Toby Jackson

INTRODUCTION

Self-motivated individual with a strong technical background, specialising in software automation, integration and quality assurance.

By working closely with senior representatives from across the business, I facilitate frequent, high-quality deliveries that meet the needs of our customers.

I specialise in what is often recognised as a “DevOps” role, by facilitating collaboration between development and operations teams whilst also supporting other departments to provide the highest quality deliverables.

I am the recognised lead on our development and testing infrastructure, consisting of nearly a hundred virtual machines, supporting three technologically distinct product offerings within a highly automated environment.

A certified scrum master, I have previously worked with five concurrent scrum teams across strategic and tactical projects, providing support and direction on developmental practices and provision of technologies to enable smoother delivery.

EDUCATION

  • Certified ScrumMaster March 2012
    • Accredited by Scrum Alliance
  • 2.1 BSc (Hons) Degree in Computer Science - 2003-2006
    • School of Computer Science, Cardiff University, Cardiff

SKILLS

  • Linux System Administration
    • RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) - v5+
    • Ubuntu Desktop / Server - v10.04+
  • Agile Methodologies
    • Scrum / KanBan
    • Test Driven Development (TDD)
    • Continous integration / delivery
    • Non-functional testing
      • For example capacity, performance, and security testing
  • Programming Languages
    • Static - Java
    • Dynamic - PHP, Ruby, Bash
  • Other Tools
    • Jenkins
    • Maven
    • Git / Subversion
    • Atlassian Suite: JIRA, Confluence, Stash, HipChat
    • Selenium
    • JBoss EAP

WORK EXPERIENCE

11/2014 - Present - Operations Engineer - Future PLC

A key member of the Engineering team working extremely closely with the systems and product teams providing server support (hardware, software, security) and hosting infrastructure supporting (both internal data centres and external co-location facilities) in order to ensure successful on-going development and administration of existing and new core and critical systems, services and platforms.

03/2007 - 11/2014 - Various Roles - PayPoint Mobile and Online

  • (Formally known as PayPoint.net and Metacharge)

01/2014 - Present - Senior Build and Release Engineer, Bath

Providing continual improvements to the development build and release processes, through more effective automation and documentation where appropriate.

Supporting desktop and datacenter development services, allowing the team to provision new servers through tools, such as Vagrant and Puppet, to ensure new project work has minimal startup friction.

09/2009 - 12/2013 - Senior Test Engineer, London

Completed a number of iterations of non-functional performance validation of new datacenters as well as taking formal ownership of testing methods within PayPoint.net. Continued to provide support and direction for development team and wider business in many aspects of quality improvement.

Implemented new tools and practices including emulation tools, mavenised build and release processes, established a new baseline for our legacy systems to provide robust release mechanisms and automated delivery cycles.

03/2007 - 09/2009 - Systems Developer, Bath / Tonbridge

Gained appreciation of commercial high-volume, high-impact development and systems operation. Worked with another developer to migrate legacy codebase into version control (From CVS/Folders into SVN) as well as incorporating Hudson (Now Jenkins) as part of the development pipeline.

Supported our operations team with the migration of our datacenter with zero-downtime from US to new servers in the UK. Implemented tools including software load-balancing and routing systems, monitoring and verification scripts, and remote installation and configuration of new services.