Joel Merrick, index page 100

Curriculum vitae

The long version.

Joel Paul Merrick

Platform Engineer / SRE / Cloud Architect / CTO

Contact: [email protected] | My Website | My GitHub

Location: Lancaster, UK

Arctic Code Vault Contributor 2020 · AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (valid through Jul 2028)

Professional Summary

Platform engineer, SRE and cloud architect with twenty years of hands-on work across AWS, Azure and GCP. Most recently I was DevOps Lead at OCU Digital, where I built the Google Cloud platform as code, and before that I ran an Operational Readiness programme across the BBC’s Data Platforms group. Much of my career has been spent inside other people’s teams, as a contractor or a lead: finding out what they need, building it with them, and training them to own it. I also build AI platforms: as CTO of a small social enterprise I built an agentic RAG platform on Azure with LangChain and LangGraph.

Key Skills

  • Cloud Architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • AI / LLM platforms (LangChain, LangGraph, Azure OpenAI, agentic RAG, pgvector)
  • Kubernetes & Containerisation
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDKTF, Helm)
  • CI/CD & DevOps Automation (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins)
  • Linux Systems Administration
  • Full-stack development (TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js, Python, Java/Spring Boot)

Core Competencies

  • Cloud Platforms: AWS (10 years), Azure (4 years), GCP (6 years)
  • AI / LLMs: 3 years applied (RAG pipelines, LangChain/LangGraph, Azure OpenAI, pgvector)
  • Infrastructure: Kubernetes (6 years), IaC (7 years), Configuration Management (13 years), Cloud (13 years)
  • Automation: CI/CD (12 years), DevOps (8 years), Virtualisation (16 years)
  • Programming: Python (11 years), Ruby (15 years), Bash (18 years), TypeScript / Node.js (4 years), Java / Spring Boot (5 years)
  • Databases: PostgreSQL with pgvector (11 years), MySQL (16 years)
  • Systems: Linux (20+ years), Networking (20+ years), Storage (16 years)

Professional Experience

OCU Digital (OCU Group)

DevOps Lead

May 2026 – Oct 2026

  • Lead DevOps for OCU Digital, owning the platform behind OCU One, the group’s flagship web application.
  • Rebuilt the Google Cloud estate as code with OpenTofu, including a new GKE production platform alongside the existing cluster.
  • Moved CI/CD to keyless authentication with Workload Identity Federation, with security and policy checks on every pull request.
  • Built observability from scratch with Grafana dashboards as code, plus estate health checks and alerting.
  • Designed blue/green releases and disaster recovery for the production platform.
  • Built AI tooling on Vertex AI (Gemini), kept within UK data residency, for pull request review and automated exploratory testing.
  • Introduced Architecture Decision Records and ran a DevOps training programme for the engineering team.

Spectrum Dynamics CIC

CTO

Jun 2025 – Present

  • Technical lead for a UK social enterprise (CIC) building AI-powered guidance tools for the SEND sector. Built the full stack solo.
  • SpektraBot: GDPR-compliant SEND support platform for parents, carers, teachers, and SENCOs. Agentic RAG pipeline with hybrid search (pgvector + BM25), self-correction, and cited answers grounded in the SEND Code of Practice and the Local Offers of all 152 English Local Authorities. Backed by a 52,000-school GIAS dataset and a crawler that harvests SEND documentation across every English Local Authority.
  • Stack: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Node.js, LangChain/LangGraph, Azure OpenAI GPT-4o, PostgreSQL with pgvector, Redis.
  • Infrastructure on Azure via Terraform (AKS, Container Apps, OpenAI, Key Vault, ACR, PostgreSQL, Redis), delivered through GitHub Actions, Docker, Helm, and GHCR.

BBC (Data Platforms)

Senior Platform Engineer (Contract)

Aug 2025 – May 2026

  • Engaged directly by the Head of Data Platforms to run an Operational Readiness programme across the whole Data Platforms group.
  • Reviewed more than 30 services in the Data Platforms portfolio and brought each into line with the BBC’s service management standards, closing gaps in ownership, runbooks, alerting, and on-call documentation.
  • Worked hands-on with AWS MWAA, Step Functions, Glue, SageMaker Unified Studio, Redshift Serverless, and Athena to understand the estate from the inside rather than from documentation alone.
  • Built Grafana dashboards covering the above services, giving squads a shared view of pipeline health, job failures, and SLO breaches.
  • Wrote and refreshed runbooks in collaboration with the owning teams, focusing on what on-call engineers actually need at 3am.
  • Contributed patterns and fixes to the GitHub Actions pipelines used across the Data Platforms estate.

Barclays (via Clearroute)

Senior Platform Engineer (Contract)

Feb 2025 – May 2025

  • Built a migration tool for migrating Barclays Chef IaC to Ansible using a novel system prompt generation loop for use with Artificial Intelligence and LLMs like Claude
  • Released tool via Clearroute at https://github.com/clear-route/chef-to-ansible-converter
  • Designed a developer pattern for GitLab pipelines, leveraging Barclays existing GitLab infrastructure to replace a legacy Nolio based workflow

Origami Energy

Senior Platform Engineer

October 2023 – Feb 2025

  • Provided support to squads by delivering a robust platform for developers
  • Migrated Kubernetes clusters and infrastructure from kops and other disparate systems to EKS
  • Utilised cdktf with TypeScript to manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
  • Developed and maintained applications using Java and Spring Boot
  • Designed and optimised GitLab CI/CD pipelines
  • Managed OpenSearch and Kafka (via Confluent Cloud)
  • Acted as Technical Authority for the IdP replacement, transitioning from Keycloak to Zitadel, enabling SSO and multi-tenancy support
  • Worked extensively with Postgres, DynamoDB, and MongoDB databases

The Sporting News

Site Reliability Engineer

Jan 2023 – Sep 2023

  • Created Jenkins pipelines and GitHub Actions for management of CI/CD process and maintained Groovy scripts used by pipelines
  • Managed EKS and Cloudflare at ingress using Terraform
  • Deployed ECS clusters using Terraform
  • Migrated Drupal PHP to Django Python
  • Set up security scanning for code repositories and Jenkins pipelines/GitHub Actions
  • Maintained PostgreSQL clusters, including making the existing cluster fault tolerant

Clinigen

DevOps Engineer (Contract)

Dec 2021 - Aug 2022

  • Created a plan and training documentation to migrate from SVN to Git (Bitbucket based) for multiple development partners and delivered multiple training sessions to developers
  • Built CI/CD system based upon Jenkins on AWS
  • Implemented deployment hooks to integrate a Jenkins pipeline with EBS deployment
  • Created Prometheus monitoring backend and deployed targets for JVM/Oracle and AWS specifics
  • Generated Grafana dashboards to display the metrics collated from Prometheus
  • Wrote Ansible playbooks for complete service deployment coverage
  • Built ETL system for internal HR administration utilising Apache Airflow

Sky UK

Senior DevOps Engineer (Contract)

Oct 2020 - May 2021

  • Conducted deployment of Video on Demand architecture from a US broadcaster to be built in EU
  • Deployed multiple environments and regions in AWS, using Terraform/Puppet and Ansible
  • Refactored existing Terraform code to work with newer versions and reduce code complexity
  • Built scrapers for CloudWatch to ingest metrics into Prometheus
  • Built visibility dashboards for ALBs/ELBs/EBS/RDS within Grafana
  • Conducted security audits and increased overall estate security through encrypted AMIs, better logging, and key rotation
  • Built registry servers for Docker container hosting
  • Improved the CI/CD pipeline with quality gates for identifying bad practices and security vulnerable patterns in Terraform and Puppet code
  • Added CVE scanning mechanisms and static analysis tools to the code pipelines

ESL Gaming

DevOps Engineer (Contract)

Feb 2020 - Jun 2020

  • Built multiple Kubernetes clusters for use within an eSports gaming prototype, whereby statistics from gameplay was aggregated, processed and consumed by various clients
  • Created clients including a Twitch extension, VR/AR tiles overlay, and website widget
  • Utilised GitLab’s CI/CD for all projects, allowing developers to create review environments from repository branches
  • Created custom build pack for Elixir and Phoenix Framework which would automatically build an environment, package and deploy to a given environment
  • Built pipelines to deploy a Twitch Extension, including full testing and integration within the Twitch ecosystem
  • Deployed clusters using Google Cloud Platform via GKE
  • Utilised Google’s CDN to create an event sourced pipeline with tick updates across the globe
  • Managed Atlassian product stack (Jira and Confluence)
  • Used Grafana with Prometheus to monitor the Kubernetes clusters and wrote custom collectors for application metrics

WSP

Engineering Lead / Solution Architect

April 2018 – Aug 2019

  • Built a full CI/CD system for Smart Consulting, transitioning from manual builds to automated and Docker-based builds for greater portability and consistency
  • Managed AWS-based deployments for over 20 active projects
  • Managed a wide range of applications, including Machine Learning for Flood Prediction and GIS based systems
  • Built and maintained a Kubernetes based platform, enabling full self service and granular control for users to manage their own projects
  • Deployed Serverless architecture via Serverless Framework on AWS Lambda for ChatOps integration and general management
  • Utilised Kubernetes native workload types within legacy products
  • Secured the Kubernetes stack and ran regular penetration testing
  • Ensured cost-optimisation across the cluster, helping reduce cloud expenditure threefold
  • Built an OpenShift cluster, utilising the latest Kubernetes tooling
  • Made legacy systems more robust by adding redundancy, additional processes and gaining higher uptime
  • Increased security through DevSecOps processes
  • Wrote and published IT standards that were used across the company
  • Introduced coding tools and standards for developers
  • Prototyped against Azure Cloud and Google Cloud (GCP), including GCP course at Google Offices in London
  • Used InfluxDB/Grafana/Telegraf to monitor infrastructure deployed into the cloud

Datacentred

Cloud Platform Engineer

May 2016 – Oct 2017

  • Managed and maintained a public cloud using OpenStack
  • Part of G-Cloud government initiative, a marketplace designed to allow gov.uk customers access to UK based cloud providers
  • Gained security clearance and screening for working with government clients
  • Worked with high profile clients, such as HMRC, to improve the quality of service and performance of their cloud based applications
  • Troubleshot and diagnosed issues with the deployment on OpenStack for Gigaspaces, a customer producing multi-cloud deployment software
  • Met with stakeholders for large profile customers to improve the efficiency of their services
  • Planned and executed an OpenStack upgrade whilst customers were still running on the platform
  • Rolled out immutable infrastructure based containerisation of backend OpenStack services for greater consistency across nodes
  • Attended KubeCon 2017 in Berlin for rolling out Kubernetes on OpenStack as a service for customers
  • Managed an InfluxDB backed monitoring solution for gathering millions of datapoints from network, compute and storage systems
  • Wrote a libvirt plugin for Telegraph, which gained extra insights into a hypervisor’s processes
  • Created and collated Grafana Dashboards, integrated with SSO solution

BBC

Senior System Administrator

Sept 2011 – Apr 2016

  • Built and maintained R&D cloud platforms and a multi-site cluster using OpenNebula middleware with Ceph-based block storage and local SSD storage
  • Integrated systems into BBC R&D’s authentication and core service backends
  • Built a Packer based build pipeline for virtual machine image generation and Docker/LXC containers with Kitchen/ServerSpec/BATS test suite
  • Delivered images for internal consumption and to 3rd party hardware/software manufacturers
  • Created EC2 and S3 compatible endpoints attached to private cloud infrastructure
  • Built and maintained continuous integration for internal software build, testing, software packaging, repository management and image creation using Jenkins
  • Managed master and build slaves across varied build targets, distributions and architectures including i386/ amd64/armhf
  • Developed and managed configuration management implementation for R&D using Puppet
  • Managed full system bootstrap for generic developer systems, internal core services and highly specialised infrastructure such as IP Studio
  • Developed a system management tool for end users to self-service and automatically configure their assets
  • Wrote a CMDB system and several microservice APIs using Ruby’s Sinatra and Grape
  • Provided consultancy work and advice to colleagues across R&D
  • Spoke at conferences, including OpenNebula Berlin 2013
  • Implemented new help-desk and monitoring system for R&D
  • Acted as Network Controller, supported successful delivery of London 2012 Super Hi-Vision, Glastonbury 2013 Online streams, Radio Academy 2012/13/14, ‘Little Sun’ R&D/Tate-Modern collaboration platform, R&D Installation at Manchester MakerFaire
  • Successfully completed in-role promotion
  • Created a monitoring solution for the Commonwealth Games 2014 using InfluxDB and Grafana

Public Speaking

Technical Skills

  • Network Services: DHCP and DNS (BIND and Unbound), SMTP (exim, postfix & qmail) and IMAP/POP3 (courier and dovecot), HTTP (Apache with mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ssl, passenger phusion), Nginx, Squid, NFS, CIFS, iSCSI, FC, LDAP (AD and OpenLDAP) and Radius (Freeradius), SNMP, SVN, git, Syslog (syslog-ng, rsyslog and logstash), Message Queues (ActiveMQ, ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ), Route53, API Gateway
  • Server Management & Monitoring: FAI, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Foreman, MCollective, Fabric, Rundeck, Nagios, Sensu, OpenNMS, Cacti, Monit, Munin, cPanel, Telegraf, Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana
  • Build Tools / CI: Terraform, Jenkins / Hudson, Packer, Drone, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Code Build, Code Deploy
  • Database Technology: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL 7.0 & 2000, ElasticSearch, MongoDB, ActiveRecord, DataMapper, RDS, Cloud Spanner, Google Cloud Database, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, DynamoDB, Clickhouse
  • Virtualisation/Cloud: KVM, VMware vSphere, VirtualBox, Vagrant, Docker, Rocket, OpenNebula, OpenStack, OpenShift, Ganeti, Proxmox, AWS – Amazon Web Services, GCP – Google Cloud, Azure, AWS Lambda, Serverless Framework, Kata Containers
  • Container Management: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, K3S, OpenShift (3 & 4), Rancher, RKE
  • Unix: Linux (build, deployment of most major distributions – Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, SuSE), Solaris, FreeBSD, AWS Linux, CoreOS, Google Container Optimised Linux
  • Security: IPTables, Firewall Setup, VPNs using OpenVPN, PPTP and IPSEC, IDS (Snort and OSSEC), Kernel Hardening (lsm, selinux, apparmor, grsecurity, pax) MAC/RBAC
  • Scripting: Python, Perl, Ruby, Typescript, PHP, Bash, Java

Languages

  • English (Native)
  • French (GCSE - A*)
  • Spanish (GCSE - A)