Michael Leer-Hipple

Experienced DevOps & Reliability Engineer

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An engineer specialising in Linux systems, with a decade of experience designing and operating applications for businesses large and small, applying them within modern working practices such as Agile, DevOps, Reliability and Chaos Engineering, to create robust, scalable systems that are a pleasure to use and maintain.


Work Experience

Senior DevOps Engineer

Kennek | July 2022 - Present

Kennek provides SaaS solutions to enable lenders, investors and other alternative lending actors to scale operations, enhance risk management and identify new funding sources without the traditional burdens

  • Design of CI/CD utilising GitHub Actions
  • Kubernetes management
  • Developer tooling

Staff Platform Engineer

Fnality International | July 2021 - July 2022

Building a blockchain technology platform to allow peer to peer digital cash asset to settle tokenised transations.

  • Security Auditing
  • Management of Kubernetes clusters
  • Design of automated PKI system

Lead DevOps Engineer

Vive (GH Bank) | September 2020 - July 2021

Lead Engineer specialising in cloud based technologies, focused on architecting a secure cloud first environment, building a DevOps and a DevSecOps team,

  • Design and implementation of secure cloud native architecture
  • Development of internal security tooling
  • Implementation of automated systems providing GitOps capabilities for Kubernetes and AWS
  • Management of DevOps and DevSecOps teams
  • Cost Optimisation
  • Architecting Spring based microservices
  • Development of custom resources for kubernetes
  • Design of a Proxy based solution allowing controlled egress from AWS

DevOps Engineer

WorldPay | November 2019 - September 2020

Engagement to work with their data teams to build a data lake, focusing on the infrastructure and security that is required to provide secure role-based access to potentially Personally identifiable information

  • Upgrade of existing terraform to latest version and syntax
  • Design and develop secure cloud policies, conforming principals of least priviledge
  • Creation of Kubernetes clusters with role-based access to resources
  • Development of GitOps based deployments
  • Design of a Proxy based solution allowing controlled egress from AWS

Site Reliability Engineer

Mention Me | January 2019 - November 2019

Sole Site Reliability Engineer focused on technical debt and increasing engineering velocity.

  • Migration of existing cloud-based infrastructure to a more secure architecture.
  • ElasticSearch upgrade from legacy EOL version to latest stable release with minimal downtime.
  • Design a Kubernetes based deployment pipeline to increase development velocity.

Head of DevOps

CallSign | November 2018 - January 2019

Foundation of a DevOps organisation operating within an embedded model, driving continuous integration and delivery utilising tools such as GitLab and Kubernetes.

  • Management of all DevOps engineers
  • Engagement strategy for embedding engineers into other development teams

Senior Software Engineer (SE3) | Site Reliability Engineer

Ocado Technology | April 2018 - November 2018

Foundation of an international engineering team focusing on implementing reliability and chaos principles, supporting engineering teams developing over 200 microservices through objective led engagements and embedding of engineering resources across multiple teams.

  • Laid the foundation for a geographically disperse engineering function
  • Creation of Product maturity program to ensure that product entering production are secure and resiliant

Principle Engineer | Site Reliability Engineer

Crownpeak | April 2016 - April 2018

Implementing DevOps and SRE principles throughout the global organisation, re-architecture of their Software as a Service platforms to ensure high levels of security and scalability for future growth, development of internal tooling to increase the development velocity and abstraction of the Crownpeak cloud platforms, leadership of a global engineering team delivering against key indicators to drive revenue growth.

  • Cloud Architecture
  • Creation of internal and external solutions to exceed customer expectations
  • Practice area / Team leadership
  • Design and Implementation of IaaS, Containerisation and Configuration Management
  • Development of GitOps based deployment systems
  • Design and Development of ChatOps systems

Senior Linux Engineer | DevOps Engineer

Rackspace | July 2012 - April 2016

Provide support to internal and external customers, supporting a variety of solutions including but not limited to, LAMP, LNMP and Cloud Computing.

  • Cloud Architecture
  • Mentorship of junior engineers
  • Develop automation for Rackers to use on customer servers
  • Develop internal tooling to facilitate internal requirements
  • Development of automated systems to reduce toil

Projects

aws-ssh-config

Open Source

Tool that uses AWS EC2 API to generate an SSH config.

ansible-nebula

Open Source

Ansible role to deploy Nebula a scalable overlay networking solution.