A highly diligent and self-motivated infrastructure architect\technical specialist with over 15 years experience within highly regulated enterprise environments. Possesses an extensive technical background, solid operational experience with specialist focus on design, development, and support of complex infrastructure solutions. I have an outstanding record of consistent, timely project delivery within quickly moving organizations, coupled with a drive to identify technological improvements to increase efficiencies and provide business value
Building a CV website stack on AWS SAM consisting of custom domain name, CDN, database, APIGW, HTTPS, Python Lambda functions and full CI/CD workflows in GitHub Actions
The Natwest Currency Project was a high-profile project as part of the bank’s wider transformation initiative. I was responsible for Application re-platforming, SAN/NAS Currency, and Data Centre migrations.
Some key responsibilities / achievements
• Infrastructure Architect for a major currency project, supporting senior project managers in planning, stakeholder engagement, project governance and presentations to CAT 1 change board.
• Created high Level and Low-Level designs ensuring adherence to Natwest Infrastructure Standards
• Working with Group Security to define process for application migrations to Natwest Private Cloud
• Drove the adoption of SRDF based SAN migrations to reduce risk and improve efficiencies.
• Led the migration of several critical bank applications from legacy SAN onto EMC VMAX to support NatWest currency initiatives.
• Created detailed documentation on Windows servers in scope of currency migrations\upgrades
• Complex troubleshooting of storage software related issues with 3rd party vendor Veritas.
• Established Feature Teams and ensured they used JIRA for updating build, config and migration activities to track the status of user stories and epics.
• Worked closely with Directory services lead to design multiple solutions ensuring correct security standards are enforced
• Work closely with senior storage consultants to automate current and future state migration accessibility checks on NAS CIFS.
• Ran technical workshops with application teams to document current application architectures and shape migration delivery.
• Developed, managed, and maintained schedule of events for all server migrations in partnership with implementation and technology owners.
• Performed options analysis outlining opportunities for legacy application re-platforming or decommissioning in accordance with platform currency initiative
• Coached and mentored four technical resources to become integral members of the migration team.
• Conducted design reviews for POC build of critical shared services including Domain Controllers, IIS, Citrix Access Gateways and MS SQL servers
• Improved migration completion times through automation of pre/post verification tasks.
• Collaborated extensively with Data Centre leads to Identify several on-premises consolidation opportunities contributing to significant reduction in DC infrastructure footprint.
• Led a team of Technical SMEs to ensure hardware devices remained current and in line with security best practices – 1500 devices in scope. Responsible for the projects risk portfolio and ensuring correct governance in place
• Oversaw Technical Design Workshop to review and evaluate High\Low Level Designs to ensure designs meet the bank’s technical standards.
• Planning and supporting regular security update events of Production estate of 20,000 servers.
• Drove automation POC to standardize the banks automated server build utilizing Puppet and PowerShell and other Devops tools.
Provide 3rd/4th line support for over 1100 Windows Servers, 4000 VDI users and 6000 client PC's, and project-based Wintel server delivery. The project-based work consists of building, failing over and disaster recovery testing Wintel servers on HP blade, VMware vSphere and SAN technologies.
• Perform “fit for purpose” analysis of project infrastructure solution documents.
• Active Directory, group policy design and implementation.
• Produce project technical support documentation for handover into production environment.
• Plan, document and test disaster recovery procedures for virtual and physical infrastructure using NetBackup and VMware restores.
• Approver of new Wintel security design documents, ensuring the bank's security, SOX compliance and ITEC standards were followed.
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