Aaron Walker

Professional Summary

Highly autonomous Staff Site Reliability Engineer specializing in multi-pillar observability tooling, production Kubernetes platforms, and service meshes. Known for exceptional technical skills, strategic problem-solving, and driving organizational standards through comprehensive architecture and developer self-service tools. A collaborative engineering partner who seamlessly leads internal infrastructure, scalability, and security initiatives while effectively balancing engineering velocity with system reliability.

Experience

Staff Site Reliability Engineer September 2021 - Present

Beamery | Greater London

Led the organizational observability strategy by migrating from Datadog to Grafana/Prometheus and the ELK stack,implementing SLOs based on error budgets, and establishing dashboards and alerting as code.
Implemented a keyless LLMOps stack to enable for broader GenAI usage whilst centralising cost management, monitoring and security.
Championed developer experience by implementing Backstage as an internal engineering hub and creating custom plugins for orchestrating and recording deployments.
Enabled decentralized Kubernetes deployments by creating shared common terraform modules for workloads with built-in best practices, secured using least-privilege IAM and OPA Gatekeeper.
Executed complex infrastructure upgrades and migrations, including critical major version upgrades for Elasticsearch (v7 to v8) and MongoDB.
Operated with high autonomy to deliver major architectural projects, including the design and rollout of a new Internal Services Gateway for access to services outside of k8s clusters (using Workload Identity Federation).
Drove platform security and compliance initiatives, gathering evidence for SOC2 audits,enabling the security team to self-serve security changes within Cloudflare, and provisioning security monitoring tools (such as GCP SCC)
Resolved complex performance and reliability bottlenecks across the platform by developing custom Prometheus exporters in Go.
Actively contributed to the broader engineering community by presenting technical talks including at MongoDB and Grafana London User Groups.

Site Reliability Engineer September 2019 - August 2021

Sky | London, England

Designed and deployed Source-to-Image (S2I) Kubernetes cluster utilizing Cloud Foundry, RKE, and OpenStack.
Developed and operated a Service Broker to facilitate Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) deployments directly atop Kubernetes.
Initiated and led a project to overhaul neglected internal services, improving security posture, regaining observability (Prometheus, Loki, Grafana), and increasing overall reliability.

Software Engineering Trainee July 2017 - September 2018

Amadeus IT Group | Bad Homburg, Germany

Developed full-stack web applications using Django, and implemented comprehensive Unit and UI testing utilizing Python and Selenium.
Built an IoT Robotics Management Framework with microservices, leveraging MQTT and the ELK stack, hosted entirely on AWS.

Professional Summary

Experience

Technical Skills

Education