Matt Peperell's CV

Senior Consultant Engineer, Automation Logic

July 2015 — present

Automation Logic is a consultancy and the vast majority of my time is spent on client placements.

Senior DevOps Engineer, Workshare

February 2015 — July 2015

Core skills: Chef, Redis, MongoDB, AWS

Day-to-day duties involved care and maintenance of all hosting environments (of which there were 6) for the company's flagship filesharing application. This made use of a microservice architecture, with applications written in Rails, pure Ruby, Java and Node.JS.

A key project in which I played a key role was a migration to Amazon, often dealing with hidden or unknown dependencies of the application architecture. Side duties included the training/mentoring of other staff - some of whom were junior devops engineers, and others of whom come from a IT support background.

On-call shifts take place approximately once every 5 weeks, being 1 week in duration.

System Administrator, Altmetric

August 2014 — January 2015

Core skills: Ruby on Rails, Chef, Redis, MongoDB

Day-to-day duties involved care and maintenance of the suite of ~20 servers comprising production and staging environments for the company's various apps. These used several technologies, including PHP, Rails and Python for the application layer, and MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Mongo and Elastic search for the data layer.

Seconary duties involved supporting Digital Science, the parent company of Altmetric, with their infrastructure.

Technical Operations Engineer, Mimecast

April 2014 — July 2014

Core skills: Puppet, Ruby, Postgres, Automation

Day-to-day duties involved deployment of new servers, and maintenance of existing ones in a network of several thousand hosts across multiple datacentres in multiple countries.

Seconary duties involved creation and maintenance of internal scripts, mostly in Bash and Ruby, and of an in-house account management tool written in Ruby on Rails.

System Administrator / Web Developer, Unboxed Consulting

April 2012 — April 2014

Core skills: Asterisk, Chef, Rails, CSS, Zimbra, Postfix, Nagios, System design

Day-to-day duties involved installation, setup, and tear down of company hardware, and supporting office equipment. Managment of company phone system (Asterisk) and Zimbra Collaboration Suite for email. There were 2 office networks (London and Capetown) and 2 datacentre networks (one self-managed in a Docklands datacentre, the other cloud-based). The severs were fully virtualised using a combination of Debian and Ubuntu. Creation of chef recipes to manage all build-classes.

Seconary duties involved placements on client development projects, taking place in Ruby on Rails, including associated development tools such as RSpec and Cucumber in an Agile environment with 1 or 2 week sprints. These projects would have a strong sysadmin component, meaning that I would often design and implement the hosting environment used by the client for their finished product. Client projects frequently also used NoSQL technologies such as Redis and memcache, and were hosted on a variety of cloud providers including AWS, Brightbox, Memset and Linode. Larger projects also used chef.

Senior System Administrator, Venda Ltd

December 2010 — April 2012

Core skills: Automation, Postfix, Memcache, Postgres, storage, Apache, training, System design, Xen/VMWare virtualisation

A return to my previous senior role at this employer, but with greater responsibilities including the training of the expanded UK systems team due to the addition of a second data centre and a content delivery network. Heavy use of NAS appliances (NetApp filers and Sun Filers), and Zeus traffic Managers (including the creation of TrafficScript rules). Creation of Kickstart profiles for single-step deployment of new machines. I was also a strong contributor of documentation in our wiki-based information repository. Areas of the network were virtualised with Xen and/or VMWare.

On call duties, consisting of week-long shifts, approximately 1 week in 5.

System Administrator, Sitemaker Software Ltd

January 2010 — December 2010

Core skills: Puppet, Backups, Apache, System design

Primary duties involved the maintenance of the Centos machines running webservers, mailservers, Sybase database servers and sundry utility servers. Secondary duties involved the physical deployment and retirement of the servers in the Docklands-based data centre.

Key projects in which I made a significant contribution include re-engineering the customer-facing web platform, the automated build system (using Puppet), and deployment of the unified datacentre backups.

The role also included an on-call component, with shift lengths of 1 week.

Senior System Administrator, Venda Ltd

September 2007 — October 2009

Core skills: Automation(cfengine), Monitoring, Storage, documentation, training, Xen virtualisation

Originally starting in a support role, I soon moved to a senior system position giving me much more responsibility. I was co-lead on the project to install a new, more reliable, monitoring system (Nagios). I designed and led the training programme for a team of system administrators who were the first members of the technical team in the US office.

Day-to-day duties involved 24x7 support of the network consisting mainly of 300 Linux machines, and infrastructure kit which included Zeus load balancers and NetApp Filer appliances.

System Administrator, BMT Marine & Offshore Surveys Ltd

January 2007 — September 2007

Core skills: Backups, MS Exchange, Security

Primary duties involved system maintenance of the numerous Windows and Linux (Debian) machines. This included a daily backup of essential company data (using Bacula) and any security updates as they became available. Secondary duties involved offering Windows desktop support to staff in the London office and in the 20+ remote offices world wide and the setting up of new machines.

A major project which was implemented towards the end of my tenure was the expansion of the internal network to be more scalable and resilient.

Web Developer, Angels IT Ltd

April 2006 — December 2006

Core skills: Postfix, SQL, PHP, Javascript, CSS, Apache

Principally, the addition of new features (most notably a payment gateway to permit credit card payments and a refund monitoring system) and the maintenance of the company's websites. Development was in PHP5 and Javascript and took place on a Fedora GNU/Linux platform using Apache HTTPD. I also made a number of speed improvements on the sites, the most apparent of which was by the introduction of the caching solution memcached.

Additional duties involved in-office support to fellow employees and the day-to-day running and configuration of the 4 public-facing servers. 3 were running Fedora Core Linux (providing web, database and mail functionality) and the fourth was running Microsoft Exchange.

Self Employed

November 2005 — April 2006

Core skills: Sendmail, Exim, C, Perl

My main client was an anti-spam company, based in San Francisco, who were in their founding stages. My duties were development of the company's blog and implementing plugins for sendmail and Spam Assassin (Perl and C), and documenting these.

Installation Engineer for Version One Ltd

October 2004 — October 2005

Core skills: Training, Sage, development, documentation

Primary duties involved visiting clients on their premises, installing the purchased financial software on their machines, integrating with their existing systems and providing training for use and administration of aforementioned software. Secondary duties when in the office involved dealing with technical queries from prospective clients, maintenance of internal documentation and running internal training courses within the company.