4 November 2023
Cv
by Dan Pilch
Dan Pilch CV
Location: United Kingdom (British Citizen)
| GitHub: danpilch
Summary
I am a seasoned professional engineer with over a decade of experience in architecture and managing distributed, scalable software systems. My passion for building has led me to excel in a diverse range of roles, including platform engineering, infrastructure design, software development, systems administration, SRE, and team leadership. My extensive background includes work in the Finance, Anti-Piracy, and Marketing sectors, spanning both startup and enterprise environments. I am dedicated to fostering remote-first engineering cultures and have a track record of proficiency working remotely.
I am currently the lead engineer of infrastructure and platform for community.com working as both a leader, manager and individual contributor.
Skills
People and soft skills: People management, engineering lead, constructive communication, feedback and presentation
Cloud and Data centre: AWS, OVH, Hetzner, GCP
Operating Systems: Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, Alpine, Debian
Vendor Services: AppSignal, NewRelic, Sumo Logic, PlanetScale, Aiven, Okta, Cloudflare, PagerDuty, Twilio
Programming Languages: Golang, Python, Elixir, Ruby
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, Packer, Vagrant
Database Technologies: PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Athena, DynamoDB, Trino, Athena, Databricks
Security: Okta, OpenVPN, Tailscale
Miscellaneous: Grafana, Prometheus, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, Docker, Concourse, Envoy, Kong, HAProxy, Temporal, Benthos, Nginx
This list is non-exhaustive.
Certifications
- Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) - Certified on 5/5/2020 (CKA-2000-007699-0100)
Experience
September 2020 - Present
- Platform strategy: Lead the strategy, architecture and day to day management of Community’s infrastructure and platform.
- Platform Migration: Successfully migrated Community from Mesos to Kubernetes (EKS), ensuring parallel availability of both platforms during migration. Reduced complexity and costs while keeping within Community’s 99.5% uptime SLA.
- Operational cost management: Reduced overall cloud spend by 33% (~$280,000) per year by introducing policy, spend controls and rightsizing workloads.
- AI-Powered On-Call Support: Developed an AI-based on-call assistant using Golang which integrated with Slack, enhancing incident management, developer time-to-resolution
- Self-Service Infrastructure: Implemented self-service infrastructure provisioning using Terraform and Atlantis, streamlining the process via GitHub pull requests.
- RabbitMQ Migration: Managed a zero-downtime migration of RabbitMQ from AmazonMQ to Kubernetes, improving reliability and reducing costs by over $8k (50%) a month.
- Tool Development: Created Golang tools for environment and CI pipeline comparisons, improving development and production parity.
Nomura Investment Bank - VP Cloud Infrastructure
May 2020 - August 2020
- Planned and provisioned core banking network infrastructure routing via AWS DirectConnect to AWS VPC.
- Provisioned AWS accounts for various business units, focusing on IAM, security and networking.
Westpac New Zealand - DevOps/Data Engineering
December 2018 – November 2019
- Led the development of a data platform using Kafka, Spark, Hadoop, Hive, and Airflow on Kubernetes.
- Integrated mainframe IBM MQ queues with Kafka for real-time transaction data streaming.
Bitcoin Australia - DevOps Engineer Consultant
November 2017 – October 2018
- Implemented CI/CD for legacy systems on EC2 and migrated the entire stack to AWS using Terraform and Ansible.
- Migrated repositories and CI pipelines from Bitbucket to GitLab.
Sharpe Capital - Cloud & Security Architect
October 2017 – May 2018
- Designed and implemented AWS environments, focusing on IAM and VPC, during their ICO (Initial Coin Offering).
PPL UK - DevOps Engineer Consultant
July 2016 – October 2017
- Established a DevOps culture and managed projects involving Apache Hadoop, AWS CloudFormation, and Docker.
Incopro - Lead DevOps Engineer
May 2013 – July 2016
- Automated provisioning and deployments on 500+ base metal servers using Ansible.
- Managed the web scraping software that scraped over 1000 websites for content and trademark protection.
Warner Bros - Anti-Piracy
September 2011 – September 2012
- Improved software and infrastructure for content protection through web scraping.
Education
University of Portsmouth - BEng (Hons) Degree in Computer Network Management & Design (1st Class)
Personal
Outside of work, I enjoy exercise, playing guitar, travel, and spending time with my wife Laura and Golden Retriever Lily.
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