Andrew Hughes-Onslow

Technical Lead, Infrastructure Engineer and Software Engineer

LinkedIn: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/hughesonslow/

Security-cleared platform and software engineer with over 15 years leading and empowering technical teams across public and private sector projects. Skilled in designing scalable, secure, and automated platforms on AWS and Azure using Docker and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation). Strong background in CI/CD pipeline automation, microservice and event-driven architecture, and developer enablement. Expertise across PHP/Drupal, Python, and Node.js.

Focus: Building secure & resilient platforms, fostering engineering excellence, and improving delivery through automation.

Key Skills

Leadership & Delivery: Technical leadership, mentoring, agile delivery, roadmap ownership, stakeholder communication

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Azure, Terraform, CloudFormation, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka

Software Engineering: PHP/Drupal, Python, JavaScript/Node/React, Bash

Automation: Pipeline automation and release management with CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Travis CI, Jenkins

Observability & Security: Dynatrace, Splunk, Sentry, SonarQube, Trivy, Checkov

Data & Storage: MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Typesense

Employment

Lead Technical Consultant > April 2025 to present

CACI > Government Department > [confidential programme]

Lead platform engineer for a multidisciplinary team delivering a world-first, large-scale digital system currently in live production trial, improving real-world processing time at a nationwide level.
Owned architecture, scalability, and reliability of Kubernetes platform supporting highly available microservices.
Designed GitOps delivery architecture using ArgoCD, improving release consistency and reducing deployment risk.
Architected Kafka event-stream platform enabling resilient, real-time communication across distributed services.
Implemented secure service-to-service communication framework using TLS/mTLS within zero-trust architecture.
Provide technical leadership, platform standards, and architectural direction across engineering teams, ensuring production readiness for trial environments.

Platform Lead > August 2024 to March 2025

CACI > Digital Experience

Led team of 5 platform engineers delivering infrastructure and platform capabilities across multiple concurrent digital transformation projects, improving team cohesion and delivery speed.
Established engineering standards and delivery practices across teams improving reliability and security.
Designed release management workflows with automated rollback mechanisms to reduce deployment risk.
Strengthened cloud network architecture and security posture through improved VPC design patterns.
Built modular infrastructure-as-code components aligned to AWS Well-Architected principles, increasing consistency.
Introduced cost visibility and optimisation practices ensuring efficient resource usage across projects and halving cloud waste.

Senior Devops Engineer > December 2023 to August 2024

CACI > Government Digital Service > One Login programme

Led infrastructure for the self-service identity platform, enabling simultaneous onboarding or low-medium complexity clients, greatly accelerating adoption by 10x.
Maintained containerized and serverless infrastructure using CloudFormation, Docker, and ECS, ensuring secure, high-availability operations.
Implemented continuous deployment pipelines with automated testing, reducing deployment time and human error.
Monitored and optimized service performance via CloudWatch, Splunk, and Dynatrace, proactively resolving issues.
Collaborated with central security teams on profiling, testing, and compliance to meet highest security standards.
Partnered with product and self-service teams to iterate on infrastructure supporting better client experience.

Technical Architect / Lead Engineer > June 2017 to Nov 2023

Department BEIS > Office for Product Safety & Standards > Primary Authority Register

Designed and led the development of a new database application for product safety standards, improving usability and cross platform and mobile device support.
Strategised and executed migration from the decommissioned GovUK PaaS to a new containerised AWS solution.
Led the development of a performance-focused Drupal / Postgres application backed by Redis and OpenSearch.
Coordinated with SOC, accessibility, content, and other teams to ensure GovUK Service Standard compliance.
Conducted roadmapping, requirement gathering, and stakeholder engagement with non-technical teams.
Implemented CI pipelines with blue/green deployments and automated rollback, improving release reliability.

Lead Engineer > July 2020 to January 2022 [part-time]

[Undisclosed] > Multi-vendor wholesaler & ad-tech platform

Architected event-driven data platform processing $1M+ daily revenue data across 100k products, enabling real-time analytics and decision making to push organic growth.
Developed Python applications using Chalice and the Serverless frameworks for scalable, maintainable workflows.
Designed service diagrams to communicate pipeline functions, results, and architecture to technical stakeholders.
Built an observability platform using CloudWatch and Grafana, enabling proactive performance management.

Senior Engineer > Dec 2016 to June 2017

Dennis Publishing > Magazine publisher, owner of The Week

Creating a new Drupal 8 platform for subscriptions services and magazine publishing

Senior Developer > May 2015 to November 2016

Eurostar > Trains from London to Paris

Creation of a new Drupal 8 component-based content site for Eurostar to drive
Contributor to the Drupal component initiative, and approach for headless content rendering
API development and integration with RESTful microservices

Senior Developer > June 2016 to March 2017 [part-time]

Trustroots > A free open source hospitality exchange network built on trust.

Senior Developer > July 2015 to July 2016

Warmshowers.org > A free worldwide hospitality exchange for touring cyclists

Senior Developer > August 2013 to January 2014

New Digital Partnership > A digital agency specialising in drupal projects

Technical Developer > October 2012 to July 2013

Reading Room > A global digital agency

Developer > July 2010 to September 2012

Firecracker > A small, fast-paced digital agency

Education

BA (architecture) > Oxford Brookes University > 2004 - 2008
3 A levels (history of art, design and technology, geography) > Eton College

References available on request.

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