Timothy Hughes - Linux Systems Engineer

Personal Details

Name: Timothy Hughes

Location: London

Email: thughes@thegoldfish.org

Nationality: Dual British and Australian Citizenship.

Computer Skills - General

• Solved technical issues regarding hardware and software both by phone and on-site/remote access.
• Built and configured servers, from Dell, HP and IBM rack mount servers through to clone office workstations.
• Installed, configured and managed many operating systems.
• Configured volume management, raid and other hardware configurations.
• Maintained, supported and expanded Linux and Windows based networks.

Computer Skills - Programming / DBA / Systems Administration

• Managed multiple terabyte mysql database systems including optimisation of tables.
• Planned, installed and networked miltiple server farms.
• Developed a virtualized development environment to increase flexibility with development teams.
• Analysed capacity / software / hardware issues.
• Designed and implemented an automated server build system.
• Developed monitoring application plugins and checks for a high volume website.
• Installed, setup, regression tested and streamlined Apache web servers and mysql servers.
• Optimised time dependent applications to allow for rapid time to market high volume datasets.
• Automated data feeds customers for mission critical data.
• Installed and managed mail servers.
• Integrated a commercial accounting package with custom online systems.

Computer Skills - Languages / Operating Systems / Software

Software

• Puppet, Rspec, Beaker, Fabric, Ansible, MCollective
• Apache, HAProxy, Brocade vADC (Riverbed Stingray), F5 Big-IP, Squid
• MySQL, Mongodb, SQLite, Postgres
• RPM Development / Repository Management, Kickstart, Redhat Satelite, Pulp
• KVM virtualisation, Vagrant, Docker
• Nagios, Icinga, SNMP, Cactus, Graphana, Graphite, Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash
• NFS, ISCSI, Samba, LVM, BTRFS, Netapp, Equalliogic, HP MSA, DRBD
• Bind, DHCP, PXE, TFTP
• Sendmail, Postfix / Courier / Dovecot
• Gitlab/CI, Jenkins, Github, Travis
• TCP, UDP, Wireshark, tcpdump
• Wordpress, Drupal, Hugo, Pelecan
• FIX (Financial Information eXchange)

Languages

• Bash
• Python: Django, Twisted, Flask, Fabric
• Ruby: Puppet, Rspec, Cucumber, Rails
• Go
• PHP
• Perl
• SQL

Employment History

Head of Systems @ LMAX Exhange, London, United Kingdom

May 2008 - Present

My role at LMAX began as a Senior Systems Engineer and has progressed through Team Lead to Head of Systems. I started with LMAX before the company released it’s first product and have been instrumental in assisting LMAX develop it’s financial exchange platform to what it is today. Throughout this period I built a team of 10 systems engineers which managed all of LMAX’s systems infrastructure. This work has encompassed multiple data centre buildouts across the globe, database management, internal IT support, monitoring and automation of all Linux and Windows systems including development environments. The development environments make heavy use of virtualisation, due to the low latency requirements of a financial exchange all production systems run on bare metal to eliminate as much overhead as possible. To automate all these systems I designed a continuous integration and deployment pipeline which manages our Puppet code base and automatically configures monitoring for newly built systems. Some of my other main responsibilities in this role are as follows.

• Puppet development and testing in a continuous deployment process.
• Act as Technical Design Authority for Systems – Servers, Storage, Operating Systems, Virtualisation, Automation.
• Design, build and maintain secure, stable, resilient systems that meet the business needs in as economical manner as possible.
• Responsible for the support of the production exchanges.
• Responsible for the support of the corporate systems and infrastructure in all our offices
• Keeping abreast of recent technological and security changes so that we can take advantage of appropriate technologies – to improve performance and capacity, reduce cost and management overhead and improve security.
• Create and maintain process and procedure to demonstrate control of our systems to auditors and regulators.
• Ensure best practice is met or exceeded for how we run our systems and processes.
• Management, recruitment and career development of Systems department staff
• Providing training and mentoring of staff in technical and non technical areas.
• Tuning Linux and applications for our state of the art, low latency trading platform.
• Monitoring systems to proactively prevent issues arising.
• Researching, designing, implementing and documenting whole data centres to low-level kernel tunings.
• Scripting and automating processes to ensure consistency and repeatability.
• Low level TCP debugging for diagnosing errors and latency issues.
• Maintenance and packaging of software for deployment.
• Working with the business to design suitable solutions to interesting and unusual requirements.
• Supporting client facing and internal office infrastructure with a variety of OSes and software.
• Designing and building of data centres to exacting requirements.

Systems Engineer @ Multimap, London, United Kingdom

Oct 2005 – May 2008

The main objective of this position was to maintain service uptime to achieve contractual SLAs that Multimap had with their clients. This involved monitoring the website using tools including Nagios, MRTG, tcpdump, sar, vmstat, iostat and external monitoring services and responding to these to prevent outages. If there were issues then we had a constant improvement project which involved working out how to prevent the same issue happening again and designing and implementing the necessary process and architectural changes. I progressed in the position to Senior Systems Engineer and was involved deeply in the architectural design and decision making process in the Operations department. I was the driving force behind a complete overhaul in the way we built new servers which reduced our server deployment time to hours instead of days. I was also instrumental in the decision and development to move the development environment over to Xen virtualisation thereby giving our Development team a much more flexible infrastructure.

Technical Support Manager @ DCLabs, Ashwood, Victoria, Australia

Aug 2004 - Sept 2005

I was responsible for a small team of technical support staff assigning them support jobs based on their individual skills. The company, DCLabs, was a firm, which sold Linux (Debian based) DCServers that were used for mail, web and gateway servers. DCLabs also did remote and on site technical support for customer’s internal networks and systems, which involved combinations of Windows, Apple and Linux systems depending on the customers needs. It was a small office so I also spent a large portion of my time doing technical support for customers, this involved setup of email clients, vpns, configuring exchange servers, setup of websites on both Apache and IIS, hosting of domains and many other aspects of IT as we were the off-site IT department for about 300 companies.

Contract Integration Engineer @ Volante Systems, East Bentleigh,

June 2004 - Aug 2004

Contract Position. Building IBM and HP servers, desktops and laptops for corporate customers and installing operating systems and customised setups. Software and network trouble shooting and testing.

Web Developer / Programmer / DBA @ Computercom, Brighton East,

Dec 2003 - June 2004

Setup and ecommerce website integrate with internal accounting system. Automate it to a position that staff with no systems admin knowledge could maintain.

Programmer / DBA / Systems Administrator @ Stomp, Pty Ltd Abbotsford,

April 2001 - Dec 2003

Technical support. Developer for e-commerce websites and an internal stock management system. DBA for MS SQL Server 2000. Linux Administrator for email server and firewall / proxy.

Education

Further Education

Secondary Education

Links

• https://www.thegoldfish.org
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/hughestim
• https://github.com/timhughes
• https://git.timhughes.org
• https://keybase.io/timhughes