Brendan's Experience#


As a highly experienced and driven engineer with over 10 years of experience across various levels and industries, I possess a unique perspective on client and internal problems. My expertise is in cloud engineering, DevOps, automation, and containerization, along with my extensive experience, enables me to deliver solutions and designs that consistently exceed client expectations.

I am an analytical and detail-oriented decision-maker who is committed to delivering quality outcomes, fostering a unique culture, and inspiring and motivating those around me. Leading by example, I apply the principles of engineering, morality, and professional practice to ensure that every project is completed to the highest standard.

As a dedicated professional, I am constantly seeking to evolve both professionally and personally. I push myself out of my comfort zone in order to drive self-growth and stay ahead of the constantly evolving technological landscape.

I am a keen supporter of fostering the technology community, I co-lead the Melbourne HashiCorp User Group as well as assist numerous others within the Melbourne tech space.

Azenix

June 2021 - Present

Principal Engineer
During my time as a Principal Engineer at Azenix, I was responsible for more than just delivering quality work to our clients. I also played a key role in driving business growth through sales and partnerships, as well as developing and implementing business strategies.

One of my major accomplishments was taking ownership of partnerships with GitHub, HashiCorp, and Octopus Deploy. I am particularly proud of the latter two, as I initiated these partnerships and successfully nurtured them into mutually beneficial relationships.

Through my time at Azenix, I discovered a deep passion for guiding others in their professional growth and lending expertise in technical education. At the core of this passion was a desire to create a safe space for individuals to thrive and learn. By sharing my knowledge and providing support, I was able to effectively elevate our teams productivity and efficiency in both client engagements and internal projects. Building strong relationships with engineers allowed me to identify their unique strengths and weaknesses, leading to tailored solutions that helped them overcome obstacles and succeed.

  • Delivered pre-sales design and advisory workshops to multiple clients
  • Provided mentoring to fellow engineers
  • Education through brown-bags, meetups and conferences both organised and presented on topics such as scalable infrastructure-as-code, deployment and management of VCS, CI/CD and Terraform Cloud using Terraform as well as DevOps practices.
  • Worked with Microsoft and GitHub to secure funding for various projects across the business
  • Created solution architecture documentation and diagrams for multiple clients, ensuring that security was front of mind.
  • I was responsible for securing, and leading several strategic engagements.
  • Worked with Microsoft, GitHub and HashiCorp to secure funding across various projects throughout the wider Mantel Group business. This aided in the acceleration of those projects.

Clients#

Macquarie Group

In my role as a team leader, I spearheaded the development and delivery of the next-generation Azure platform for the Corporate Operations Group (COG). This involved implementing best practices, with Terraform serving as the cornerstone of our approach. By leveraging Terraform, we were able to create a highly reliable and scalable environment that could be easily audited and replicated.

As part of this engagement, I also took on the crucial task of mentoring and upskilling our internal team members in the use of Terraform. This helped to ensure that our organization would be well-equipped to sustain and grow the platform well into the future.

  • Advised, educated, and implemented Terraform practices across multiple areas within COG cloud team(s)
  • Guided an Azenix engineer to takeover the leadership of the engagement
  • Interfaced with client stakeholders as well as internal
  • Implementation of Terraform to deploy Azure Enterprise Landing Zone, Azure DevOps, & Palo Alto
  • Worked with the security team to ensure that the designed solution was adherent to business security requirements, this meant taking security on the journey.
  • Implemented a Secure SDLC for the cloud engineering team ensuring reviews and security scanning was done.
  • Setup CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure-as-code and application deployments using Azure DevOps, and Atlas with relevant peer-reviewing processes.
  • Put into action Azure Policy to enforce governance controls on the Azure platform.
  • Worked with the central cloud team, networking team and feature team to implement an observability platform that catered to all requirements.

Big Wx

During this project, our team was responsible for enhancing Big Wx's Terraform practices and Kubernetes infrastructure. I spent a considerable amount of time providing consultation on Terraform, CI/CD, and Kubernetes to the Big Wx cloud team, as well as to the feature teams utilizing their cloud services. Additionally, I played a crucial role in securing the Master Services Agreement (MSA) for Mantel Group, which enabled both Azenix and the entire organization to work with Woolworths Group more extensively.

  • Advised internal team(s) on Terraform, Kubernetes, Azure and CI/CD best practices
  • Worked with feature teams to uplift their skills on Terraform
  • Migrated feature teams from using Jenkins for infrastructure and application deployment to a combination of Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions.
  • Reviewed pull request review process and CI/CD approval workflows advised on uplift to the Implementation.

National Australia Bank

May 2019 - June 2021

Senior Cloud Engineer/Tech Lead

Working at NAB has given me exposure to multiple clouds and experience in an enterprise financial services organisation.

Teams#

  • Cloud Platform Services

    Sept. 2020 - June 2021

    Cloud Platform Services is the centralized team that provides cloud services within NAB. This ensures that the services that are delivered, deployed and consumed within the bank are consistent and secure. During my time with this team, I drove the following:

    • Delivered Terraform Enterprise at scale, as well as continuous improvements to both the platform and the custom NAB Terraform module library.
    • Developed patches and improvements for upstream Terraform providers.
    • Guided and educated more junior Terraform and Azure colleagues.
    • Developed Terraform best practices and standards utilised within both CPS and consumption teams.
    • Worked closely with vendors such as Microsoft and HashiCorp to deliver outcomes.
    • Acted as a central team member in the delivery of an Azure platform using Terraform Enterprise to BNZ, a subsidiary of NAB, including the up-skilling of their engineering team(s).
    • Worked with teams to facilitate service enablement and on-boarding.
    • Acted as an integral part of the M1K (the largest Microsoft cloud migration project in the southern hemisphere) team guiding external consultants on Terraform practices within the bank as well as problem-resolution and process improvement.
    • Assisted the NAB Engineering Framework (NEF) team on uplifting their Terraform deployed Jenkins instances that were created and consumed by individual feature teams.

    TerraformMicrosoft AzureCloud Design

  • API Gateway

    May 2019 - Sept. 2020

    Whilst working within the API Gateway team, my main objective was to guide a team of engineers to deliver the bank API Gateway solution on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Doing so allowed the bank to have the same capability across its preferred cloud vendors.

    • Work with the team to design a solution to deploy Kong at scale with Kubernetes, specifically Azure Kubernetes Services.
    • Design and write Terraform code to provision the Azure resources, as well as the Kubernetes resources within the AKS clusters.
    • Build-out automation for orchestrating Terraform open source using the bank's CI/CD technology choice, Jenkins.
    • Work with business and security stakeholders to ensure delivery of the project.
    KongKubernetes
TerraformMicrosoft AzureCloud DesignAutomation Strategy

LAB3

May 2019 - June 2021

Senior Cloud Engineer (Consultant)
As a consultant with LAB3 I work with many clients, my primary client was National Australia Bank as described above.

Clients#

AusNet Services

I was part of the project responsible for deploying the API Gateway and management layer for AusNet Services.

  • Wrote Terraform code for Azure Application Gateway Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Azure Traffic Manager (TM) based on design.
  • Implemented automation for the deployment of the WAF and TM using Azure DevOps.

Services Australia

During the proof of concept that LAB3 provided to Services Australia I was responsible for working in a small tiger team delivering an automated way of deploying OpenShift clusters within Azure. This automation used a combination of Terraform and GitLab CI.

  • Write Terraform code to deploy OpenShift clusters on Azure
  • Write Terraform code to generate projects and automation pipelines within GitLab.
  • Extend the GitLab Terraform provider to ensure it exposed all required API endpoints.

Persuit

Feb. 2019 - May 2019

Senior Cloud Engineer

During my time at Persuit I helped move the organisation off of Heroku and Microsoft Azure and onto Google Cloud Platform. This was driven by the fact that they operated in a cloud-native, container-first approach. As they were a startup, GCP provided the best value for money.

  • Work with business and technology stakeholders to design and build proof-of-concept a Kubernetes solution in both Microsoft Azure and GCP.
  • Implement the designed Kubernetes solution on the selected cloud (GCP) utilising Terraform.
  • Provide education and learning for the developers within the team on GCP, Terraform, and Kubernetes.
GCPKubernetesTerraformMicrosoft AzureGolangMongo

AGL

Nov. 2017 - Feb 2019

Senior Cloud Engineer
I was part of the Data and Decisioning team within AGL; this team was responsible for ensuring AGL had a centralised data store and decisioning platform where the business could get and make decisions for the customers. This platform was fundamental to ensuring that the customers experience was positive and delivered personalized offers.

I was responsible for migrating a COTS application from a single docker instance solution into a scalable Kubernetes solution. This was done through the use of acs-engine which was Microsoft Azure's product for deploying Kubernetes onto IaaS servers. During this time, I worked with architecture, business stakeholders, and vendors to ensure the platform was stable and scalable.
Microsoft AzureKubernetesTerraformPegaAzure DevOps

Telstra Health

Jan. 2016 - Nov. 2017

Senior Cloud Engineer/Tech Lead

Telstra Health (TH) motivated me to move back to Melbourne from Queensland. My main functions at TH were operating within the DevOps team on projects such as the Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA), and ReadyCare. These two products were released to help Australia become more technologically advanced in the health space.

Once TH won the National Cancer Screening Register, I took on the responsibility of a Tech Lead to drive technology decisions and lead a team of people to deliver those decisions.

  • Work with the DevOps manager to devise and implement cloud strategy on Azure.
  • Work with Architects and business stakeholders on the architecture and detailed design documents to meet Federal Government expectations and compliance requirements for the NCSR.
  • Ensure the underlying IaaS machines were operational for our applications.
  • Create Cisco firewall requests and validate the rules were provisioned.
Microsoft AzureVMwareCiscoF5 BIG-IP