CV / Portfolio

Head of Engineering

Red Acre | September 2023 - Present

Orchestrate the collaboration of DevOps, SRE, QA, IT, and Physical Infrastructure teams while closely partnering with Heads of Development and Product. Design system architecture to facilitate feature development and ensure stability.

Operations & Reliability Manager

Red Acre | November 2021 - September 2023

Led DevOps and SRE teams, implemented Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and GitHub Actions. Established monitoring with Grafana Prometheus stack. Managed trading and brokerage services, creating products like tradelocker.com & funderpro.com.

DevOps Team Lead

Blexr | September 2018 - November 2021

Blexr was in a period of rapid growth, which led me to step into evolving roles within the DevOps team as critical needs were identified. I played a pivotal role in the recruitment and retention of the team, contributing to the creation of a secure, high-availability infrastructure capable of handling high-traffic loads across hundreds of web projects. Our infrastructure leveraged key AWS services, including EC2, RDS, ECS, and S3.

One of my major initiatives was spearheading the introduction of Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), promoting a low-risk, highly scalable architecture. Through the implementation of CI/CD pipelines, we significantly reduced production environment issues and streamlined developer workflows. With my development background and a strong focus on continuous improvement, I led the adoption of Infrastructure as Code at Blexr, driving automation and efficiency.

In addition to these efforts, I contributed to several key projects, including network security with DDoS mitigation, comprehensive monitoring and alerting across all data points, VPN integration for company services, and centralized authentication management. Our work also included marketing tracking and data warehousing solutions.

Tech Stack: AWS, GitLab CI, Terraform, Docker, Azure, LDAP, Zabbix.

Senior Java Developer & Product Owner

Blexr | September 2017 - September 2018

I was hired to develop an affiliate revenue tracking platform to address a critical gap in the affiliate industry. Starting from scratch, I gathered requirements from the business department and built the product using Java/Spring. As the platform matured, I took ownership of the product, with my responsibilities expanding beyond development into the business aspects. I witnessed the team`'`s growth from a developer-only group to a fully cross-functional team.

Tech Stack: Java/Spring, React

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.

Tech Stack: Python, Django, Javascript

Software Operations Engineer

CCBill | September 2014 - August 2015

To broaden my expertise, I took on the challenge of delving into Software Operations. My responsibilities included maintaining existing codebases, applying upgrades to CCBill’s product lines, and working extensively in the production environment. This role demanded quick problem-solving skills and out-of-the-box thinking to address critical issues. Communication was key, as teams were spread across Malta, Serbia, and the United States. Additionally, I was involved in meetings that discussed implementation strategies and release procedures handling sensitive production user data. During my time, I was exposed to Agile methodology as the company transitioned from Waterfall.

Tech Stack: Java/Spring, Bash, MySQL, VMware

Software Engineer

CCBill | September 2012 - September 2014

During my undergraduate studies, I secured a summer internship that extended into a part-time role during my final year. This was my first professional experience in the industry, where I gained hands-on exposure to enterprise-level tools, specifically working with Java/Spring and VMware technologies. Upon completing my degree, I was promoted to a full-time software engineer at CCBill. In this role, I utilized company-standard source control and task tracking software while contributing to multiple projects. My work involved participating in releases, analysis, and design to ensure system solutions aligned with overall architecture.

I was also involved in developing enterprise applications, most notably for PhoenixNAP, a cloud portal allowing clients to manage virtual machines, load balancers, firewalls, and network storage with scalable growth options.

Tech Stack: Java/Spring, Bash, MySQL, VMware

M.Sc in Data Science

University of Glasgow | 2015 - 2016

B.Sc ICT Computer Science with Artificial Intelligence

University of Malta | 2010 - 2013

Programming Languages

Experienced: Java, Spring, Bash, Python, K8s

Limited Experience: C#, Django, FastApi, C, C++, OpenGL, OpenCV, PHP, Laravel, Unity, HTML5, CSS, Javascript, NestJS

CI/CD

Gitlab, Github, ArgoCD, Bitbucket, Jenkins, SonarQube

Server Operating Systems and Tools

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