Michael Haddon

Infrastructure Engineer • Site Reliability Engineer • Software Engineer

Jersey, Channel Islands

[email protected] | mhaddon | majhaddon | https://politepixels.io | @PolitePixels

 

Introduction

I am an extremely passionate Infrastructure Engineer constantly trying to improve my own skills and learn from new experiences. My favourite way to spend my pastime is to create educational content about Infrastructure, Cloud Architecture and what I call Developer-first Operations, for my website & Youtube.

At the moment I have a particular love and fascination over the Kubernetes Ecosystem.

My Developer-first philosophy prioritises empowering teams to focus on building and innovating, while seamless infrastructure and automation handle the complexities. I believe that adopting and integrating a strong DevOps culture is vital for companies to drive efficiency, collaboration, and developer productivity.

Recently, I have been focusing on helping organisations meet and exceed their requirements with Availability, Maintainability, Observability and Speed of Development. Which I believe are the core fundamental issues that DevOps, and therefore I, intend to solve.

I have a broad range of experiences in different work environments such as the Automotive, Logistical, Fintech, Finance, Hospitality, Software as a Service and Gambling industries.

Throughout my professional journey, I have had the opportunity become experienced with Remote Work and have successfully blended Efficient Communication and Teamwork with the perks of flexibility.

I hope this curriculum vitae is the start of a wonderful and memorable experience for both of us.

Skills

  • Driving License
  • English (Native)
  • IT Experience (13+ years)

Experience

PolitePixels Limited

Director & Infrastructure Consultant/Contractor

  • Managing infrastructures for clients in Fintech, Finance, SAAS & Logistics
  • Pursuing a focus for Developer Experience with strong CI-CD and infrastructure solutions
  • Providing tools and educational material designed to Simplify The Complexity Of Infrastructure

Technologies: AWS, Baremetal, BigQuery, GCloud, Golang, Kubernetes, Parquet, Proxmox, Tailscale
Responsibilities: Architecture Design, Engineering, On-call support
Highlight: Achieved a 0% release error rate by implementing thorough testing throughout the build process.

MN Services

Senior Infrastructure Consultant/Contractor

  • Lead investigation to produce readiness assessment reports to ensure program Operational Readiness
  • Aiding in planning the transition from development to a Production-Ready project
  • Restructured and greatly expanded project documentation to enable a Seamless Handover
  • Engineered outbound datalake solution, focused on Security, Performance and Cost Efficiency

Technologies: Apache Kyuubi, AWS Athena, AWS Lakeformation, FluxCD (GitOps), Kubernetes, Parquet, Terraform
Responsibilities: Engineering, Operational Readiness
Highlight: Teamed-up to drastically reduce project vulnerabilities, cutting them down from thousands to negligible figures, while also ensuring that new releases consistently met the high standards required for production environments.

Haddon Consultancy

Independent Infrastructure Consultant/Contractor

  • Managing infrastructures for clients in Fintech, Finance & Logistics
  • Specialising in managing Kubernetes for processing BigData systems on AWS and GCloud
  • Engineering automatic ephemeral integration environments for Continuous Integration pipelines
  • Coordinating with SOC Teams to investigate platform Anomalous Behaviour
  • Collaborating with the design of the future Infrastructure Architectural Landscape
  • Reorganising projects technical documentation, in order to Accelerate Onboarding Processes
  • Modernising of infrastructure from chaotic spaghetti to Structured GitOps repositories
  • Working in environments with Sensitive Data and Compliance Requirements

Technologies: ArgoCD (GitOps), Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform
Responsibilities: Architecture Design, Budgeting, Engineering, On-call support
Highlight: Successfully decreased clients' cloud spending by 65% through the strategic implementation of more efficient technologies and effective management of application configuration and resource allocation.

Dyme

Lead Infrastructure Engineer

  • Supporting a rapidly accelerating & expanding Fintech Startup
  • Architecturing new infrastructure landscape utilising GitOps, Service Meshes and Kubernetes
  • Re-engineering platform infrastructure from scratch utilising Open Source technologies
  • Building Continuous Load Testing Solutions to ensure stability during traffic spikes
  • Encouraging and supporting an environment which promotes Developer Responsibility
  • Investigating and assessing future infrastructure requirements based on the organisational goals
  • Maintaining a scalable platform on Google Cloud's Kubernetes Engine

Technologies: ArgoCD (GitOps), AWS, GCloud, Istio, Kubernetes, Terraform
Responsibilities: Architecture Design, Engineering, On-call support, Operational Maturity
Highlight: Recruited in response to challenges in achieving reliability targets aligned with product growth, I led a complete overhaul of the platform, successfully ensuring an availability uptime of 99.9%, while providing for a drastic increase of concurrent usage.

Portbase

Senior DevOps Engineer

  • Maintaining the core Logistical Tech-Stack for the Dutch ports
  • Architecting & engineering solutions for organisational CloudNative Adoption and transition
  • Assessing Operational Maturity against the organisational goals
  • Developing roadmaps for Observability, Stability and Scalability
  • Integrating modern release strategies, such as Canary releases
  • Organising and leading Training Workshops to coach the personal development of other engineers
  • Leading an investigation and project into the integration of Kubernetes, Service Meshes & Gitops
  • Responsibility for maintaining Highly-Critical Services on AWS and ensuring Availability Goals

Technologies: AWS, Istio, Java, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, Oracle, Terraform
Responsibilities: Architectural Design, Engineering, On-call support, Operational Maturity
Highlight: Following a challenging shift from third-party managed infrastructure to self-managed AWS, I led the initiative to significantly improve system reliability, reducing the mean time between incidents from daily occurrences to just once every few months.

Lunatech Labs

Consultant Site Reliability/Infrastructure Engineer

  • Providing services for a leading player in the German Automotive industry
  • Hosting Internal Workshops for inter-project knowledge sharing
  • Collaborating closely with International teams remotely and in-person
  • Coordinating infrastructure support with International clients

Technologies: Scala, Java, DC/OS, Kubernetes, Javascript
Responsibilities: Client Engagement, Onboarding, Training
Highlight: Streamlined the engineer onboarding process for projects by implementing comprehensive training, significantly cutting down the time required to bring new team members up to speed.

Audi Electronics Venture

Consultant Site Reliability/Infrastructure Engineer

  • Managing over 400 AWS EC2 instances across 15 Clusters
  • Engineering automated deployment solutions with Terraform and Ansible
  • Developing CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins, including automatic Nightly build testing
  • Orchestrating Docker and UCR containers with DC/OS and Kubernetes
  • Supporting highly distributed Big Data processing nodes

Technologies: Ansible, AWS, Datastax (Cassandra), Docker, DC/OS, Jenkins, Kafka, Kubernetes, Mesos, UCR
Responsibilities: Engineering, On-call support, Client Engagement
Highlight: Drastically reduced the complexity of our CI/CD system, so-much-so, that the average CI/CD ticket complexity dropped by half.

Twelve40

Full-Stack Developer

  • Engineering core services for an international Gambling platform
  • Maintaining and developing a PHP website using the Silverstripe framework
  • Leading Javascript frontend transition and rewrite from ECMAScript 5 to ECMAScript 6
  • Leading modernisation of CSS architecture to SCSS
  • Developing Java tools for Continuous Production Compliance Testing
  • Creating, configurating, nurturing, and later automating, LAMP staging servers
  • Automating creation and configuration of Local Development Environments with Vagrant and Puppet
  • Working closely with clients across Three Continents

Technologies: Apache, Java, Javascript, Linux, MySQL, PHP, Puppet, SCSS, Vagrant, Virtual Machines
Responsibilities: Engineering
Highlight: Enhanced our system's testing efficiency by dramatically decreasing the time required to establish test environments, from several weeks to mere minutes, thereby boosting our ability to conduct reliable testing swiftly.

The Processor Centre

Consultant Systems Administrator & Technical Support

  • Maintaining the IT infrastructure of 30+ local companies
  • Working with companies in Many Industries, notably hospitality and finance
  • Organising continuous Disaster Recovery Testing of highly critical and confidential data
  • Configuring Firewalls, Routers and High Resilience servers
  • Providing phone and On-site Technical Support

Technologies: Linux, Virtual Machines, Windows Server, Windows, Sophos, VMWare
Responsibilities: On-call support, Client Engagement

Freelance

Website Development

  • Working with small clients in the local hospitality, education and music industries
  • Creating bespoke websites with integrated Content Management Systems
  • Hosting on my own CentOS servers, and later, AWS EC2 machines

Technologies: Apache, AWS EC2, Javascript, Linux, MySQL, Nginx, PHP, CSS, Virtual Machines
Responsibilities: Client Engagement, Engineering, On-call support, Product Management

Education

Cloud Native Foundation

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

Highlands

BTEC (Business and Technology Education) Diploma

Covered:
  • Object Orientated Programming in C#
  • Software development processes of Scrum, Agile and Waterfall methodologies
  • Server Networking
  • Core understanding of computer operations

Results:
  • BTEC National Diploma for IT Practitioners: Triple Distinction
  • COMPTIA A+ Essential Support Skills: Pass
  • COMPTIA A+ Practical Applications: Pass
  • COMPTIA Network+: Pass