About

Good platforms.
Clear thinking.

I'm a Lead Cloud Engineer with more than seven years designing, automating, and operating cloud-native platforms across financial services, the public sector, and retail. Today I lead cloud engineering on a financial-crime intelligence data platform at Lloyds Banking Group. I work deep in Kubernetes, Terraform and Python. Lately I've been getting curious about the data and AI tooling built on top, learning how retrieval and evaluation systems work by building small ones from scratch. I like turning repetitive, manual work into reliable automation, mentoring engineers, and explaining complex systems clearly to technical and non-technical people alike. Clients I've supported include Lloyds Banking Group, the UK Home Office, and the John Lewis Partnership.

Lead Cloud Engineer at Lloyds Banking Group Yorkshire, United Kingdom

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Experience

Built through experience.

The places I’ve built platforms, automated delivery, and learned what reliable engineering looks like in practice.

  1. Nov 2023 to Present

    Lead Cloud Engineer at Lloyds Banking Group

    • Lead cloud engineering on the Economic Crime Intelligence data platform.
    • Build reusable cloud and platform patterns that improve consistency and delivery.
    • Strengthen reliability and operability through automation, observability, and least-privilege access.
    • Mentor engineers and communicate architectural trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

  2. Apr 2022 to Nov 2023

    Senior DevOps Consultant at Publicis Sapient

    • Built automated deployment pipelines (Terraform, Jenkins, Helm) delivering applications to GCP for Lloyds Banking Group, enabling faster, more reliable releases.
    • Cut environment-provisioning pipeline runtime from 4 hours to 2 by analysing and documenting bottlenecks for the Platform Engineering team.
    • Led on-prem-to-GCP network design over dedicated Interconnect, and ran bi-weekly tech-talk sessions for 6+ months to embed CI/CD best practice.
    • Engaged through my own consultancy, Fregata Consulting (Director), founded to provide specialist Cloud & DevOps engineering.

  3. Mar 2019 to Apr 2022

    DevOps Consultant → Senior DevOps Consultant at IBM

    • Cut National Law Enforcement Data Programme deployments from half a day to under 30 minutes with parallel Jenkins release pipelines that now run multiple times a day across environments.
    • Built GCP Terraform modules integrated into Jenkins for Lloyds' new API management solution (Apigee X).
    • Identified up to 90% AWS hosting-cost savings using EC2 Spot instances; findings fed into the production architecture.
    • Refactored Jenkins pipeline code from 600 to 300 lines via a shared library, and mentored across five Scrum teams.

  4. Sep 2016 to Mar 2019

    Technology Graduate at John Lewis & Partners

    • Reduced platform-onboarding Google Group creation from a one-week process to under 5 minutes by automating Google APIs with Python in GitLab CI.
    • Built tier-based GCP pipelines (Terraform, Kubernetes) for faster delivery, and added Prometheus observability via a custom NGINX base image.
    • Rotated across seven roles spanning Business Intelligence, iOS development and DevOps, across the John Lewis and Waitrose brands.

  5. Sep 2014 to Aug 2015

    Undergraduate Software Engineer at Sage

    • Maintained Sage UK&I's subscription sales systems, resolving live issues for internal and external customers.
    • Designed and built a rollback tool to correct mis-applied subscription changes, helping Finance issue timely customer refunds.

Skills

Tools for the work at hand.

The cloud, delivery and observability tools I work with, alongside the systems I’m learning by building.

Cloud & Containers

  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Helm

Infrastructure as Code

  • Terraform
  • Vault

CI/CD & Automation

  • Jenkins
  • GitLab CI
  • GitHub Actions
  • Gradle

Languages

  • Python
  • Go
  • Bash
  • Groovy

Currently exploring

  • RAG
  • Claude API
  • Embeddings
  • ChromaDB
  • Evaluation

Observability & Quality

  • Prometheus
  • Dynatrace
  • SonarQube
  • Nexus

Beyond the day job

Learning is better shared.

Mentoring

I mentor engineers one-to-one and across teams. It's the part of the job I enjoy most.

Learning in public

I learn by building: small repos for Go, algorithms and AI tooling, kept open so others can follow along.

Writing & talks

I write up what I learn and build demos to explain complex systems, like my live Kubernetes control-plane talk.