Profile Summary
Results-driven Senior Technical Manager with over 18 years of progressive experience in enterprise IT infrastructure, cloud operations, and cross-functional team leadership. Renowned for architecting robust, high-availability systems and orchestrating seamless transitions to cloud platforms including OpenStack and AWS. Distinguished by expert-level Bash scripting capabilities — developing sophisticated automation frameworks that have consistently reduced manual overhead and incident response times by up to 50%. Combines deep technical proficiency in Linux and Windows environment troubleshooting with strong strategic acumen, consistently delivering cost-effective, scalable, and secure solutions for global clients.
Professional Experience
Armia Systems
Senior Technical Manager
- Directed end-to-end management of servers co-located across remote data centres, maintaining consistent high performance and near-zero unplanned downtime.
- Spearheaded a full-scale migration from dedicated server infrastructure to a scalable OpenStack cloud environment, reducing capital expenditure significantly.
- Architected and administered OpenStack services (CLI & API) integrated with Ceph distributed storage for resilient, scalable data management.
- Defined infrastructure standards and best practices, mentoring a team of engineers to elevate operational efficiency and service quality.
- Collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders to align IT strategy with business objectives, driving continuous service improvement initiatives.
Key Achievements
- Delivered high-availability solutions that reduced unplanned system downtime by 40%.
- Optimised Ceph storage architecture, cutting data redundancy by 30% while improving I/O performance.
VIPoint Solutions
Team Manager – Linux Infrastructure
- Led and mentored a team of 20+ engineers delivering 24/7 Linux server support for a diverse global client portfolio.
- Served as the primary escalation authority for L3/L4 incidents, providing expert-level root cause analysis and proactive preventative measures.
- Administered hosting, database, and bespoke server environments — hardening security posture and optimising performance across the fleet.
- Established SLA frameworks and monitoring protocols that ensured consistent service delivery against agreed performance benchmarks.
Key Achievements
- Enhanced server throughput by deploying Varnish and XVarnish caching, significantly boosting web application response times.
- Reduced mean incident response time by 50% through the development of advanced automation and alerting scripts.
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Linux Administrator & Operations Manager
- Managed CI/CD pipelines using TeamCity and Puppet, overseeing GIT repository integrity across multiple concurrent software projects.
- Directed testing environment operations, ensuring seamless integration, deployment, and quality assurance workflows.
- Provided operational oversight and technical guidance to development and QA teams on infrastructure dependencies.
GVO Labs
Senior Server Administrator
- Executed large-scale web server migrations and critical data restoration projects with minimal service interruption and zero data loss.
- Designed and implemented multi-layered security frameworks including firewalls, intrusion detection, and access controls, significantly strengthening server resilience.
- Administered shared and dedicated Linux hosting environments serving thousands of end-users globally.
Additional Strengths
☁️
OpenStack Administration & Troubleshooting
Extensive hands-on experience administering and troubleshooting production-grade OpenStack cloud environments — managing compute (Nova), networking (Neutron), identity (Keystone), image (Glance), and dashboard (Horizon) services via both CLI and REST API. Proficient in diagnosing and resolving complex service failures, message queue bottlenecks, and storage layer issues.
🐇 RabbitMQ (RMQ)
Management of OpenStack message broker — monitoring queues, diagnosing consumer lag, resolving service communication failures between Nova, Neutron, and Cinder.
🗄️ Ceph Block Storage (RBD)
Provisioning and managing RBD volumes as persistent backend storage for OpenStack Cinder — handling pool configuration, volume snapshots, and performance tuning for VM workloads.
🪣 Ceph Object Storage (RGW)
Deploying and managing Ceph RADOS Gateway as an S3/Swift-compatible object store — configuring buckets, access policies, and integrating with OpenStack Swift for scalable unstructured data.
📦 Ceph Distributed Storage
Architecture, deployment, and tuning of Ceph clusters — OSD management, CRUSH map configuration, replication policies, and capacity planning to ensure high availability and data durability.
🌐 OpenStack Networking (Neutron)
Configuration of tenant networks, routers, floating IPs, security groups, and provider networks — troubleshooting L2/L3 connectivity issues and OVS/OVN virtual switch problems.
🖥️ Compute & Image (Nova/Glance)
Managing VM lifecycle, flavours, host aggregates, and availability zones via Nova — alongside Glance image registry management for maintaining golden images and snapshot catalogues.
🚢
OpenShift Administration & Kubernetes Expertise
Certified Red Hat OpenShift Administrator with hands-on experience deploying, managing, and troubleshooting OpenShift container platforms in production environments. Proficient in Kubernetes core concepts and OpenShift-specific extensions — administering clusters, managing workloads, and resolving complex container and networking issues via the
oc CLI and web console.⌨️ OpenShift CLI (oc)
Advanced usage of
oc for project/namespace management, pod debugging (oc exec, oc logs, oc describe), rollouts, scaling, and resource management across multiple clusters.☸️ Kubernetes Core
Strong grasp of Pods, Deployments, ReplicaSets, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps, Secrets, PersistentVolumes, and PersistentVolumeClaims — managing the full workload lifecycle.
🔧 OpenShift-Specific Resources
Working knowledge of Routes, DeploymentConfigs, ImageStreams, BuildConfigs, Templates, and Operators — leveraging OpenShift's extended capabilities beyond standard Kubernetes.
🔐 RBAC & Security
Configuring Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), service accounts, Security Context Constraints (SCCs), and network policies to enforce least-privilege access across multi-tenant OpenShift clusters.
📦 Helm & Application Deployment
Deploying and managing applications using Helm charts — customising values, managing release lifecycles, and integrating Helm with GitOps pipelines for repeatable, versioned deployments.
🐳 Container & Image Management
Building, tagging, and managing container images using Podman and Docker — maintaining private registries, optimising Dockerfiles, and integrating image pipelines with OpenShift's internal registry.
💻
Expert Bash Scripting
Authored extensive Bash automation scripts for system health monitoring, log analysis, scheduled maintenance, and incident auto-remediation — dramatically reducing manual intervention and accelerating operational workflows across large server fleets.
🔍
Cross-Platform Troubleshooting
Proven ability to diagnose and resolve complex issues across both Linux (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian) and Windows Server environments — including networking faults, performance bottlenecks, kernel issues, Active Directory, and IIS — a distinctive cross-platform advantage.
📦
HashiCorp Packer — Image & Template Creation
Skilled in using HashiCorp Packer to build automated, reproducible machine images and templates across multiple platforms including OpenStack, AWS, and VMware. Maintains versioned golden image pipelines — embedding security hardening, configuration baselines, and pre-installed packages — ensuring consistent, compliant VM deployments at scale.
🔐
Security Hardening & Compliance
Deep expertise in server security hardening — implementing Iptables and CSF firewall rules, Apache/Nginx hardening, SSH lockdown, intrusion detection, and vulnerability patching — ensuring infrastructure meets security compliance benchmarks across multi-tenant hosting environments.
⚡
Performance Optimisation
Proven track record of improving system and application performance through Varnish/XVarnish caching, web server tuning (Apache, LiteSpeed, Nginx), MySQL query optimisation, storage I/O profiling, and kernel parameter tuning — delivering measurable throughput gains across production environments.
🔄
CI/CD & DevOps Tooling
Hands-on experience managing CI/CD pipelines with TeamCity, configuration management with Puppet and Ansible, and version control workflows via Git — enabling streamlined, automated software delivery and infrastructure-as-code practices across development and production environments.
🗂️
Version Control & Source Code Management
Experienced in managing source code across the full project lifecycle — from day-to-day version control operations to self-hosting and maintaining enterprise-grade SCM platforms for multi-team environments.
Git
Advanced usage including branching strategies (GitFlow, trunk-based), merging, rebasing, tagging, and custom hooks for workflow automation.
SVN (Subversion)
Repository administration and maintenance, including successful migrations from SVN to Git with full history preservation.
GitLab — Self-Hosted Installation & Maintenance
End-to-end installation, configuration, and ongoing maintenance of self-hosted GitLab instances — managing multiple projects and teams including CI/CD pipeline setup, GitLab Runners, user access controls, group permissions, SSL configuration, upgrades, and backup & restore procedures.
GitHub & Bitbucket
Familiarity with GitHub and Bitbucket for collaborative development, pull request workflows, and integration with CI/CD toolchains.
🛡️
High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Designed and implemented HA clustering, automated failover architectures, and comprehensive backup and disaster recovery strategies — achieving a 40% reduction in unplanned downtime and ensuring business continuity for mission-critical services across global client environments.
Education
Executive MBA
National Institute of Management · 2009
Diploma in Electronics & Computer Hardware Engineering
Technical Education Board