attitude towards work, developing a high morale and team spirit.
My other responsibilities included creation and ongoing development of various internal web-based administration interfaces, provisioning and CRM systems, product development and documentation, establishment and enforcement of security mechanisms and customer support for both outsourced IT contracts and subscribers.
Some larger projects I drove/executed included a fully redundant, spam/virus scanning email architecture, a custom WiFi hotspot network, a distributed RADIUS platform (including usage-based accounting information and bandwidth management) and a system-wide API providing integration with many platforms for internal and customer-facing applications.
Lead web developer on a well publicised anti-bullying website, I worked in a small team to create and maintain various components of a bespoke content management system and featureful administrative interface. Later work involved liaising with several educational bodies, Microsoft and a large publishing company as facets of the site, and Pupiline's unique and original content, was repurposed for use in schools.
I have also undertaken the following courses:
Outside of work, i try to make time for; building Pantomime sets, the odd game of pétanque, contributing to Open Source projects, making and eating curries, swimming in the sea, smoking meat and playing the accordion...