Dexter is available for hire

Dexter Lakin

Verified Expert in Engineering

Software Developer

Fleet, United Kingdom

Toptal member since October 1, 2021

Expertise

AWS DevOps Kubernetes AWS DevOps Python CSS Visual Studio Development Agile Development Jenkins Ruby Node.js Web Development

Bio

Dexter is a talented cloud DevOps engineer and Certified Kubernetes Administrator. His interests include software development, DevOps, infrastructure as code (IaC), CI/CD, release engineering, security, compliance, monitoring, and logging. Dexter creates and maintains CI/CD pipelines and IaC and has a broad knowledge of public clouds (AWS and Azure in particular), software development, operating systems, and networking.

Portfolio

Vonage

Jenkins, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ruby, Python...

Blockdaemon

Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Go

Ensono

Azure, Kubernetes, Networking

Experience

Python - 5 years
Jenkins - 3 years
Kubernetes - 3 years
Azure - 3 years
Azure DevOps - 3 years
Agile Software Development - 3 years
Ruby - 1 year

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Azure

The most amazing...

...project I've ever worked on was Cinch.co.uk, a new website that was launched in under six months using a modern tech stack.

Work Experience

Engineering Enablement

2020 - PRESENT

Vonage

Delivered a large-scale project to migrate and modernize the CI/CD platform.
Enabled the transition from continuous delivery to entirely hands-off continuous deployment.
Supported engineering teams with the developer toolchain.

Technologies: Jenkins, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ruby, Python, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

2021 - 2024

Blockdaemon

Rapidly scaled a multi-protocol blockchain API suite to 10,000 RPS with a five 9s SLA.
Reduced public cloud costs for the API by 75% from $200,000 a month to approximately $50,000 a month while also adding new regions.
Wrote infrastructure code, CI/CD pipelines, and developer tooling used to launch a new non-fungible token (NFT) data API in under two months.
Improved the deployment frequency of the dev team by over 10,000% while also improving the mean time to recovery (MTTR) and change failure rate.

Technologies: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Go

Cloud Consultant

2019 - 2020

Ensono

Productized Ensono’s Kubernetes consultancy offering.
Architected, presented, and delivered solutions relating to Azure Cloud, DevOps, and Kubernetes.
Shaped Ensono's adoption of Terraform to replace ARM for Azure deployments.

Technologies: Azure, Kubernetes, Networking

DevOps Engineer

2018 - 2019

British Car Auctions

Transformed the build and release pipelines of the company’s car auction platform, through which BCA sold more than £8 billion worth of vehicles in 2017.
Designed, configured, and maintained Azure DevOps CI/CD build and release pipelines to ensure that code releases were executed cleanly and accurately.
Migrated over 60 development projects from TFS and other legacy infrastructure to Azure and advocated for the company-wide adoption of Git as the single source-control tool.
Founded the Cloud Computing Community of Practice which led to cloud architectural improvements, particularly in the areas of monitoring and alerting.

Technologies: Agile Software Development, Azure DevOps, Azure

Network Operations Engineer

2018 - 2018

Eclair Digital

Supported the rollout of a new cloud-based content delivery platform.
Contributed to Ansible playbooks and Bash and Python scripts.
Debugged and resolved Linux server and network issues.

Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ansible, Linux, Networking

Experience

Cinch

https://www.cinch.co.uk/

A public-facing website designed with modern web technologies (JAMStack, Azure, Kubernetes). I was on the team responsible for the CI/CD pipelines that enabled the team to deliver this in under six months and migrated some older web APIs to be reused for this project.

Personal Blog Site

https://www.dexterlakin.com/

This is a website I use for blogging. It is created with Hugo, a static site generator, and written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use, and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full HTML website.

Jenkins "V2"

Delivered a large-scale project to migrate and modernize the CI/CD platform, from a single Jenkins "snowflake" server on physical hardware in a server room to a highly available, multi-master, immutable stack running on AWS. CI/CD pipelines for critical infrastructure and services were migrated from manually written scripts to pipelines as code using Jenkins DSL.

Education

2010 - 2013

Bachelor's Degree in History

University of Nottingham - Nottingham, UK

Certifications

MARCH 2021 - PRESENT

Responsive Web Design

FreeCodeCamp

FEBRUARY 2021 - PRESENT

Certified Jenkins Engineer 2021

Jenkins

OCTOBER 2020 - PRESENT

Hashicorp Certified: Terraform Associate

HashiCorp

AUGUST 2020 - AUGUST 2023

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

AWS

NOVEMBER 2019 - PRESENT

Microsoft Certified: Azure Devops Engineer Expert

Microsoft

SEPTEMBER 2019 - PRESENT

Certified Kubernetes Administrator

The Linux Foundation

SEPTEMBER 2018 - PRESENT

Linux+

CompTIA

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Jenkins Job DSL, Node.js

Tools

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Helm, Jenkins, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Ansible, Terraform

Paradigms

Azure DevOps, DevOps, Agile Software Development, Jamstack

Platforms

Kubernetes, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Azure, Linux, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Languages

Ruby, Python, HTML, CSS, Go

Other

AWS DevOps, Networking, Web Development, CI/CD Pipelines

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