About me
👋 I’m a senior platform engineer working on infrastructure at Monzo. I previously worked on platform for Crunch.
Interests #
Running Kubernetes at scale #
I’ve been working with Kubernetes for 4-5 years - first as a curious tinkerer, then as an operator of the clusters that power Monzo. I’ve spoken in the past about why I think Kubernetes has been a powerful enabler (talk link). I’ve enjoyed self-hosting our cluster and learning all the nuts and bolts (along with the pain!), but I now think managed Kubernetes is the way to go for most people (talk link)
Observability backed by Prometheus #
I first deployed Prometheus in my previous role, and it was a game changer - simple to operate, and cheap to throw all manner of metrics at it. I’ve gone from that to building out and operating our metrics setup at Monzo, which currently processes several million samples per second, using Thanos to aggregate across multiple Prometheus replicas.
Operating healthy on-call rotations #
I went on-call at Monzo in my 3rd week, and have been on-call ever since. Our on-call setup has changed a lot, and I’m super interested in the art and science of making on-call not suck. I planned a talk for SRECon Americas 2020, but that was sadly cancelled due to COVID-19. Instead, I was lucky enough to publish a short essay in “97 Things Every SRE Should Know”.
Reach out to me for… #
🤝 Mentoring #
Infrastructure/Platform/SRE can be a pretty tough domain to get into as a newbie. If you’re looking for help or advice, I’d be happy to answer ad-hoc questions, point you in the right direction, or meet on a regular basis (dependent on how busy I am!)
As a senior engineer, I’d love to also hear from potential mentors - if you’re a staff or principal engineer looking for a mentee, let me know!
💬 Meetup/conference talks #
I’d love to talk at more conferences! If you’d like to hear from me on one of the topics listed above, get in touch 🙏
🙋♀️ Help with applying to Monzo #
If you’re interested in working at Monzo, I’m happy to answer questions or have a chat about the process.
Please do not reach out to me for… #
💰 Sales pitches #
I’m lucky enough to receive quite a few sales pitches, but generally within our organisation we’re a) pretty happy about our choices of tooling and technology and b) comfortable enough doing thorough research and reaching out to relevant people when we’re not.
🙇♂️ Customer support #
I’ve enjoyed the handful of times I’ve worked on the Monzo customer support frontline, but I’m a) not very good at it (I’m pretty sure I caused more work than I saved!) and b) not allowed to randomly interact with people’s accounts (for very good privacy reasons!). Your best bet is go via in-app chat and talk to our wonderful Customer Operations team directly.