kieren.cv@hynd.org - postal address, telephone details and references provided upon request.
Deeply involved in the design, deployment and maintenance of Ticketmaster's global B2C and B2B products, platform services and supporting infrastructure for nearly two decades. Fostered strong, effective working relationships across technical and non-technical global teams spanning multiple timezones.
Chief Architect (January 2023-)
Established and led an elite Enterprise Architecture team covering business, data and application architecture, embedded in Ticketmaster's highest-profile programs improving experiences of fans, clients and internal teams. Owned the global architectural vision of Ticketmaster, navigating a large and complex estate to identify opportunities for modernisation and consolidation. Applied Domain-driven design principles to ensure an evolvable architecture capable of adapting to a fast-paced industry, pivoting from independent monolithic ticketing platforms to a suite of global capabilities. Partnered with engineering and product at all levels across the business on tactical and strategic programmes to ensure timely, quality, outcome-oriented delivery in line with the overarching vision. Engaged daily in trade-off framing and the arbitration of technical decisions across multiple divisions.
Introduced and shepherded technical governance processes, including architecture reviews and a technology radar. Developed critical information sources such as capability catalogues, architectural principles and best practice frameworks. Led a strategic programme to enhance foundational data capabilities with a specific focus on the governance, quality and discoverability of data products.
Drove the M&A technical due diligence process for acquisitions, strategic partnerships and vendor selection over a ten-year period. Worked closely with acquired companies and played a key role in regional expansion and various organisational architecture initiatives. Participated in data and security risk councils, incident response and PCI & SOX audits. Collaborated with teams across the business to move innovations accelerated by AI safely to production, including the definition of AI policies, guardrails, metrics, and advocacy.
Systems Architect ("Senior" to "Distinguished", March 2011-December 2022)
Worked with global engineering, operational, and product teams to evaluate, research, and develop software for outward-facing and internal products & services. Ensured products were built for scale, availability and optimal performance. Evaluated new technologies, and worked with teams on patterns and developer tooling to ensure internal and external applications were deployed consistently in a redundant, scalable, and automated fashion across a variety of compute (bare metal, virtualised & containerised), storage and traffic management technologies on both an internally developed private cloud and AWS.Undertook frequent performance analysis and tuning at various layers, from lower-level kernel, TCP and NFS options through to core applications including Apache, PHP, Elasticsearch, Solr, HBase, and MySQL. Optimised the end-user experience by working with CDNs such as Fastly and Akamai. Created custom tools and enhancements for K6, Gatling, and Jmeter to simulate the unique and demanding traffic characteristics of Ticketmaster.
Notable projects include design and deployment of a high-throughput, redundant metrics collection platform based on OpenTSDB, HBase, and HDFS, capturing billions of data points per day. Designed and implemented a proof-of-concept successor using a composable telemetry pipeline based on Prometheus and Kafka. Additionally, designed and deployed a redundant log aggregation platform based on Rsyslog and the ELK stack, indexing multiple terabytes of data daily. Created practices and enhancements for an internally developed Linux configuration management system deployed to tens of thousands of servers. Designed and built its successor, leveraging Chef, Packer, containerised test environments and integration with a scalable, centralised LDAP/Kerberos infrastructure based on FreeIPA. Produced extensive documentation and worked closely with Linux and Windows teams to migrate large estates over to the new pipeline.
Systems Engineer & Manager (October 2009 - February 2011)
Managed the International Web Systems team, balancing project and operational work. Monitored high-demand ticket sales with unique traffic profiles and performed proactive maintenance to ensure the ongoing stability of highly available, transactional websites. Utilised reactive diagnosis & troubleshooting skills to maintain site performance during peak loads.
Planned, implemented and maintained systems for a medium-sized, business-oriented ISP. Engineered high-capacity, resilient services and assisted with the development of new products while providing high-level customer service. Maintained ISP-oriented services including email, web hosting, RADIUS, and DNS, alongside underlying database, backup, and monitoring facilities. Managed core, distribution and access elements of the network across multiple data centres, handling inter-AS peering and network merge operations.
Progressed to Systems Manager, taking responsibility for expansion budgeting and producing detailed technical reports for the board. Managed department staff from selection and recruitment through to appraisals and training. Developed internal web-based administration interfaces, provisioning systems, and CRMs. Established security mechanisms and customer support processes for both subscribers and outsourced IT contracts. Executed large-scale projects including a fully redundant spam and virus scanning email architecture, a custom WiFi hotspot network, and a distributed RADIUS platform with usage-based accounting.
Served as lead web developer for a well-publicised anti-bullying website. Worked in a small team to create and maintain a bespoke content management system and administrative interface built with Coldfusion and MySQL. Liaised with Microsoft, educational bodies, and a large publishing company to repurpose unique site content for use in schools.