Andrew Hardie


E: hardieas@gmail.com | T: +44 (0)7801 823345


Dev[Sec]Ops, Platform Engineering, Observability,

Automation, CI/CD, Event-Driven Systems.


Key Highlights


30+ years experience with automation, infrastructure & networking

30+ years experience with Unix/Linux

30+ years experience with Web servers and Web services

20+ years experience with CI/CD pipelines

10+ years experience with containers, event-driven systems, observability & DevSecOps

5+ years experience with Kafka, etc


Wide experience across public sector, large companies, NGOs & start-ups

London based

Open to Perm and Contract roles

Active & current SC & NPPV3


Core technical skills & recent experience


Core/current Techs: Linux/Unix (Ubuntu/Debian), Ansible (500+ roles written), Terraform, Git, Containers (Docker, etc.), Kubernetes, Kafka, Cloud (Azure/AWS/GCP), Nginx, Haproxy, Caddy, SSH, ELK, Vault, Prometheus, Beats, Jenkins, BASH, Perl, MySQL/MariaDB, PgSQL, GitLab, Grafana, Artifactory, Nexus.


Summary


Very experienced, hands-on IT senior professional with 30+ year record of creating, managing and delivering innovative and successful project solutions, designs, systems and valuable intellectual property for high-profile public, private and NGO clients, with a reputation for high-quality advice, guidance, thought leadership and problem-solving across a wide range of requirements.


Roles (contract & permanent) have included DevOps Lead, Strategy Architect, Systems Architect, Observability, Head of IT, Senior DevOps Engineer, Strategic Consultant, Senior DevOps Manager, Transformation Lead & Lead Developer, working for seven parliaments (including the UK House of Commons), eight UK Government departments (including BEIS, MOD, MoJ, Home Office), the Metropolitan Police, three Local Authorities, Tony Blair's private office, Royal Household, Council of Europe in Strasbourg, HSBC, Lloyds Bank, two hi-tech startups. Extensive consulting experience, deep tech to enterprise strategy.


Comfortable at all organisational levels from the coding coalface to the Boardroom & beyond, including Parliamentary Select Committees. Regular conference speaker & panel session participant. A well-known figure on the London DevOps & related tech scenes.


Evangelist for pervasive automation, orchestration, event-driven systems and “everything as code”. Proponent of “Accelerate”, “You write it, you run it”, Supply Chain Integrity, Observability, Event Driven systems and loosely-coupled system architectures. Strident advocate of ongoing hands-on learning to maintain currency with rapidly-changing tech. Active mentor to team collegaues and beyond. Perpetually curious about new tools & techniques, to evaluate their uses & benefits for the organisation and its clients.


(Last update Jun 2025)

Recent Roles (2014-present)


Senior DevOps Manager, Madison Logic Ltd (09/2024 - 12/2024)


Senior DevOps Manager for US-based Business Intelligence company, providing qualified leads to subscriber companies for marketing purposes. Large scale data streaming platform (Apache Airflow) and data lake (Snowflake). Responsible for managing a multinational team in North America, London and India. Role primarily management, with only limited hands-on activity.



DevOps Consultant, Devoperative Ltd (PSC Contracts) (04/2022 - present)


Contract engagements on several projects, including an extreme sports community video website, a public/private sector network and cloud services company, a major Government secure Law Enforcement platform, a crypto-currency token exchange platform and an online food safety training & certification service, all typically involving Cloud (AWS, Azure), Terraform, Ansible and a range of Observability components, based on Kafka, including Ansible roles for deployment & configuration of Kafka Kraft instances.



R3, Production DevOps Team Lead & Infrastructure Services Lead (06/2020-03/2022)


Production DevOps Team lead for Corda enterprise permissioned blockchain for business platform, planning and implementing Infrastructure as Code, production deployment automation, observability instrumentation, etc, in VMs and migrating to Kubernetes, with responsibility for service definitions, security assessments and observability (based on Kafka)


Tech: Azure, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Kafka, OPA, Containers (Docker), GitHub, Cockroach DB, ELK, Grafana, Loki, PostgreSQL, Nginx, Atlassian suite, etc.


Later, promoted to Infrastructure Services Lead (Platform Engineering), with larger team, designing/implementing a range of persistent and on-demand (as code) infrastructure services, such as Kubernetes, Kafka, Deployment, Observability framework, Policy, Secrets, CI, Storage, etc, into K8S on Azure, AWS, GCP. Supervising teams in Singapore, London & New York.


Tech: Terraform, Vault, Grafana, Kibana, CockroachDB, Beats, Kafka, Druid, Superset.



DevOps Consultant, Devoperative Ltd (PSC Contracts) (10/2018-05/2020)


DevOps Engineer in the Civil Nuclear and Resilience Directorate of the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. Responsible for upgrading and stabilising the management infrastructure and systems, for a joint BEIS/MOD project (NERIMNET), ahead of major delivery milestone. Tech: AWS, CentOS, Docker, PgSQL, Ansible, Jenkins, GitLab, Nexus, Nginx & Atlassian suite.


DevOps Strategy Architect in the Enterprise Architecture and Cyber Security Division of the Metropolitan Police. Working on creating Strategy and new Architecture for the future of Digital Policing and triage activity on legacy systems migration to the cloud.


Design and specification of the future SDLC toolchain to achieve end-to-end, self-service, fully-automated build, package and deployment of applications into multi-cloud environments (initially Azure) with infrastructure as code, “everything as code” and immutable architecture, across multiple deployment models including bare metal, traditional VMs, micro-VMs, microservices, containers, Kubernetes, serverless and event-driven (streaming) systems.


Included extensive research and survey of market/community trends, vendor assessments and creation of POC demonstrator projects (esp Kafka, Open Policy Agent, Druid, Superset) and to validate new architecture patterns, e.g. use of Kafka-based Event Driven System for police incident response support.



Lloyd’s Banking Group, DevOps Transformation Lead (04/2017-09/2018)


DevOps Transformation Lead in the Payments, Fraud & Financial Crime division of Lloyds Banking Group (in the Wipro team). Migration to the cloud of a large number of legacy Java applications from AIX/WAS to Liberty/WAS, Docker & Kubernetes in IBM Cloud Private and introduction of DevOps principles and practices to the COBOL code development for the IBM Z-series mainframe systems.


DevOps expert on major AML programs, implementing Jenkins pipelines for deployment, configuration & maintenance of BigData ETL and data matching systems using Hadoop, HDFS, Hive & Spark. Test automation. Implementing MIS dashboards. New technology evaluations and POC demonstrators. Leading/mentoring onshore and offshore DevOps and provisioning teams. Delivering regular in-house team presentation events on new tech & best practices.


Tech: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Jenkins, Ansible, Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Spark, Gerrit/GitHub, Nexus, Atlassian Suite, IBM Cloud Private, public cloud, etc.



DevOps Consultant, Devoperative Ltd (PSC Contracts) (10/2014-04/2017)


Senior DevOps Engineer in HSBC Digital Technology for Corporates program team, assigned to Global Business Banking, developing division-wide standards for DevOps and full CI/CD for Java-based microservices deployment to VMs and Cloud Foundry across development teams located in London, Canada, Poland, India, and Hong Kong / China. Tech: Jenkins, Ansible, l CloudFoundry, Git/GitHub, Stash, Nexus, SonarQube, ELK, RHEL, MuleSoft.


Senior DevOps/Automation Engineer and Infrastructure as Code Specialist in the Ministry of Justice, working on build & deployment pipelines for the £350m Common Platform Project and to enhance DevOps practice. Wide experience across the program and leading a small team with a primary focus on infrastructure creation, acceptance testing, monitoring and deployment using a large Ansible codebase with builds and deployments run via Jenkins slave farms. Agile, Jira, Confluence, SonarQube, etc. Tech: Jenkins, Jenkins Job Builder, Ansible, PostgreSQL, Alfresco, Artemis, Zabbix, ELK. Deployment from Gerrit/GitLab & Artifactory of Java Apps into a multi-tier test and release promotion pipeline (DEV, SIT, NFT, Pre-Prod, Prod) of RHEL (6 & 7) VMWare estate of 2000+ VMs on Vcloud Director and Azure with ForgeRock stack for IAM.


CI Architect in the Home Office (in the IBM team) working on the Immigration Platform Technologies (IPT) Program, in the Enhancements and Standards team of the infrastructure unit. Jenkins and Puppet used to provision components and services on RHEL VMs running on SkyScape (now UK Cloud), derived from repositories in Stash (Git) and Hiera (config), to create a standardised, re-usable infrastructure for the whole IPT program, but initially in supporting online Visa application case tracking database & Biometric Residency Permit system management.

Also new tech evaluations, and numerous other CI and DevOps-related tasks, including Jenkins/LDAP, RunDeck, Jira/Confluence, VirtualBox, Vagrant and Docker for R & D activities.



(Summary of previous roles, projects and activities available on request.)


Education & Professional Qualifications


Eastbourne College and King’s College, London.


B.Sc.(Hons), European Engineer (Eur. Ing.), Chartered Engineer (C.Eng.), Chartered IT Professional (CITP), Chartered Fellow BCS, BCS Elite Group Member, former Fellow IMIS & Fellow IAP (both now part of BCS).

Founder & first chair of BCS DevSecOps Expert Group. Member AFCEA (C3I) & AOC (EW).


Miscellaneous



References, Interviews & Conference/Meetup Presentations




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