Nigel Gutcher - | Platform Engineer |

Career Summary

17+ years experience helping organizations achieve their automation, connectivity, infrastructure, visibility, and team workflow goals.

For the past eight years I have been immersed in best-practices for Cloud platforms; deploying to AWS & GCP and Kubernetes with various forms of automation. I have grown considerably in recent years as an infrastructure observability specialist.

Over the past six years I have been directly involved in delivering two fully-automated Infrastructure-as-Code Kubernetes platforms to Production. My combined years of experience have granted me a keen eye for resilient and maintainable patterns.

Core SKILLS

Cloud Providers
- Amazon AWS ⋆ 9y
- Google Cloud ⋆ 2y
Kubernetes ⋆ 8y
Service Mesh ⋆ 2y
Automation
- Bash / CLI ⋆ 21y
- CloudFormation ⋆ 2y
- Terraform ⋆ 7y
- Terragrunt ⋆ 3y
- GitLab ⋆ 5y
- GitHub Actions ⋆ 1y
- Jenkins ⋆ 2y
- Python ⋆ 3y
- TypeScript ⋆ 1y
- Java ⋆ 1y
- ArgoCD ⋆ 1y
PostgreSQL Admin ⋆ 1y

Telemetry
- Splunk ⋆ 4y
- Logz.io / Grafana ⋆ 3y
- Prometheus ⋆ 2y
- OpenTelemetry ⋆ 2y
- New Relic ⋆ 2y
- Splunk ⋆ 3y
Linux Systems ⋆ 21y
Network Design ⋆ 15y
High Availability ⋆ 13y
Docker ⋆ 12y
Application Support
- Java ⋆ 10y
Documentation & Diagrams
SCRUM / Agile ⋆ 7y
- Product Owner ⋆ 2y

Experience

Sum Computing Consulting

June 2026Oct 2026

Kubernetes Platform Engineer (ongoing)

Identified an extreme inefficiency in the usage of compute resources across Compute Fabric and delivered a cluster 'right-sizing' tool to stop tenants from contending heavily for resources, ensuring vital compute workloads are able to operate more efficiently
- The knowledge gained from this activity will be used to drive and maximize Compute Forge platform efficiency, resulting in real cost savings and preventing capacity-based outages
Created and presented a bold, holistic action plan for adding systemic guardrails and resiliency into the Compute Forge estate - dramatically reducing overall risk and attack surface
Took the initiative to move infrastructure components to a semantically-versioned standard at a critical juncture
Helped stand up the Compute Forge 'Engineering' environment needed for infrastructure development and testing
AI power-user
Team player, and clear communicator

OneSpan

May 2020Jan 2026

Senior DevOps Developer

Platform Engineer - Designed and Developed repeatable Kubernetes infrastructure deployments
- Developed networking layers including Service Mesh (Istio Ingress), Firewall/Security groups, Transit Gateway, NAT Gateway, and subnet isolation on AWS
- Automated deployment with CI/CD pipelines using Terraform, Python, and Bash
  - Kept infrastructure up-to-date with RenovateBot
  - Passed SOC2 compliance with in-pipeline image security scanning, code vulnerability scans, file integrity monitoring, and organizational controls (Kubernetes RBAC)
  - Automated SDLC for infrastructure components with automatic image builds (Docker) and updates
  - Integrated application build and deploy (CI) using Helm
  - Developed and released ArgoCD environments for continuous application deployments
  - Developed observability stack on Kubernetes using OpenTelemetry to send Logs, Metrics, and Traces to ELK stack (Grafana & Prometheus via Log.zio) and configured Dashboarding and Alerting

Designed, coded, and deployed a Terraform IaC platform on AWS ECS for the sales development team
- Self-directed project management and delivery
Formed and led a small DevOps team to create tooling for early adoption of a modern company-wide Infrastructure-as-Code platform
Became a Core DevOps team contributor to deliver a modern Kubernetes / GitOps IaC platform
- CI/CD and observability SME
  - Wrote and maintained GitLab CI pipelines
  - Grafana dashboarding
  - Metrics delivery infrastructure on K8s
  - Developed ArgoCD automated deployment
Delivered projects enhancing organizational security and SOC2 compliance
Worked with application development teams; providing ad-hoc tooling to ensure successful platform migration

Gannett Company / USA Today Network

20182020

DevOps Engineer

Supported a multi-cloud developer platform and learned Terraform
- GCP (Kubernetes) & AWS
  - Managed deployments with Helm and Ansible
- Envoy proxy configuration and deployment
- Delivered an Artifactory Terraform module
  - Migrated company from on-prem to SaaS Artifactory
Began API programming in Python
- Integration with HashiCorp Vault
Maintained Jenkins instances in Kubernetes
Used New Relic APM & Sumo Logic for metrics and log analysis

Morgan Stanley

20162018

Technology Associate - L3 Systems Administrator

Hired as a full-time employee from NTT Data Inc.
Infrastructure product champion for Splunk deployments
- Engaged in capacity planning, roll-out, and support for a rapidly expanding Splunk Enterprise on-prem deployment with 100TB+ of metric events and logs ingested per day
- Scaled the platform from a small collection of servers and saw it to maturity through various config management methods over four years, working with other teams and business units as customers
Wrote procedures and automation to drive operational efficiency
- Performed high-effort data migrations, then automated the process
- Delivered a dense, high-quality body of documentation to enable customer self-service and reduce the L2/L3 support burden
- Developed infrastructure self-healing and alerting scripts in Bash and Python
worked closely with Engineering and L2 support teams to guide infrastructure expansion and feature support in a large Enterprise environment
Trained a new L2 support team on-site in Guadalajara, Mexico

NTT Data Inc.

20132016

Senior Consultant - L3 Systems Administrator

Planned and executed infrastructure upgrades and migrations while communicating risk with stakeholders via ITSM & Change Management
Configured High Availability on F5 load balancers and Apache
Configured monitoring, monitoring-of-monitoring (MoM), and visualized metrics with dashboarding
Co-founded an Agile support team in a more traditional technology environment
- Shifted recurrent support themes down to L2 Operations with new procedures and scripts
- Handled support tickets and JIRA issues for project work
- Star communicator with clear written and spoken English - represented my team in meetings with various business units

Freelance

20122013

Systems Administrator | Web Developer | Repair Technician

Remote Linux & BSD Systems Administrator
- Deployed Nagios/Cacti, Sendmail/Dovecot, OpenSwan/PF/IPTables
Web design
- Completed a tourism website, exploring development on Django
Serviced local businesses and individuals with hardware repair

NetMedia Services Inc.

20102012

Systems Architect

Responsible for the transformation of four racks of company servers with a complete network redesign
- Designed and deployed a high-performance, redundant 200TB+ fiber SAN on Lustre
- Designed and deployed monitoring and alerting infrastructure from the ground up with Cacti and Munin
- Secured office and DMZ networks with VLANs
- Deployed firewalls, file servers, a Hadoop cluster, an OpenStack cluster, DHCP, and DNS
Supported a network of 40+ Windows desktops