Paul Wright Head of Cloud Engineering at Worldpay

Email: pozzalenko@mac.com
Phone: (+44) 7950053369
Web: www.pozza.co.uk/cv

Multifaceted technology leader currently working as Head of Cloud Engineering for Worldpay, helping to facilitate stable, innovative and rapid product delivery.

With over 20 years industry experience, I build, manage and lead technology groups from startup to enterprise across eCommerce and finance realms. I have specialist interest and experience in delivering PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solutions on cloud technology alongside continuous delivery of software.

Specialities: IT leadership and technical strategy, infrastructure design and delivery, automating build and deployment systems, performance monitoring, management, collaboration and helping to shape DevOps culture in organisations.

July 2017 - Present

Head of Cloud Engineering

Worldpay, London, UK

Senior leadership role overseeing Cloud and DevOps engineers seeded across multiple cross functional delivery teams. Key to this role is balancing technical alignment across teams (squads) alongside autonomy and ability to deliver quality at speed. It’s a people and culture challenge as much as a technical one and a genuinely powerful way of working if you can get it right. My sense is that the future is about shifting left not only in a QA sense, but also operationally...the strength of “own what you build” tends to drive operability to the top of backlogs. We're taking a test-driven approach to Infrastructure-as-Code and focusing on built in quality. We’re using AWS, GCP, Kubernetes (GKE and Openshift) and containers to deliver our microservices globally.

Key deliverables as part of my remit include:

• Providing leadership, strategy, guidance and motivation to the group
• Engaging with key stakeholders in Worldpay's cloud journey, ensuring alignment with various review boards
• Ensuring consistent standards and practices that evolve in line with Worldpay policy
• Chairing the Worldpay Cloud Engineering Chapter and Guild, and driving adoption of standards and decsions taken
• Working closely with security, compliance, risk and supplier management to enable effective and timely procurement of resources
• Recruiting, building and developing Worldpay's Cloud Engineering and Container Platform practice
• Ensuring non-functional requirements are baked into delivery and treated as first class citizens
• Working alongside build and product teams to ensure consistent vision and collaboration
• Ensuring effective management of secrets and IAM policy across cloud domains

September 2015 - July 2017

Senior Manager eCommerce, DevOps & Web Operations

Office Depot, Milton Keynes, UK

This wide ranging role involved leading a team of DevOps focussed engineers and developers tasked with delivery of a multi-million pound European wide eCommerce replatform across 24 distinct web properties. It required a solid operational focus alongside a "deploy often" mentality to ensure the correct balance between rapid delivery and operational stability was achieved.

As a team of DevOps evangelists, we strived to provide clear insight and monitoring to enable quick and reliable feedback. Key technical areas covered include:

• Enabling "Deploy on Demand" pipelines underpinned by Chef orchestration and automated deployments to SAP hybris platform
• Providing application performance monitoring through New Relic, Dynatrace and various other feedback channels
• Automating process wherever possible and appropriate (Chef, Python and Ruby scripts, etc)
• Providing stable and scalable build services via centralised platform
• Providing and supporting centralised developer tooling (Sonar, Jira, Upsource, etc)
• Implementing and managing centralised logging systems using Splunk, ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana
• Engineering frameworks for HA messaging services using MuleESB and ActiveMQ

Key deliverables as part of my remit included:

• Providing leadership and motivation to the team
• Ensuring clear and reliable communication to executive team
• Ensuring smooth communication with stakeholders and collaboration across various international teams
• Providing technical advice, insight and mentorship
• Ensuring architectural standards are maintained
• Managing third party and vendor relationships

August 2012 - September 2015

Development Support & Integration Manager

Ocado Technology, Hatfield, UK

Leading a team of automation focussed infrastructure developers and engineers, this role involved driving forward innovation, collaboration and product delivery within Ocado through channels such as:

• Building better developer self-service mechanisms via PaaS and IaaS adoption (Docker, OpenShift, AWS, OpenStack, GCE, GAE)
• Automating process where ever possible (Puppet, Chef, Python and Ruby scripts, etc)
• Providing stable and scalable build services via centralised Jenkins and ThoughtWorks GO platform (currently servicing thousands of daily builds)
• Enabling Continuous Delivery pipelines via in-house developed tool (currently deploying hundreds of times per day to Development, Test and Production environments)
• Providing and supporting centralised developer tooling (Nexus, Sonar, Jira, Crucible, etc)
• Providing distributed NoSQL database service using Cassandra
• Engineering frameworks for HA messaging services using ActiveMQ and ZooKeeper
• Implementing and managing centralised logging systems via ElasticSearch, Logstash and Kibana
• Product delivery through Lean and Agile methodologies

My remit included:

• Providing leadership and motivation to the team
• Coordinating service implementation with external support teams
• Helping with technical implementation
• Ensuring smooth communication with stakeholders and collaboration across teams
• Providing technical advice, insight and mentorship
• Ensuring architectural standards are maintained
• Presenting to senior management
• Managing third party and vendor relationships
• Calculating and managing budget within the team
• Delivering appraisals and providing personal development plans to team members
• Ensuring team have appropriate training
• Ensuring team have recognition from the business for their delivery

August 2002 - August 2012

Senior Systems Administrator

Ocado.com, Hatfield, UK

Over my time in this role I worked primarily as a Systems Administrator delivering engineering and administrative function across a wide range of technical areas, including:

• Linux, Debian, RedHat/CentOS and AIX operating systems
• NetApp, SAN, NAS, and various disk subsystem technologies
• VMWare ESX, KVM and IBM LPAR hypervisors
• Cisco IOS, F5 Big IP, and JunOS networking systems
• Asterisk, Cisco Call Manager, Nortel Meridian and Cisco IPCC (Unified Voice) telephony systems
• Tomcat, Apache HTTPD and Nginx webservers
• Oracle, MySQL and Postgres databases
• Git, Subversion and Mercurial administration

During my tenure in this post, most automation was carried out with Bash scripts, Python, Ruby, Perl and occasionally some C.

In addition, I worked to standards within the payment card industry involving PCI Compliance and APACS.

January 2001 - June 2001

Unix Systems Administrator

OneTel, Sydney, Australia

The main focus of this role was the day-to-day administration of the Unix environment within One Tel. The architecture comprised Enterprise level Tru64 Compaq, Linux and Solaris solutions. Work included installation and development of new enterprise Tru64 systems, maintenance of hardware and systems, backups using Legato Networker, disk management using Veritas Volume Manager and Compaq LSM, scripting, general administration.

January 1999 - October 2000

Unix Systems Administrator

Getty Images, London, UK

This position involved the day to day running of a 40+ server environment, primarily Sun Enterprise systems. Work included installation and networking of new servers, maintenance of all hardware and software, system backups using Veritas Netbackup and Legato, disk management using Solstice Disksuite and Veritas Volume manager, system support to users, interfacing new systems with users PC/Mac, shell scripting, off site backup storage, maintenance calls.

April 1997 - January 1999

Digital Systems Supervisor

Getty Images, London, UK

This position saw the migration of the digital production (scanning / retouching) department from a SCO/Silicon Graphics environment to Sun Solaris. Work included the management of space on a production system, cataloging and automating the flow of high resolution scans using shell scripts, ensuring simple retrieval of images at anytime, helping with the installation and design of a new E4500 production server, user support.

Advanced, 5 Years

Cloud and Container

AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, CoreOS, Mesos and Mesosphere

Advanced, 5 Years

DevOps & Tools

Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, Git, Maven, Nexus, Sonar, etc

Advanced, 10+ Years

Operating Systems

*nix, OSX, Windows

Moderate, 5 - 10 Years

Networking

Cisco IOS/CatoS, JunOS, DXOS (Juniper), F5 Big IP

I have worked with many networking components and technologies and have sound skills, however, I have generally been more systems than network engineer.

Moderate, 5 - 10 Years

Telephony

Asterisk, Polycom, Cisco Call Manager, Cisco IPCC (Unified Voice), Meridian X11

I have specialist interest in VoIP technologies, and have sought out opportunities to work in this area over my career.

Moderate, 5 - 10 Years

Programming

Shell, Python, Ruby, Javascript, HTML, CSS

Central Institute of Technology, Perth, Western Australia

Diploma of Applied Science

1992 - 1995

3 year course based around graphics and imaging, photography, photomicrography, cinematography, design, etc