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Andrew M. Knight

Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Glasgow, Scotland (UK)

Summary

Platform engineer with a background in application development in a variety of languages and many automation tools such as Terraform and Kubernetes. Dual US/UK Citizen with full right to work in both countries without sponsorship.

Skills

Platforms

  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • GitHub
  • Gitlab
  • Istio
  • Knative
  • Docker
  • Helm

Tools & Skills

  • Terraform
  • ArgoCD
  • Vault
  • CI/CD
  • Monitoring
  • Logging
  • Redis

Languages

  • Go
  • Java
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Javascript
  • HCL
  • Bash
  • SQL

Work Experience(8)

Jul 2024 - Current
Staff Site Reliability Engineer - Environment Automation
Gitlab

Team lead for the core commercial offering of GitLab Dedicated

  • Lead development of Hosted Runners to Limited Availability that secured multiple customer multi-year commitments of $500k+ in ARR

  • Developed blueprints for Zero Downtime Deployment and Disaster Recovery

  • Served as part of a technical escalation for critical GitLab Dedicated incidents

  • Key expert in a working group to overhaul SRE hiring across the company

  • Lead analysis and implemented fixes to support the largest GitLab Dedicated tenant's critical scaling issues

Nov 2022 - Jun 2024
Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Environment Automation
Gitlab

Fully remote SRE working on building the new GitLab dedicated offering.

  • Added aws instance event alerting for our tenants

  • Implemented GitLab Geo for Dedicated tenants as a DR solution

Jun 2021 - Nov 2022
Principal Site Reliability Engineer
Magic Leap

Fully remote SRE working on platform initiatives and supporting key applications for enterprise customers.

  • Implemented POC Kubernetes based machine learning platform (kubeflow)

  • Coded (Go) a custom Kubernetes operator to create databases and set database permissions for users in Google Cloud SQL

  • Created automation to aggregrate NAT IPs for allowlisting across our GCP projects

  • Collaboratively planned go-live for services/onboarding portal for ML2

  • Advised on high level purchases of software and services

Jun 2020 - Jun 2021
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Blizzard Entertainment

Fully remote SRE embedded with the Long Term Analytics ("big data") team collaborating with game teams and other data teams

  • Wrote a tool in Go to streamline argo-cd configuration across teams

  • Implemented cert-manager and external-dns for my embedded team

  • Built out a custom Atlantis (terraform automation) instance in GKE to allow reviews of infra changes via PR

Jan 2019 - Jun 2020
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Magic Leap

Fully remote position working with a globally distributed SRE team supporting Magic Leap's platforms and websites

  • Created a pipeline to manage our GCP projects and user permissions as code using Terraform - managing over 417 projects

  • Created a pipeline to manage our GCP Shared VPC provisioning 53 subnets in different projects for on premises connectivity

  • Maintained 20+ terraform provider forks and hundreds of terraform modules in Go and Terraform

  • A primary architect of a Kubernetes Platform as a Service (PaaS) running internal and major external workloads scaling to accommodate product launches and hundreds of thousands of requests

  • Ran Knative in production as the primary feature of the PaaS providing automatic scaling to 0, istio service mesh/routing and also automatic provisioning of sql databases for services using operator-sdk and CRDs

Jan 2018 - Jan 2019
Site Reliability Engineer
Apple

Part of an SRE team supporting Apple Maps

  • Primarily supported an internal tool for managing bare metal servers and a workflow engine both built in Ruby on Rails

  • Monitored site reliability and performance while building monitoring tools to automate and document this work

  • Worked with developers to support new features, releases and consult on architecture

  • Scaled infrastructure and respond to production incidents owning production for the services/sites

Jun 2013 - Jan 2018
Web Engineer II
King Arthur Baking (previously King Arthur Flour)

Part of remote team working for internal clients on projects across the company's ecommerce site and backend systems

  • Integrated a tax API for all shopping transactions

  • Created an automated deployment system using github to push updates to the static site

  • Built a Disaster Recovery environment in AWS for our data center based servers

  • Modernized tooling and infrastructure

  • Rebuilt from scratch failed production servers transitioning from hand built servers to repeatable ansible playbooks

Jul 2011 - Jun 2013
Programmer
Accenture

Developer filling primarily Java roles within the Federal Services division for major government clients.

  • Arrived with 0 knowledge of spring and java by the time I left I had built a prototype front end redesign and was teaching lunch and learns on spring/java best practices

Education(2)

Jan 2009 - Jan 2011
Masters of Arts Anthropology
Columbia University
Jan 2007 - Jan 2009
Bachelor of Arts Anthropology
George Mason University

References(2)

“ Andy is undoubtedly a reliable partner and a pillar of this squad. He has a complete set of technical competencies and professional knowledge that makes the perfect match for such a project. He has a good knowledge of the various infrastructure layers involved in the project, He can develop applications (Golang) and has been the main provider of the various Kubernetes controllers and API servers running in the platform, When it comes to stressful production incidents or problems, he is able to take the right decisions and have the proper and calm reaction to have the service available again as fast as possible. ”
Romain Chalumeau
“ Andy has great deep technical knowledge which clearly translates into the reliable and scalable services he builds. Always trying to help others, very friendly and good communication skills. With his excellent Kubernetes skills, any team would be lucky to have Andy onboard. ”
Filipe Santos