Kieran James

Professional Experience

Where I've worked. Select a role to expand it.

  1. Capital on Tap 2021 – Current Moorgate, London

    SRE & Platform Engineering Manager

    Managing the Platform and SRE teams at Capital on Tap across UK and Australia. Overseeing 15+ engineers across cloud, platform, and SRE teams, with impact spanning people management, process improvement, developer self-service, stakeholder relations, AI adoption, reliability, and incident management.

    • Team Leadership: Manages multi-level engineering teams end-to-end; roadmaps, progression plans, retros, and all recruitment.
    • Ways of Working: Standardised change management, retrospectives, and ticketing; embedded SREs directly into engineering teams; introduced staggered start times for Australia team integration and a lighter on-call policy.
    • Self-Service: Built developer autonomy through Go-based CRDs, IaC modules, a software catalogue, and early IDP adoption: reducing bottlenecks and upskilling engineers on incidents and observability.
    • Stakeholder Engagement: Ran consistent reporting and feedback loops with stakeholders and peer managers; used dashboards to track cross-team objectives; managed vendor relationships including cost/usage oversight.
    • AI Adoption: Led rollout of AI tools (Claude-based) with a security/PII-conscious approach; built an AI platform using Foundry, Anthropic, Agentgateway, Kubernetes, and CRDs for governance and self-serve access.
    • Reliability & Observability: Closed observability gaps with IaC-based monitoring modules and semantic tagging; standardized APM/DBM usage tied to scorecards in the software catalogue.
    • Incident Management: Migrated to incident.io, improving incident visibility and extending its use to non-engineering parts of the business.
  2. Creative Technologies 2020 – 2021 Horsham

    Devops Engineer

    A hands-on DevOps/infrastructure role focused on build & deployment support, tooling automation, and platform maintenance across a wide toolchain, with some team-building and process responsibilities.

    • Build & Deployment Support: First line of support for dev teams’ build/deployment issues, plus scheduling and overseeing out-of-hours production deployments.
    • Platform Management: Broad tooling ownership; GitHub, Octopus, TeamCity, Azure, TFS, ProGet, AKS, Bitbucket, Docker, Chocolatey, Puppet Enterprise.
    • Automation & Scripting: Built Octopus runbooks and PowerShell scripts to cut down BAU work; automated audit reporting; created a Dockerised pipeline for Octopus execution containers; built a new TeamCity NPM build template.
    • Infrastructure Setup: Stood up Puppet masters via Terraform/Bash; provisioned new devs/teams using Terraform and Octopus; set up the DR environment; maintained AKS and its containers.
    • Environment Migration: Assisted migrating QA, Staging, and Production environments.
    • Security Tools: Worked with Barracuda WAFs and firewalls.
    • Cross-team Support: Helped set up a cloud support team (acting as their point of contact); supported application support team on IIS, SEQ, Stackify, and general app issues; troubleshot the Cake build script in TeamCity.
    • People: Involved in onboarding and interviewing.
  3. Infinity 2015 – 2020 Reigate

    Devops Engineer / IT Support

    Progressed from IT Support (help desk, AD/O365 user management) to System Administrator (Windows/Linux infrastructure, VOIP/telephony, security patching, container and network management) at Infinity, then into an early AWS cloud migration role building Terraform-based networking and infrastructure.

    • Security & Patching: Defended against major threats (WannaCry, Spectre/Meltdown); built and managed WSUS; timed patching to minimize downtime.
    • VOIP/Telephony: Completed SIP training; worked with Freeswitch, XML/JSON dial plans, SIP groups/users/queues, and Yealink phone provisioning.
    • Linux & Containers: Wrote Puppet modules; managed LVM backups; used Git for dev/prod container changes and RPM pushes to GitHub; built and networked dev/prod containers (IP, DNS, firewall/IPTables rules).
    • Infrastructure: Managed VLANs, ADSL/phone lines, SSL certs (via Nginx), and the Paxton door access system; used HeidiSQL/MySQL. Supported the migration from On-Prem to AWS.
    • Migrations & Finance Systems: Led IT side of an Office 365 → Google Suite migration; managed Sage 200 users and Spindle/Barclays Gemalto setups.
    • Leadership & Compliance: Trained a new sysadmin; led IT Guidelines review for GDPR; handled on-call rotation and vendor ticket resolution.