Ali Farooqui

An experienced DevSecOps engineer with a strong systems administration and automation background, I specialise in infrastructure as code, security and configuration management. I help create processes that remove impediments in the CI/CD pipelines for large scale agile infrastructure deployments.

I am passionate about Linux, open source projects, development and cybersecurity.

I understand that the difference between a good engineer and a great one is empathy.

Skills & Expertise

• Configuration Management - Ansible, Puppet
• Containers and Orchestration - Docker, ECS, LXC, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure as Code - Terraform, CloudFormation, Altus Director Config
• Continuous Integration - Gitlab, Jenkins
• Development and Scripting - Ruby, Bash, Python and experience with TDD using Rspec
• Load testing - Jmeter, Gatling and writing scenarios in Scala
• Threat Monitoring - OSSEC, Investigator, Wazuh
• WAF Training - ModSec, Varnish, IaC ruleset management
• Security Testing - ZAP, Burp, Metasploit
• Analytics - Elastic stack, Graphite, Splunk

Work Experience

Coop Membership Team - Manchester - DevSecOps Consultant. May ‘19 - Present

I am currently working with the Coop Membership Team as a DevSecOps engineer building automated deployment pipelines. This includes working with API Gateway, Cloudfront and serverless infrastructure, managing the platform with a variety of infrastructure as code tools.

I am also helping the team write security tools and develop security behaviours that improve the security posture from the ground up.

HMRC Custom’s Declaration Service Platform Team - Manchester; DevOps Engineer. June ‘18 - May ‘19

Worked with the Custom’s Declaration Service Platform team to build CI/CD pipelines for data-warehousing tools like Cloudera, Pentaho and bespoke business analysis tools in AWS. I have spent a major portion of this project working on creating bootstrapping mechanisms using python, bash and Ansible, and wrapping them in the Altus Director’s HOCON configs to automate Cloudera Cluster deployments. Dependent infrastructure is provisioned using Terraform within Terragrunt wrappers. During my time on this project, I streamlined the Cloudera cluster build process from a 2 week manual process to a 2 hour automated build process managed through a Jenkins instance.

HMRC Digital Build and Deploy Team - London; DevOps Engineer. Dec ’17- June ’18

Worked as a DevOps engineer with the team responsible for building and maintaining orchestration pipelines for the HMRC Digital platform. The team’s main responsibility was to build CI processes and pipelines for 800 microservice teams located across the UK. This involved working with tools such as Jenkins, Sensu, Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Docker and a variety of container management tools including deployments with the Elastic Container Service. During my time with the Build and Deploy team, I rewrote the monitoring platform for microservice deployment tools and wrote Sensu plugins for all the in house deployment tools in Ruby and bash. I was also involved with supporting these microservice teams by helping them integrate shared Jenkins libraries into their build pipelines.

Equal Experts - Manchester; Platform Engineer, Machine Learning Environment. Oct ‘17 - Dec ‘17

Worked on automating a Jupyterhub environment deployment. This involved building a CI/CD pipeline in AWS using Terraform, Docker and Ansible. During my time on this short project, I created an end to end Jenkins pipeline for automated Jupyterhub deployments that acted as a demo environment.

UKFAST - Manchester; DevOps Engineer, Dec’13- Oct’17

As the Lead load testing engineer I was responsible for client stress tests and building the environment for the platform itself. I created a platform that would create user journeys automatically and built tools for the in-house support team to run stress tests for clients with one-liners written in bash and deployed through Ansible.

As a DevOps engineer for the threat monitoring project I was involved with server and agent install automation for all the OSSEC tools across thousands of client server instances. I was involved with creating dashboards in Skedler and in Kibana for creating threat monitoring reports. This work was based around the Elastic Stack.

As a Senior Linux Systems Administrator I worked with clients to provide them with best practice guidance and helped them optimise their web infrastructure. I also helped maintain client infrastructure and implement changes to a large variety of web based applications.

Education & Professional Qualifications

University of Sheffield: BEng (Honours) in Electronic Engineering – July 2013

• 2020 7
• 2019 1
• 2018 1