Timothy Hughes - Linux Systems Engineer

Personal Details

Name: Timothy Hughes

Location: London

Email: [email protected]

Nationality: Dual British and Australian Citizenship.

Computer Skills - General

Computer Skills - Programming / DBA / Systems Administration

Computer Skills - Languages / Operating Systems / Software

Software

Languages

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.

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

Dates Course Extra
2008 RHCE Cert Num: 80500818223054
2004 Introduction to Java Programming Holmesglen Tafe
2000 Visual Basic for Windows Council of Adult Education
1999 Earth Science Deakin University Rusden
1995 - 1997 Chemical Science Deakin University Geelong

Secondary Education

Date School Location
1994 Grant High School Mount Gambier