Owen Valentine

Cloud/DevOps Engineer

Seasoned Software Development-adjacent DevOps/Cloud Engineer, most recently at Entersekt. Skilled at Systems Design, Consultation, Technical Support, Technical Documentation, Technical Training, Linux System Administration, Virtualization, Containerization, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code.

Work

Hosting Platform Engineer

– Present

Software Engineer: DevOps

I was part of the DevOps team at Entersekt, responsible for CI/CD, packaging and related infrastructure, with focus on PCI compliance and artifacts. This involved Kubernetes, GitLab, Xray and an internal BDD framework based on Cucumber.

DevOps/Test Engineer

Establishing this role at Snapt, I initially focused on manual product testing and began to set up automated pipelines before the company shut down. This involved Docker/Compose, GitHub and CircleCI.

  • Established manual testing procedure for Snapt products

  • Managed and owned non-production infrastructure - including Nginx/PHP-FPM, InfluxDB, Redis and PostgreSQL

  • Created and maintained API and product documentation on various platforms

  • Provided third-line assistance to support engineering

IT Systems Engineer

In this role at Snapt, I bolstered pre-sales engineering and drove automation and infrastructure-as-code initiatives. This involved Terraform, Ansible and Packer.

  • Trained and upskilled technical and non-technical staff alike on various cloud platforms, technologies and trends

  • Created and maintained an automation framework with Terraform, to provision ephemeral, short-lived demo environments for customer ease

  • Co-developed a logical load testing framework to certify Snapt software releases and guide marketing and product development

  • Spearheaded move towards containerization and refactoring of Snapt software components, to avoid dependency hell and provide consistency across environments

  • Fostered increased infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD adoption and focus - Terraform, Ansible, CircleCI

  • All-rounder: handled internal and external technical queries/needs/improvements across the board - including invoicing systems, security consultation services and customer deployments

Cloud Support Engineer

My role at AWS was to resolve customer support queries, focusing on large enterprise customers with complex environments.

  • Pioneered the AWS Premium Support Andon Program (PSAP) in Cape Town

  • Trained >80 engineers globally on Docker, containerization and ECS/Fargate

  • Maintained a perfect customer satisfaction record

  • Became a go-to engineer (in a team of >60) for all in-domain topics and many extra-domain topics in short time

  • Member of ECS (Elastic Container Service) and CloudEndure support operations teams

Senior Systems/Network Engineer

My role at Umanix was mainly focused on a single customer, managing their entire software infrastructure. This involved Proxmox, LXC, Wildfly and MySQL.

  • Managed, maintained and improved full tech stack (Hypervisor cluster, LXC, Nginx, Wildfly/Java, MySQL) for a large-footprint Business Management Platform SaaS provider

  • Set up and maintained Umanix's helpdesk system, running Zammad, a Rails app with PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch

  • Drove company direction and strategy

  • Oversaw the work and training of three technicians, serving as an escalation point

System Administrator

  • Deployed, maintained and improved a number of POP3/IMAP/SMTP servers, as well as LAMP hosting infrastructure

  • Managed and maintained RADIUS and proxy RADIUS servers for DSL realms and other PPPoE uses

Technical Support Agent

  • Handled technical calls and emails from customers, covering all services provided by Huge Networks

  • Installed wireless/fibre equipment and handled technical support at customer sites

Volunteer

Certificates

Skills

DevOps

  • Terraform
  • Terragrunt
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Ansible
  • CircleCI
  • Packer
  • REST
  • Sentry
  • GitLab CI

Systems Engineering

  • Networking
  • Load Balancing
  • Web Applications
  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • MySQL
  • Python
  • PHP
  • SMTP
  • POP3
  • IMAP

Linux

  • Red Hat
  • RHEL
  • CentOS
  • Rocky Linux
  • Ubuntu
  • Debian
  • Kernel
  • Troubleshooting

Cloud Architecture

  • AWS
  • Azure
  • GCP
  • DigitalOcean
  • Linode
  • OCI
  • VPC
  • ECS
  • EKS
  • Fargate
  • EC2
  • RDS
  • ElastiCache

Languages

English

Native proficiency

Afrikaans

Working proficiency

Esperanto

Working proficiency

isiXhosa

Limited working proficiency