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Kurt Portelli

Head of Engineering

Malta | [email protected] | kurtportelli.com

Professional Profile

  • I am an experienced tech leader with a strong academic background and industry expertise across startups and established enterprises. With a hands-on leadership approach, I have successfully led development and DevOps teams, optimising infrastructure and streamlining workflows.
  • I excel at bridging the gap between technical and operational stakeholders, ensuring clear communication and effective collaboration. With a deep understanding of Agile methodologies and SDLCs, I work autonomously, stay delivery-focused, and drive innovation, scalability, and security with a results-driven mindset. My passion lies in solving complex challenges and delivering impactful solutions.

Work Experience

Head of Engineering

Red Acre | September 2021 - Present

  • Led the DevOps, SRE, QA, IT, and Physical Infrastructure teams while working closely with Heads of Development and Product.
  • Designed system architecture to facilitate feature development and ensure stability.
  • Spearheaded the implementation of Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and GitHub Actions, streamlining deployment processes.
  • Implemented an on-call rotation system with comprehensive monitoring and alerting using the Grafana Prometheus stack, enabling a proactive approach to issue detection and resolution.
  • My responsibilities extended to managing various trading and brokerage services which led to the creation of 2 startup companies; tradelocker.com & funderpro.com.
  • I was part of the team that built an in-house chatbot to handle the high volume of support requests our large customer support team received each month. As the chatbot began resolving the majority of these requests, it matured and evolved into its own SaaS product, imred.ai.
  • Worked closely with development teams to optimize AWS infrastructure, ensuring cost efficiency through automation, scaling strategies, and resource optimization best practices.

Senior Java Developer & DevOps Team Lead

Blexr | September 2017 - November 2021

  • Developed an affiliate revenue tracking platform to address a critical gap in the affiliate industry.
  • As the platform matured, I took ownership of the product, with my responsibilities expanding beyond development and into the business aspects.
  • During a period of rapid growth within the company I was promoted to the DevOps Team lead role.
  • I played a pivotal role in the creation of a secure, high-availability infrastructure capable of handling high-traffic loads across hundreds of web projects leveraging key AWS services such as EC2, RDS, ECS, and S3.
  • Led the adoption of Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and implemented CI/CD across all company products, reducing production issues and streamlining developer workflows. Also contributed to network security, DDoS mitigation, comprehensive monitoring, VPN integration, and centralized authentication management.
  • Designed and implemented a Redshift-based data warehouse, leveraging AWS Glue to process and analyse user tracking data for Blexr's digital operations.

Tutor

University of Glasgow | September 2015 - May 2017

  • During my postgraduate studies in Glasgow I was employed by the University of Glasgow to tutor a variety of courses: Professional Software Development, Web Application Development and Computer Systems.
  • This involved mentoring, overseeing and marking work done by students in the lab/tutorials.

Software Engineer

CCBill | June 2012 - August 2015

  • Part of the team developing PhoenixNAP, a cloud portal allowing clients to manage virtual machines, load balancers, firewalls, and network storage with scalable growth options.
  • During this period, I was actively involved in the company's transition from a waterfall methodology to agile. Effective communication was essential, as the development teams were distributed across Malta, Serbia, and the United States.
  • My main accomplishments;
    • Migrated application to Spring OAuth2
    • Creation of a mocked VMware vSphere
    • Split a monolith application into microservices
    • Migrated from an older Spring framework to Spring Boot

Education

M.Sc in Data Science

University of Glasgow | 2015 - 2016

B.Sc ICT Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence

University of Malta | 2010 - 2013

Publications

  • Portelli, K. and Anagnostopoulos, C. (2017) Leveraging Edge Computing through Collaborative Machine Learning. doi:10.1109/FiCloudW.2017.72
  • Donaldson, P., Ntarmos, N. and Portelli, K. (2017) A Systematic Review of the Potential of Machine Learning and Data Science in Primary and Secondary Education. https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/151244/
  • Popescu, I., Portelli, K.,Anagnostopoulos, C. and Ntarmos, N. (2018) The Case for Graph-Based Recommendations. doi:10.1109/BigData.2017.8258553

Certifications

  • SAFe® 4 Certified Scrum Master, Scaled Agile, Inc. (February 2018)
  • SAFe® 4 Certified Agilist, Scaled Agile, Inc. (November 2017)

Technical Skills

Programming Languages

Experienced: Java (Spring), Typescript (Nest/Next), Bash, Python

Limited Experience: C#, Django, FastApi, C/C++, Unity, OpenCV/CV, PHP, Laravel, Wordpress

CI/CD

Gitlab, Github, ArgoCD, Bitbucket, Jenkins, SonarQube

Server Operating Systems and Tools

Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu), Windows, Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Apache, Nginx, WHM/cPanel, Zabbix, Prometheus, Grafana, OpenVPN, VMware, Zookeeper, Hadoop, HBase, HAProxy, Varnish, Ansible, Terraform, Docker, K8s

Hosting Services

AWS, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare