About

Who Am I?

I'm James Powell. I'm a jack of all trades Server Engineer with a passion for Linux and open-source software. I am especially interested in CI/CD tooling and automation, as well as container orchestration.

Outside of work, I spend most of my time exercising out in nature. I adore my winter sports - I'm an avid backcountry skier and snowboarder, and love to play and watch ice hockey. In the summer I enjoy rock climbing, mountain biking, hiking and camping.

My Specialties

Technical Competencies

Linux Administration

RHEL, Debian, Apache/nginx/Pound, PHP, Varnish, Redis, MySQL/MariaDB/Postgres

CI/CD Tooling

Gitlab/BitBucket/BuildKite, Docker, Kubernetes, Hashicorp Vault

Infrastructure as Code

Terraform, Packer, Vagrant

Scripting and Automation

Ansible, Bash, Python

Observability

Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Apache Cassandra, Nagios, Graylog, ELK stack, Cacti, PRTG

Security

SecurityOnion, Splunk Enterprise, TheHive Cortex, Clair, Checkov

Web

DNS, domain name management, SSL/TLS, CDNs (Cloudflare, section.io, Fastly), Magento 1 and 2 CE/EE, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal

Experience

Employment History

Site Reliability Engineer at Cydarm Technologies 2020 - 2023

Responsibilities

  • Write Infrastructure as Code and Configuration Management modules enabling rapid deployment of our application, along with SIEM integrations, to public and private cloud
  • Design and implement monitoring and alerting, centralised logging and encrypted backup platforms
  • Develop CI/CD pipelines enabling automated application testing and deployment
  • Lead SRE team - develop and manage roadmap, OKRs, work closely with development, customer success, sales & marketing team leads
Achievements
  • Developed automation to configure and deploy tailored, self-serve trials of our web app within 15 minutes
  • Design and implement alerting and observability solution for production customer deployments using Prometheus/Alertmanager/PagerDuty, Grafana, and Loki/Promtail/Cassandra for log aggregation and alerting
  • Design and implement our BC/DR process
  • Implement containerised Hashicorp Vault service to move secrets off disk, establish Encryption as a Service endpoint
  • Create an automated nightly build/deployment of the platform for smoke tests
  • Create and manage build pipelines and underlying infrastructure, pushing container definitions to container repositories (ECR, Github Packages)

System Administrator at M.D.G IT 2018-2020

Responsibilities

  • Provision and manage web Virtual Private Servers and shared (cPanel) Magento hosting, along with management of underlying hypervisor/networking/storage infrastructure
  • Manage cloud hosting environments for large online (Magento) retailers - AWS, Azure
  • Improve internal automation using bash/Python scripting and Ansible
  • Develop CI/CD pipelines and Docker images for development agencies in order to improve Magento 2 build and deploy times
  • Manage Amazon EKS (Kubernetes) infrastructure, develop internal tooling to make Kubernetes hosting accessible to clients of all sizes
Achievements
  • Lead Melbourne team and train/coach/mentor new hires
  • Automate multiple internal scheduled tasks leveraging vendor APIs

Server Engineer at Centorrino Technologies 2015-2017

Responsibilities

  • Provision and manage all virtual servers for approximately 80 hosted website clients, including liaising with developers to manage deployments and patching on both Linux and Windows based system
  • Work with internal sales staff to design virtual server infrastructure and allocate hardware resources for each client
  • Proactive monitoring of all sensors in monitoring software suite as well as responding to all alerts generated for hosted website client uptime changes
  • Manage virtual hosts and guest operating systems along with guest OS applications (Exchange, accounting packages etc) for approximately 6 secondary schools and businesses of varying sizes – predominantly Windows/Hyper-V systems with a small number of Linux guests
Achievements
  • Single-handedly managed 24x7 on-call for all hosted website clients
  • Pushed for implementation of an internal documentation system (Atlassian Confluence) and contributed vast amounts of How-To and KB articles particularly regarding CLI Linux for junior helpdesk staff

NAS & IP System Administrator at IBM Australia 2013-2015

Responsibilities

  • Provide operational support for clients’ NAS & IP fleet, consisting of 30 High-Availability clustered NetApp FAS controllers and 540 Cisco switches, handling in excess of 3 Petabytes (PB) of business-critical (production) data
  • On-going lifecycle management – perform firmware patching and online (non-disruptive) major upgrades to NetApp filers and Cisco switches
  • Participate in 24x7 On-Call roster, reporting to key Incident Management stakeholders within the client’s organisation
Achievements
  • Created automated tools for quarterly security audits, resulting in a reduction of more than 40 hours of manual work annually
  • Developed automated reporting solutions for maintenance of storage infrastructure and operations, delivered to key client stakeholders

Education and Certifications

Education

The Bachelor of Business Information Technology (Professional) is one of Australia’s most prestigious IT degrees. It has been designed in partnership with leading Australian companies and aims to maximise students’ employability potential and provide future leaders in Australia’s bourgeoning IT industry.

Students develop technical skills in database and programming, with an emphasis placed on business analysis and problem-solving, business process management, business analytics, project management, the management of information systems (IS) in organisations, the provision of IS services, social networking in organisations, and mobile business and connectivity. The course also includes business units aimed at developing managerial and leadership skills.

English, Mathematical Methods, Chemistry, Physics, Japanese, Information Technology Systems



Certifications

An AIM Impactful Leader credential builds the foundational knowledge of great management. Students discover how to coach, mentor, provide direction, motivate and monitor their team effectively.

Including a DiSC behavioural assessment, AIM Impactful Leaders understand their own communication and management style and can identify how to get the best out of their team.

See credential

Get in Touch

Contact