Hi, I'm
Aspiring Cloud Engineer — transitioning from 18 years in operations to building event-driven systems on AWS.
About Me
I've spent 18 years as a General Manager, leading teams, solving complex operational problems, and making decisions under pressure. That career gave me something that's hard to teach — resilience, resourcefulness, and the ability to figure things out independently.
Over the past year I've been learning AWS to build an event-driven data platform from the ground up. What started as a practical project turned into a genuine passion. I found myself going deeper and deeper into cloud architecture, automation, and AI — and realising this is the career I want to build. I've also completed AWS Cloud Quest: Data Analytics for hands-on experience with data lakes, warehousing, and analytics services.
I bring an unusual combination to the table: the technical curiosity of someone who fell in love with cloud engineering, and the real-world experience of someone who has managed people, budgets, and operations at scale for nearly two decades. I'm hungry to grow fast and contribute from day one.
Skills
I work across the full cloud engineering stack — from designing resilient AWS architectures to automating deployments and keeping systems observable and secure.
Projects
Real-world cloud engineering projects — each one built from scratch, deployed on AWS, and available to view on GitHub.
Enterprise-grade multi-tier AWS architecture demonstrating SA portfolio skills: VPC networking (public/private subnets, NAT, NACLs), Aurora PostgreSQL Multi-AZ, ElastiCache Redis, Cognito OAuth2/OIDC, API Gateway with usage plans, WAF, GuardDuty/Config/Security Hub, cross-region DR (Route 53 failover), CloudFront CDN, ECS auto scaling, IAM permission boundaries & role chaining, Secrets Manager rotation, KMS encryption governance, CloudWatch composite alarms & anomaly detection, S3 lifecycle, AWS Backup, Service Quotas monitoring. Python FastAPI application with GitHub Actions CI/CD (OIDC). 267 tests including 10 property-based invariants. Zero-cost local dev via Docker Compose + LocalStack.
Enterprise-grade event-driven analytics platform processing e-commerce events in real time. EventBridge central bus with schema registry and content-based routing, SQS consumers with partial batch failure handling, Step Functions orchestrating order workflows (parallel processing, human approval gates, Map state), S3 data lake with Parquet/partitioned storage, Glue crawlers + Athena for serverless analytics, Kinesis real-time streaming with tumbling window aggregations, and a Bedrock AI service translating natural language questions into SQL via RAG. Includes a Strangler Fig migration adapter. 460 tests (unit + 11 property-based invariants + integration). Full local dev via LocalStack — zero AWS cost.
Production-grade Kubernetes platform: EKS Terraform modules, GitOps with ArgoCD, Python FastAPI microservice, Prometheus/Grafana observability stack, Helm charts for packaging. 98 tests including 5 property-based invariants. Zero-cost operational model — full local development without cloud spend.
Multi-environment cloud platform demonstrating enterprise DevOps & FinOps practices. 8 Terraform modules, ECS Fargate with auto-scaling, GitHub Actions CI/CD (OIDC, rollback, security gates), Lambda cost governance (business-hours scaling, orphaned resource scanning, anomaly detection). 198 tests including 8 property-based invariants. Zero-cost operational model — full local dev via LocalStack, on-demand AWS demos < £2.
IoT vessel monitoring platform: AWS Greengrass edge computing + serverless cloud. Real-time navigation safety, predictive maintenance, collision avoidance. 1,633 tests, 24 property-based invariants. Full AWS stack under £2/month.
This portfolio site — hosted on S3, delivered via CloudFront, with a serverless visitor counter powered by API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB. Contact form sends emails via SES. Full Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation, CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions with OIDC federation (no stored access keys). Pushes to main auto-deploy to S3 and invalidate CloudFront cache globally.
Contact
Whether you have a role in mind, a project to discuss, or just want to connect — my inbox is open.