London, England, United Kingdom
Interested in leadership roles which have solving complex technical problems at their core. Most of my recent experience has been in the Platform Engineering space: including areas like Cyber Security, CDNs, DevOps, Observability, Technical Architecture, CMDBs, and several large-scale org-wide migrations. I love figuring out approaches that are both technically appropriate and also work for the humans who'll interact with them. Having said that, if there's something that's outside my usual wheelhouse in an organisation with a motivating mission, I'd be up for that too!
Set strategic direction for cyber security at the FT. – Defined the vision and set the strategy for IT Risk and Cyber Security. – Senior stakeholder management - acting as a bridge between business colleagues and engineers. – Introduced and oversaw a new process for renewing and refreshing technical policies across the organisation. – Responsible for security incident management and contributed to wider crisis management. – Spent 3 months on secondment to the FT’s parent company, Nikkei, in Tokyo. Assisted their product security function and strengthened ties between the two companies.
Led the company’s cyber security function through a period of organisational change. – Built a central cyber security function, combining a number of teams which had previously reported into different parts of the organisation. – Line managed a team of a dozen people from different disciplines, including Engineers, Risk Analysts and those in IT governance roles. – Steered the direction of Security work across the technology department, and the organisation as a whole. – Worked with a third party consultancy to build a strategic roadmap and help prioritise security initiatives. – Involved in recruitment of a permanent VP of Cyber Security.
Ran a selection of engineering teams throughout this period, including building a new one from scratch. Led the company-wide strategic direction in these areas, as well as managing the delivery of initiatives within the relevant teams. – Managed engineers of various seniorities, including managers of other engineers. – Responsible for the relationship with an off-shore 3rd party engineering team. – Worked on vendor management of a range of key suppliers (including the FT’s code repository platform, issue tracking platform & content delivery network). Set the direction for these relationships to align with our broader tech strategy. In a number of cases, this included a full migration from on-premise software to Software-as-a-Service alternatives. – Recruited engineers for vacancies within our teams, including both internal & external candidates. Aimed to keep diversity and equity at forefront of hiring decisions, including actively modifying our recruitment process following feedback from neurodiverse candidates. – Was a department rep for the move of our company headquarters. In collaboration with reps from across the business, I worked representing the 300+ people in our area, ensuring they could make the move seamlessly. – Led work on the democratisation of security data, to enable engineering teams to make better decisions around their own risks, beginning with an aggregated view of vulnerability data. – Managed security incidents across the business; collaborated with Operations team to improve the incident process.
A three month secondment with Nikkei's Product Security team. Worked on a number of projects directly related to and adjacent to cyber security, with an aim to build relationships between the Financial Times and our parent company, Nikkei.
I began this role focused on web development on a number of projects, such as the FT's HTML5 Web App and FastFT (a realtime news CMS & front end). I frequently debugged a variety of live issues, from small intermittent bugs which can't be reproduced elsewhere to large show-stopping errors which light up monitoring displays like Christmas trees. However, during the role I became more involved in our integrations with backend systems. I wrote a collection of libraries for developers to interact with various pieces of infrastructure (eg Databases, Varnish, Xapian search). I also rearchitectued our Varnish configuration and gave a talk about it at the VUG 8 conference in Berlin. The departure of all our team's sysadmins within a short period of time pushed me to become focused on managing the infrastructure itself. I wrote a considerable amount of puppet configuration and templates for configuration of other systems (Apache, Varnish etc) I also contributed to all major decisions regarding infrastructure within them team: combining operational requirements, architectural concerns, and the needs of developers interacting with the infrastructure. Towards the end of my time with FT Labs, I took the lead in developing the team's internal tooling. This involved a combination of hands-on coding and the co-ordination of others working on these tools. The tools were eclectic in nature including those which dealt with deployments, live error collection and monitoring aggregation.
Worked on various web projects for a range of clients, doing both backend and frontend work. Backends included Wordpress, an in-house framework and vanilla PHP. Frontend javascript varied from simple jQuery-based interfaces, to large object-orientated systems which utilised many HTML5 features. Assanka was acquired by the Financial Times at the end of 2011 and was later rebranded "FT Labs".
Operated Lighting Desks for a range of live events, including Discos, Live Bands and political debates.