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CV

Mike Bell
Author
Mike Bell

Mike Bell
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DevOps Engineer - Remote & Manchester UK
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DevOps Engineer focused on AWS, management, building and maintaining of infrastructure and projects.

I’ve been remote working for over 9 years, taking responsibility of my own time management and ability to work with teams based anywhere in the world. At MoJ Cloud Platform I manage, maintain and support users in our Kubernetes cluster. I’ve managed critical incidents professionally and often help other team members. I enjoy pairing up with colleagues and working on tough and interesting problems.

Outside of work I maintain my own on-prem and cloud infrastructure where I run multiple VMs and containers focusing on home automation software. When not working I love to build Lego, design and build custom keyboards, cook and play with my cats.

Employment History
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Ministry of Justice - Cloud Platform - November 2023
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Cloud Platform team.

  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Incident management

My role on the Cloud Platform team takes me across many different areas of Kubernetes, Terraform and AWS. I’m currently running an initiative to decouple or terraform/k8s stack ready for upcoming work on moving to multi cluster, this has included creating a custom Python tool to migrate terraform state and Concourse pipelines to automate the process. I also provide support to our users and often have to solve complex issues. I’ve been involved in Kubernetes cluster upgrades and managed critical incidents.

Platform Engineer - SpareRoom - May 2023 to September 2023
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Responsible for managing and maintaining GCP infrastructure.

  • Terraform
  • Jenkins and Github Actions
  • GCP

Senior Consultant - Platform Engineer - Hippo Digital - February 2021 to February 2023
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Government Property Agency - Built and maintain a multi environment AWS setup for a data warehouse and accompanying ingestion and APIs. Currently managing 12 AWS accounts for two different projects (ETL and Data Warehouse).

  • Cloudformation and subsequent refactor to Terraform/Terragrunt
  • CodePipeline, Codebuild and Github Actions
  • RDS
  • Lambda Functions (Python using Chalice)
  • Ansible
  • Cognito

Sega, Creative Assembly - PaaS for highly available multilingual static sites with a focus on security. Consultancy around other properties in the Sega portfolio.

  • Terraform/Terragrunt for a repeatable multi environment platform
  • CodePipeline, Codebuild and CodeDeploy
  • API Gateway, Cognito, Cloudfront, ECR, ELB/ALB, VPC/EC2, S3

DevOps Engineer (previously Senior Developer) - Convivio - June 2016 to February 2021
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Cabinet Office National Leadership Centre - I helped to build and maintain an AWS EKS cluster for their now defunct Leadership Network Connect. The first objective of the project was to compare existing architectures available through the Government such as GOV.UK PaaS and GSP (GDS Supported Platform), while both have their benefits we were unable to use them for our needs so proceeded to build our own. Following building our own we made sure to open source our work to create a repeatable UK government friendly Kubernetes cluster.

  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • Concourse
  • Prometheus
  • Kibana

GDS TechDocs - With the help of others via pair programming we built the API integration for the TechDocs gem. This required an in-depth knowledge of the OpenAPI specification and learning Ruby on Rails. A challenging project but one where I scoped the features we could deliver within the time given.

Internal Systems - Responsible for the development and maintaining of Convivios internal infrastructure.

  • Terraform
  • AWS, EC2/S3/DynamoDB/RDS
  • Ansible
  • Concourse

Cyber Essentials Plus - I have run the company through the CE and CE+ audits to ensure that we’re compliant with their standards. As part of this I’ve also started our investigation into ISO 27001. I chose to run Cyber Essentials project as a Kanban to make sure it was visible to everyone what they had to provide and where we were going through the process. It worked really well and there was a very quick turn around.

MOJ Judicial Appointments Commission - Responsible for development and support of the JAC application system.

  • Development of new features using Drupal and PHP.
  • Support of existing features and infrastructure including CI and deployment. Implementing and monitoring the support queue.
  • Application debugging and performance monitoring/improvements at the server and code level.

Senior Developer - WunderUK - January 2016 to June 2016
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Ministry of Justice JAC/JARS - Complex reporting functionality across hundreds of datasets. This involved liaising with many MOJ team members to get a greater understanding of the data they have and how they wanted to use it.

Kew Gardens Grow Wild - A large print and TV campaign that required high availability form submissions using a custom PHP API.

Internal Projects - Wunderhub - a headless Drupal 8 site with built in API for exposing various bits of information about users and their skills.

Drupal Technical Architect - CTI Digital - 2013 to 2015
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Drupal Technical Lead - Ixis - January 2010 to August 2013
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Web Developer - Inphinet - April 2008 – December 2009
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Commitment to Open Source and Community
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I like to give back to open source communities whether that be in code contributions or speaking at conferences. I’m a confident public speaker and proud to have keynoted at DrupalCon Barcelona and spoken at PHPNW Conference.

In the past I co-ran a Drupal user group in Manchester for many years and regularly ran hackdays for the community.

I part administered a mental health support group on Slack for people within the tech community, I’ve also contributed to Geek Mental Health week including maintaining the website and running events.

Education
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2004 – 2007 – Degree in Multimedia and E-Commerce Systems at the University of Gloucestershire

2002 – 2004 – A Levels, Dixons City Technology College:

  • AVCE ICT (Double Award) - BB
  • General Studies C
  • Physics D

2000 - 2002 - GCSE, Dixons City Technology College:

  • GNVQ ICT (Merit)
  • English Literature (B), English Language (B)
  • Maths (B)
  • Chemistry (B), Physics (C), Biology (C)
  • Geography (C), German (D)

References available upon request.