Matt Kimberley

Email: mattkimberley84@gmail.com Location: Worcestershire

Major Achievements / Key highlights

  • Contributed significantly to a large digital transformation project towards AWS for the UK’s second largest Building Society (Coventry Building Society), designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines to deliver IAC
  • Designed and led a proof of concept CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, Terraform, Packer, Ansible, AWX, Vault and Consul to build infrastructure and components in AWS for Coventry Building Society.
  • Experienced working within Agile teams and passionate about promoting a DevOps culture
  • Key to the delivery and development of an automated deployment of a global OpenShift OKD platform for FastHosts and 1&1. This platform was built using Foreman, oVirt, OKD 3.11, Ceph Mimic, Ansible, AWX, Consul, Packer and Python to automatically build and scale out both the Hyper Converged base platform and virtual machine estate using CI/CD and IAC practices
  • Very high level of Linux experience and knowledge (20 years + in RedHat / Debian based distributions)
  • Extensive Networking experience
  • Produced and presented a recommended design to C-Level executives to reconcile Rexel UK’s Data Center footprint, enabling circa £110K saving on hardware maintenance renewals (rebuild of VMWare vSphere environment and SAN fabric renewal) and accompanying DR site in an “Active / Warm” failover pairing.
  • Lead Rexel UK through a successful external security audit by implementing security best practices that were previously lacking
  • Designed and implemented an infrastructure automation environment for Sanctuary Group
  • Successfully designed and implemented significant business systems for Sanctuary Group in support of their “One Sanctuary” SAP transformation programme (a circa £50 million IT Transformation Project)
  • University Graduate, AWS Certified, ITIL v3 Qualified, BTEC Certified Data Centre Technician (CDCT)
  • Extensive project experience
  • Co-organiser of the Birmingham Cloud Native Foundation meetup
  • Passionate about container technologies and Cloud Native computing in Open Source environments

Technical Skills

  • Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, RDS, Auto Scaling, Load Balancing, VPC etc)
  • CI / CD Pipelines with Infrastructure as Code (Jenkins, GitLab Runners, AWS CodeDeploy etc)
  • Containerisation and Container Orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift / OKD)
  • IAC tool sets (Terraform, Terratest, Consul, Vault, Packer, Jenkins, Ansible, AWX - currently learning Puppet)
  • Familiarity with the cloud native ecosystem (Helm, ArgoCD, Rook, ngix and others)
  • Development understanding (Learning Go and Python, previous experience with C++)
  • Source code version control (Git / GitHub / GitLab)
  • Linux Servers deployment and administration (RedHat / Debian)
  • Good Layer 3 Networking knowledge (LLDP, RSTP, ARP vLANs, ACLs, Routing etc)
  • Lab / Development based exposure to GCP, MS Azure and OpenStack

Work Experience

February 2025 - Present: Hive - Senior DevOps Engineer

October 2024 - February 2025: Red Hat - Senior Specialist Solution Architect (OpenShift / Kubernetes)

Direct inline promotion of role

April 2023 - October 2024: Red Hat - Specialist Solution Architect (OpenShift / Kubernetes)

A Specialist Solution Architect focused on OpenShift, supporting colleagues and customers in OpenShift adoption

June 2021 - April 2023: Red Hat - Solution Architect

This role sees me working as a Solution Architect within Red Hat, focusing on the Red Hat product portfolio including Red Hat Openshift, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage, Ceph, Ansible Automation platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux etc. In this role I am responsible for designing architecture solutions for customers supporting the technical Pre Sales function of Red Hat’s customer life cycle, providing demonstrations, presentations, proof of concept architectures etc solving the technology problems Red Hat customers may have.

July 2019 - June 2021: Coventry Building Society - Senior Cloud and Automation Engineer

My role as a Senior Cloud Automation Engineer saw me working within a project-focused Agile team; designing, building and delivering the Society’s public cloud environment (AWS) as part of a digital transformation programme. The team are primarily the Society’s AWS subject matter experts, and are responsible for building AWS infrastructure and core services using infrastructure as code (Terraform, Packer, Ansible, Bash, Python etc).

In addition to building the public cloud platform through IaC, I have acted as a technical lead on the design and build of Ansible Tower and Hashicorp Vault cluster to support the Societies’ continued move to CI/CD of applications and infrastructure.

As well as promoting cloud technology and its adoption, I actively promoted a “DevOps” culture between developers, testers, support and project teams in a self organising “bottom up” manner by running workshops (such as a value stream mapping session for CI/CD pipelines) and encourage out of hours projects to demonstrate the benefits from such a way of working to senior management teams.

November 2018 - July 2019: Fasthosts / 1&1 Ionos – Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer

Working within the systems engineering team in conjunction with the technical Architects, I was part of the team responsible for the design and implementation of Fasthosts’ / 1&1 open source built private container cloud platform which houses “containers as a service” to the entirety of Fasthosts and its parent company 1&1 Ionos. This was built within a pure open source environment.

This private cloud platform (iCaaS) was designed as an upgrade from OKD 3.9 and migration from Openstack to oVirt and OKD 3.11 . Using oVirt, Ceph, Foreman, Ansible, AWX, Puppet, Packer, Python and Consul, the project was to build a complete automated environment that could be quickly deployed in any of the groups data centres across the world to support the migration from the OKD 3.9 platform to OKD 3.11.

In addition to building the “iCaaS” platform, the team acts as OpenShift OKD subject matter experts and cluster admins for each of the OKD clusters, working with developers to assist globally with the deployment, testing and support of containerised workloads.

July 2018 – November 2018: Coventry Building Society – Technical Specialist (Amazon Web Services)

Working within the IT Services function for Coventry Building Society (CBS), the role positioned me acting as an SME for AWS across production within IT Services. This hands-on BAU support role involved shaping the AWS environment through influencing the design of CBS’s cloud platform as part of the Infrastructure Transformation Programme. The role included automating the build and deployment of the AWS platform through infrastructure as code (Terraform) whilst working within a virtual agile based/DevOps team. In addition to technically supporting AWS, this role included supporting the wider IT Services community, colleagues and peers as the “Society” undertook this significant IT transformation Programme by acting as an AWS SME to IT Services.

January 2017 – July 2018: Rexel UK – Enterprise Infrastructure Manager

Working within part of a global £4.3bn organisation with the UK arm (Rexel UK), I was responsible for the maintenance and development of Rexel’s UK data centres, storage and virtualisation platforms, servers (Windows, Linux and IBM iSeries) and other infrastructure technologies. This was a hands-on leadership role, including leadership and management of the Rexel UK Enterprise Infrastructure team.

During my time at Rexel, I lead the design and implementation of Infrastructure projects, such as the consolidation of data centre hypervisor hardware to reduce licensing costs, a hyper converged proof of concept (Nutanix) and the implementation of a Nimble storage fabric to refresh part of an aged storage estate, as well as initiating the migration from legacy Server OS environments to Ubuntu 18.04 / MS Windows Server 2016. As part of this role, I would frequently make recommendations for Infrastructure transformation and feasibility projects including cost-based analysis for cloud migrations (AWS and Azure).

April 2016 – December 2016: Redacted

April 2014 – April 2016 Sanctuary Group – IT Infrastructure Technical Team Lead

Leading a team “from the front” of technical specialists responsible for delivering highly available server infrastructures supporting Sanctuary Group’s non-SAP business critical application infrastructure servers. Additionally Introduced infrastructure automation, utilising System Centre Orchestrator including technical delivery and development governance.

November 2012 – April 2014: Kidderminster College – ICT Operations Manager

Responsible for the development and maintenance of the IT infrastructure at Kidderminster College, ranging from server rooms, servers and networking infrastructure, telephony wifi etc to end user devices and desktops. Serving as the manager of the IT Helpdesk at Kidderminster College, I was responsible for seven IT professionals and the key individual for IT service delivery within Kidderminster College. (Left as a result of the NCG Group takeover in 2014)

May 2012 – October 2012: Cadbury Sixth Form College – Senior IT Systems Specialist

Responsible for the maintenance and support of a large-scale enterprise grade network infrastructure (Network, Systems, Servers, telephony etc), acting in a 3rd line context in a small IT team for an exciting and rewarding Sixth Form College.

University of Birmingham 2007 – 2012 (Various roles due to promotion and development)

  • 2011 –2012 - Data Centre Operations Specialist

  • 2010 - 2011: IT Service Desk Technical Analyst

  • 2008 – 2010: Deputy Catering Systems Manager

Education and Qualifications

Professional Certification:

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (May 2019)
  • AWS Certified SysOps Administrator Associate (April 2019)
  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (July 2018, recertified May 2019)
  • CNET – Certified Data Centre Technician BTEC
  • ITIL Service Management v3 Foundation

Formal Education:

Aston University 2003 - 2007

  • BSc Cell and Molecular Biology with honours

Current Development:

  • AWS Certified Developer Associate
  • AWS Certified DevOps Professional
  • RHCSA
  • RHCE
  • Kubernetes CKA

Personal

As a lover of the outdoors I enjoy hiking, rock-climbing, wild camping, running and when I can’t do any of that I’m usually found playing and recording guitar between technical projects.