Ash Davies

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Resume

Lead Platform Engineer specialising in enterprise Azure infrastructure, Terraform, and cloud governance — with proven experience managing estates at scale across the UK public sector.

Contact details

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drizzlyowl/
GitHub: https://github.com/drizzlyowl/
Location: Bradford, UK

Summary

Platform engineer and technical leader with deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, and DevOps practices across Azure and AWS. Currently providing technical direction for a Cloud Centre of Excellence managing an enterprise Azure estate of 39 subscriptions across a dual-region hub-spoke topology (~£50k/month cloud spend). Experienced in driving platform transformation — from legacy Terraform remediation and CI/CD standardisation to governance, security, and observability at scale. Strong public sector background with a consistent record of delivering secure, high-availability platforms for critical services.

Certifications

  • HashiCorp Terraform Associate
  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)

Work Experience

British Business Bank – Cloud Centre of Excellence

August 2025 – Present | Tech Lead from March 2026

Embedded within a three-person Cloud Centre of Excellence team as the primary technical authority and Azure SME, reporting into a wider Technical and Security Engineering function. Recognised across the organisation as the subject matter expert for Azure, regularly consulted by other business areas on cloud infrastructure decisions.

  • Own architectural decision-making for cloud infrastructure across an estate of 39 Azure subscriptions spanning two UK regions in a mirrored hub-spoke topology (~£50k/month cloud spend, at least 21 production environments).
  • Host CCOE daily standups and facilitate backlog grooming sessions with senior technical leaders across the wider organisation to align on priorities and initiatives.
  • Led a comprehensive Terraform codebase transformation: remediated config drift between non-production and production environments, imported ClickOps-provisioned resources into state, and rewrote poorly structured legacy code across approximately 15 subscriptions to improve maintainability and consistency.
  • Introduced standardised shared CI/CD workflows via Azure DevOps Pipelines across the CCOE, replacing inconsistent per-repo pipelines that relied on deprecated Visual Studio Marketplace extensions and lacked robust production deployment controls.
  • Designed and deployed a comprehensive Monitoring Landing Zone covering all 39 subscriptions, including geo-redundant Log Analytics Workspaces, Data Collection Rules (DCRs), Data Collection Endpoints (DCEs), alert rules (Active Directory, NPS, database deadlocks/CPU/DTU, VM CPU/disk/memory, activity log events for AUM failures and VNet peering), severity-scoped Action Groups, and cold storage log export.
  • Authored custom Azure Policy definitions and initiatives to configure Diagnostic Settings across key resource types, feeding into the platform Log Analytics Workspace.
  • Led the introduction of Private Endpoints across the hub-spoke topology and improved split-horizon DNS resolution by distributing private DNS zones across both UK regions.
  • Driving cost optimisation through VM right-sizing, ongoing Azure Cost Management and Cost Analysis, and establishing budget alerts for tier 1 workloads to notify service owners.
  • Produced architecture documentation and network topology diagrams in Visio for greenfield and brownfield project work.
  • Participated in incident bridge calls and post-mortems; authored best practice configuration baseline guidance for engineering teams.

Department for Education – Regional Services Division

December 2022 – August 2025

Served as the sole DevOps engineer for the Regional Services Division programme for approximately two years, embedded in the cross-cutting technical team and working directly with lead developers across multiple delivery teams.

  • Managed approximately 10 containerised workloads, each identically deployed across Dev, Test, and Production environments using Azure Container Apps.
  • Designed and maintained CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions: building and signing Docker images, publishing to GitHub Container Registry, and triggering ACR pull tasks into a private Azure Container Registry before restarting the Container App against the new image tag.
  • Maintained the highest Defender for Cloud Secure Score across DfE subscriptions; the team’s infrastructure was recognised as the gold standard for workload deployments across the department.
  • Published reusable Terraform modules that promoted cross-team collaboration and consistent infrastructure patterns across the division.
  • Identified and decommissioned legacy Azure resources, delivering approximately £20,000 in annual cost savings.
  • Implemented secure-by-design principles throughout, with strong familiarity with Azure Well-Architected Framework guidance.
  • Worked with Azure Container Apps, Container Instances, and Container Jobs; implemented infrastructure and application monitoring, logging, and diagnostics using Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Great Ormond Street Hospital

Short engagement

  • Established foundational AWS infrastructure for a greenfield project, focusing on account vending and identity management using AWS Control Tower.
  • Built initial deployment pipelines using GitLab CI.

dxw internal platform – Dalmatian

Ongoing, alongside client engagements

  • Contributed to dxw’s internal containerised AWS hosting platform, built on ECS, EC2, Aurora RDS, and PostgreSQL RDS, with CloudFront, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager, and WAF — all deployed via bootstrappable Terraform.
  • Contributed features to dalmatian-tools, an internal bash CLI enabling developers to trigger deployments via CodeDeploy, initiate Session Manager shell sessions on EC2 instances, and manage WAF IP allowlists.
  • Provided out-of-hours on-call support as 1st-line triage and 2nd-line escalation for the hosted platform.

Mixd

November 2015 – October 2022

Lead Technical Architect (April 2021 – October 2022)

  • Designed, provisioned, and maintained robust and highly available web hosting solutions for clients using Rackspace OpenStack.
  • Automated infrastructure provisioning and configuration management using Ansible and Heat Orchestration templates.
  • Responsible for the stability and security of critical public service websites, including NHS Intranets, NHS Trust and CCG websites, North West Ambulance Service, and North Yorkshire Police.
  • Engaged with stakeholders to present hosting architecture and ensure alignment with client requirements.

Previous roles: Senior Developer (2018 – 2021), Web Developer (2015 – 2018) Progressed from web development into infrastructure and technical architecture, building a foundation in Linux administration, server management, and performance optimisation.

Skills

  • Cloud Platforms
    • Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace OpenStack
  • Infrastructure as Code
    • Terraform (HashiCorp Certified), Ansible, Heat Orchestration
  • CI/CD
    • Azure DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI
  • Containers & Compute
    • Azure Container Apps, Container Instances, Container Jobs,
    • AWS ECS, EC2, Docker
  • Networking
    • Hub-spoke architecture, VNet peering, Private Endpoints, Private DNS zones,
    • Azure Firewall, NSGs, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, AWS VPCs
  • Monitoring & Observability
    • Azure Monitor, Log Analytics Workspaces, DCRs/DCEs, Application Insights,
    • AWS CloudWatch
  • Security & Governance
    • Azure Policy (custom definitions and initiatives), Checkov, tfsec,
    • Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Managed Identities, Entra ID RBAC
  • Data & Storage
    • Aurora RDS, PostgreSQL RDS, Azure SQL
  • Developer Tooling
    • Bash scripting, AWS Secrets Manager, CloudFront, WAF
  • Soft Skills
    • Technical leadership, architectural decision-making, stakeholder engagement, backlog management, incident response, documentation

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