Kieron Harding - CV
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Senior DevOps Engineer with extensive experience in Azure, Kubernetes, Elastic, Helm, Terraform and CI/CD Pipelines. Passionate about automation, security and optimising cloud infrastructure for high availability. Experienced in mentoring teams, collaborating with stakeholders and driving automation securely and efficiently.
Current Role
Senior DevOps Engineer - Matrix Security Watchdog
MARCH 2024 ⏩ PRESENT
- Infrastructure Leadership: Lead the design, implementation and cost optimisation of our Core Platform infrastructure, with high availability and security by design.
- Automation & Security: Spearheaded improvements in our IaC (Infrastructure as Code) processes, Cloud Management and Posture as well as improvements to our Gitlab projects, focusing on scalability, automation and security enhancements.
- Mentorship & Collaboration: Mentoring junior engineers in the department and collaborating with Technical Architects and key stakeholders to drive continuous improvement in CI/CD processes.
- Operational Excellence: Overseeing our 24x7x365 service availability, ensuring seamless scaling and system robustness during standard operation as well as upgrades in Production.
Previous Roles
DevOps Engineer - Matrix Security Watchdog
NOVEMBER 2020 ⏩ MARCH 2024
- Driven infrastructure improvements using Terraform, Kubernetes, Azure and Gitlab to ensure and deliver a highly available and performant 24x7x365 system.
- Optimised our CI/CD pipelines, reducing deployment times into Production by 65% and increasing efficiency during upgrades.
- Enhanced security measures across our cloud infrastructure by implementing automated patching to reduce vulnerability lifetime windows by 90%.
Digital Solutions Consultant - Security Watchdog
FEBUARY 2019 ⏩ NOVEMBER 2020
- Led the implementation of Azure Sentinel, still in Preview, strengthening our cloud security posture and achieving greater visibility across our estate.
- Managed a telephony migration project, improving operational efficiency.
- Collaborated with Microsoft to resolve business-critical issues.
- Supported InfoSec Teams in compliance and policy enforcement.
Key Projects
Core Platform Continuous Improvement
- Leveraged Terraform to strengthen and improve the Core Platform’s infrastructure.
- Enabled rapid iteration and deployment into Production, reducing time to market for new features and security improvements.
- Ensured scalability and resilience, continuously optimising cloud resources for performance as well as cost efficiency.
Cloud Cost Optimisation Initiative
- Implemented auto-scaling into our clusters, using various data points to define scale activity, reducing cloud spend by 30%.
- Migrating workloads from classical deployments to optimised Kubernetes clusters, improving efficiency.
Security & Compliance Overhaul
- Automated security patching across multiple kinds of resources using Terraform to strengthen and improve our infrastructure posture.
- Enabled rapid iteration and deployment into Production, reducing time-to-market for new features and improvements.
- Ensured scalability and resilience, continuously optimising cloud resources for performance and cost efficiency.
Skills and abilities
- Programming: Python, Terraform, bash (focused on automation & infrastructure as code).
- Cloud Infrastructure: Extensive experience with Azure, managing web apps, Linux VMs, and cloud security.
- DevOps & Automation: Expertise in Terraform, Kubernetes, GitLab, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Database Management: Proficient in SQL, including query optimization and database modifications.
- Monitoring & Logging: Experience with Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK Stack.
- Security & Compliance: Strong knowledge of Azure Sentinel, DevSecOps best practices, and InfoSec policies.