Gareth Slade

Sole DevOps engineer for a 500+ employee global business, owning the entire DevOps function end to end.

Internal

• Sole owner of all AWS infrastructure across a 26-account AWS Organization, including multiple production workloads, as GitHub organisation owner and custodian of all IaC, CI/CD pipelines and Kubernetes configuration
• Inherited and actively remediating significant technical debt left by previous outsourced contractors
• Designed and built a reusable "cookie-cutter" EKS bootstrapping framework using Terraform and FluxCD (GitOps), provisioning a Fargate-first cluster pre-configured with VPA, Kyverno, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Flagger, External Secrets Operator, external-dns and Stakater Reloader
• Leading the migration of a business-critical workload from a single shared EKS cluster into segregated, environment-specific AWS accounts and clusters
• Designed and implemented a HAProxy solution on ECS Fargate providing transitive routing from a VPC-peered SaaS environment through AWS into the on-premise network via VPN
• Mentoring a colleague to build broader DevOps capability across the business

Professional Services

• Key senior contributor and, alongside the CTO, the primary deliverer of client-facing engagements
• Personally identified over $6M in annual cost-saving opportunities across multiple client AWS environments through independent cost optimisation analysis and reporting
• Delivered a live AWS Cost Explorer workshop to ~20 members of a client's technical team
• Delivered Well-Architected Framework reviews and 20+ AWS security assessments, having also previously supported the pre-sales activity that generated this business

Government A national law enforcement agency

• Provided thought leadership on attribute-based access control (ABAC), establishing the approach for the team
• Designed and configured federated access for ArgoCD via Okta
• Developed a scalable EKS node selection strategy and authored the operational readiness checklist

Financial Services The UK's Largest Pensions Insurance Specialist

• Solely responsible for designing and engineering core AWS solutions, including an enterprise-grade log consolidation solution and an EKS platform hosting Jupyter Notebook applications
• Designed and delivered an organisation-wide private DNS implementation and a platform-level breakglass access mechanism
• Led operational management of the organisation's EKS clusters and was principal contributor to the long-term engagement roadmap
• Acted as trusted advisor and AWS subject matter expert, presenting to key stakeholders up to CTO level

• Provisioned AWS resources using Sceptre / CloudFormation and authored solution capability templates
• Provisioned and managed Windows and Linux EKS clusters, configuring OIDC, RBAC, IRSA and IAM security controls
• Implemented monitoring and alerting across all production systems
• Conducted disaster recovery exercises and developed task automation scripts in Bash and Python
• Liaised daily with VIP stakeholders at director level and above, authoring runbooks, process and technical reference documentation

• Provided "fanatical" AWS support to a customer base of ~1500, building and maintaining secure, highly available and scalable customer environments
• Created versatile AWS CloudFormation templates and built deployment pipelines using AWS CodeSuite and GitHub web-hooks
• Configured custom CloudWatch alarms using metric filters and assisted the AWS CloudFormation team with beta testing of Drift Detection
• Developed Bash and JavaScript scripts to automate repetitive tasks
• Prepared, reviewed and executed scheduled maintenance tasks and managed packages within customer environments