AWS Certifications
… progressing from no certifications to 7x AWS-certified, including both Pro and one Specialty certificates, within a year
Richard Coupe
Certified Cloud & DevOps Engineer, Agile Coach & Engineering Leader
@ rjcoupe@pm.me +44 (0) 7460700782 South Wales
Profile
With a background comprising of software development, Agile practice, secure cloud engineering and consultancy, I'm an IT professional with a significant skillset in both the technical and ways-of-working arena within the technology sphere. I'm passionate about the benefits of well-implemented technological solutions as well as the efficacy of an Agile mindset and its methodologies to the point of faintly irritating my wife in my efforts to apply them to household tasks.
I greatly enjoy "playing" with technology and taking opportunities to both learn new things and increase my knowledge of existing areas of expertise. I live for "projects", whether they have a tangibly useful outcome or are simply a vehicle for my efforts at trying a new technology or process.
Over time, I've worked with development platforms and ecosystems such as NodeJS, Python, React, Go, Rust, Ruby and PHP, either professionally or simply for the enjoyment of picking up a new technology. I get a lot of pleasure from finding the "right" way to execute and deploy the results, finding the best ways to follow the good practices of the day to ensure principles such as security and reliability are implemented.
My current area of especially focused interest is that of Cybersecurity and penetration testing. I have begun pursuing certifications in the field entirely due to my personal fascination with the subject matter, and have found it to be just as enthralling as I had hoped. Having recently obtained both the OSWP and KLCP from Offsec, I am now studying for the OSCP in my own time.
Outside of my work (and play), I'm a father to four wonderful children and a husband to an extremely tolerant wife. We live in Cardiff, Wales, and can often be found out and about on country walks, whiling away the hours in play parks or trying to settle the important (loud) arguments that take place between a 11 year old and his 9 year old sister, 6 year old brother with the background sound of a remarkably shouty toddler.
Experience
Vidsy
Head of Engineering Enablement
September 2023 - (Present)
- Took over the Cloud, infrastructure and devops function within the company full time in response to growing demand
- Oversaw rearchitecture of CI/CD pipelines, with a specific view to opening the processes to other engineers and ensuring their ability to critique and contribute
- Pushed for and implemented shifting-left of security through better CI/CD practices
- Lead the full reworking of infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to allow for vastly more flexible environment management, specifically to enable both on-demand test as disaster-recovery capabilities
- Lead penetration testing engagement, liaising with partner testing company, triaging surfaced vulnerabilities and coordinating remediation work with engineers
- Drove cost-saving initiatives across cloud infrastructure, establishing policies and audit capabilities to better control cloud spend
Engineering Manager
October 2022 - September 2023
- Joined and lead development team in state of flux, overseeing recruitment for multiple roles
- Introduced agile ways of working, coaching engineers through principles and processes involved
- Lead team responsible for developer enablement and cloud infrastructure
- Line managed over 10 engineers, forming strong bonds and working with each on their personal growth and development
Ensono Digital
Lead Consultant
February 2022 - October 2022
- Promoted in recognition of prior performance, continuing with existing duties
Senior Consultant
September 2021 - February 2022
- Lead DevOps/Cloud work on major UK government project
- Designed and implemented, from scratch, a continuous integration/deployment pipeline enabling developers to deploy to ephemeral environments through git commits
- Worked closely with client teams and leadership
- Line managed more junior engineers
Tech Stack
- AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service
- Azure DevOps
- Azure Container Registry
- Terraform
- Forgerock
Seccl
Engineering Manager/Technical Lead - DevOps
December 2020 - September 2021
- Built and lead the DevOps/Cloud team, focusing on both technical excellence and the personal development of engineers
- Maximising developer ROI by proactively removing impediments and improving processes around them
- Overhauled team work management, implementing agile practices resulting in a kanban process
- Liaising with stakeholders throughout the business on matters concerning cloud and deployment processes
Tech Stack
- AWS Lambda, API Gateway, EC2, Cloudfront & DynamoDB
- AWS networking architectures (VPCs - and the routing, subnetting etc. therein) as well as Site to Site VPNs
- AWS security tools including Guard Duty and WAF
- Containerisation via Docker, AWS ECS and AWS EKS/Kubernetes
- MongoDB
- Github & Github Actions
- Ansible
- Jenkins
- Terraform
- Typescript
DevOpsGroup
Cloud Consultant
September 2019 - October 2020
- Responsible, as a qualified AWS Well-Architected Lead, for leading Well-Architected Reviews for over 20 distinct clients in order to determine where best to focus efforts on improvement to their cloud estate
- Designed, proposed and implemented solutions for clients requiring an enchancement or original creation of cloud strategy
- Regularly undertook engineering work alone as well as alongside dedicated engineers
Tech Stack
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - a very broad range of the technologies and products therein
- Kubernetes
- A wide array of technologies used by clients as part of the solution design and implementation processes
Agile Coach
January 2019 - September 2019
- Taking on a wider range of clients, worked primarily within the scale-up sector to bring client teams up to date in their ways of working
- Improved a client team's practice sufficiently to prompt the CIO to comment to the effect that the most recently released version was 6 months ahead of expectations due to the engagement
- Worked with two teams at the nascent stage of an enterprise transformation, coaching them from project to product team architecture
- Pulled double duty as an Academy Coach, line-managing our undergraduate interns to help facilitate their growth and development
Scrum Master
July 2018 - December 2018
- Scrum Master for a team operating within a FTSE 350 client organisation
- Facilitated effective workflow enabling engineering team to make substantial improvements to prior infrastructure
- Ensured effective lines of communication between engineers and stakeholders
Sorenson Media
Product Owner
September 2017 - July 2018
- One of a two-person product owning team for Sorenson's flagship Ad Suite product, a television advert-enhancing service with partners including Samsung, Discovery, ESPN and the Sinclair Group
- Sole product owner of the Broadcast Data API, a business critical internal product serving several customer-facing platforms
- Defined, prioritised managed and communicated to stakeholders the status of multiple releases across different products
Scrum Master
June 2016 - September 2017
- Scrum Mastered multiple teams across multiple products as needed by the business to ensure a predictable and consistent velocity and throughput of the teams in question
- Served as a line manager as an extra facet to the role, taking on a mandate to effectively develop and enable the team members so as to help them realise their full potentials both individually and as a team
- Tracked and used various metrics including lead and cycle times to discover and realise potential reductions in waste
- Served as a technical lead with responsibility for the technical implementations undertaken for the overall products
Senior Developer
September 2015 - June 2016
- Contributed to an ethos of quality and dependability of code, prioritising a test-mandating approach to ensure a long term vision
- Recognised as a high-profile, hard working member of the team by peers and leadership
- On multiple occasions, stepped into traditional Scrum Master roles by leading stand-ups, retrospectives and planning sessions
Tech Stack
- NodeJS
- MongoDB
- React
Imaginet
Web Developer
February 2014 - May 2015
- Worked with an array of clients including national enterprises such as NCP and Natural Balance Foods, creating and maintaining their commercial websites
- Implemented back-end solutions integrating technologies such as Atos WorldPay
- Designated as the Primary E-Commerce Developer within the company shortly after starting
Tech Stack
- PHP
- MySQL
"Make it work, then make it perfect."
Strengths
Adaptable
Personable
Ambitious
Big Picture-focused
Value-driven
Puzzle solver
Approachable
Logical
Process and Systems Thinking
Proud of
Varied Experiences
… through my variety of agile roles, I have seen the world through the eyes of a Developer/Engineer, Scrum Master, Product Owner and Agile Coach to realise a thoroughly diverse view of a business's end goals.
Ambition
… in myself, my colleagues and my work. I am always striving to develop whatever and however I can and feel I have had great success in this respect.
Certifications
- Offsec Wireless Professional
- Offsec Kali Linux Certified Professional
- AWS Solutions Architect (Professional)
- AWS DevOps Engineer (Professional)
- AWS Security Specialty
- AWS Solutions Architect (Associate)
- AWS Developer (Associate)
- AWS SysOps Administrator (Associate)
- AWS Cloud Practitioner
- Certified Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance)
- Certified Product Owner (Scrum Alliance)
- BCS Agile Foundation
- BCS DevOps 101