Andrew Hughes-Onslow

Platform & DevOps Engineering Lead

e: [email protected]

w: http://hughes-onslow.com

GitHub: https://github.com/kalpaitch

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

Experienced Platform and DevOps engineer, leading development teams across the public and private sectors and setting the technical direction for cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD on AWS and Azure. Security-cleared, software engineer by background, architecting scalable microservice, serverless and event-driven solutions in Node, Python and PHP.

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

Key Skills

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

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

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

Version Control & Automation: Github, Gitlab, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, Travis CI, Jenkins

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

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

Employment

Technical Consultant > April 2025 to present

CACI > Government Department > [confidential programme]

• Leading infrastructure and automation in a multidisciplinary team delivering a large-scale national system in production, processing around 2.5 million messages a day.
• 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 for the team, 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.

Earlier roles

• Senior Developer, Eurostar
• Senior Engineer, Dennis Publishing
• Senior Developer, Warmshowers.org
• Developer roles at New Digital Partnership, Reading Room and Firecracker

Education

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