Hey There! I'm Theo M.
But you know that, right?
Exploring new pastures
I'm an infrastructure and reliability engineer with experience across Linux and Windows systems, OpenShift, Kubernetes, DevOps, application development, and information security. I'm a former Red Hat Certified Engineer and previously worked in OpenShift Site Reliability Engineering for Red Hat across the Asia Pacific region.
My experience spans enterprise infrastructure, financial technology, production reliability, automation, networking, identity and access control, security hardening, vulnerability management, and software delivery.
Personally, I maintain my own OpenShift environment and a collection of other infrastructure and services that give me somewhere to experiment, build, break things, and occasionally even fix them again.
About Me
- I'm experienced in enterprise Linux and production infrastructure, particularly Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SELinux, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. I've worked across reliability engineering, systems administration, automation, incident response, and platform operations.
- I'm comfortable working with virtualisation and distributed infrastructure including Proxmox, ESXi, OpenStack, and Hyper V, as well as containerised environments built around Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
- I'm experienced with infrastructure automation and deployment technologies including Ansible, Red Hat Kickstart, Debian Preseed, and iPXE, and have built automated deployment and configuration workflows for both production and personal environments.
- My security experience includes system hardening, role based access control, least privilege, vulnerability and CVE management, patching, security remediation, and responding to findings from independent penetration testing engagements.
- I've also spent several years working in financial technology, including payment systems and card networks, combining infrastructure, software, operational, and security responsibilities.
Niblets
- Former Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)
- Developer of the ird-validator Ruby gem
- Developer of Gateway, a remote systems administration and automation platform
History
- Chase
Westport, New Zealand • 2021-2023 • Chief Executive Officer
At Chase, I performed roles across infrastructure, code, financial services, staffing, and contract negotiations. In this role I grew Chase from a small startup to the midsize company it is today.
Key Contributions
- Deployed infrastructure for Chase, including Active Directory, OpenShift, and our own custom web deployment platform
- Wrote unit tests for the Quantumm® software, speeding up the development lifecycle for our developers
- Worked through remediation and retesting following an independent penetration testing engagement, addressing application and infrastructure findings
- Red Hat
New Zealand • 2019-2021 • OpenShift Site Reliability Engineering, Asia Pacific
At Red Hat, I worked in OpenShift Site Reliability Engineering for the Asia Pacific region, supporting Red Hat OpenShift services from New Zealand. The role centred on production reliability, automation, incident response, and the day to day operation of distributed OpenShift environments.
Key Contributions
- Operated and supported production OpenShift services across Asia Pacific, working across Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, networking, and platform operations
- Participated in incident response, monitoring, maintenance, upgrades, and lifecycle work for customer environments
- Automated operational tasks and contributed to tooling designed to reduce toil and improve consistency
- M6 Securities LLC
Utah, United States • 2020-2021 • Senior DevOps Engineer • Contract
As the Senior DevOps Engineer for M6 Securities, I worked across infrastructure and software, introducing new workflows and improving the software development lifecycle. I implemented CRM functionality, improved resilience, and strengthened security controls in line with ISO 27018, ISO 27031, and ISO 27040.
Key Contributions
- Implemented automated resiliency controls, bringing uptime and stability of our CRM software to "six nines" (99.9999% uptime)
- Implemented and rolled out enhanced security controls on web applications by deploying Red Hat OpenShift 4.x and implementing RBAC best practices
- Implemented controls aligned with ISO 27018, ISO 27031, and ISO 27040, covering cloud privacy, ICT readiness, and storage security
- Online Republic
Auckland, New Zealand • 2018-2019 • DevOps Engineer
As the DevOps Engineer for Online Republic, I worked across infrastructure and software, improving practices and acting as the gatekeeper for weekly rollouts of the Cruise software. I was responsible for keeping deployments from affecting production while maintaining "four nines" (99.99%) uptime.
Key Contributions
- Implemented new infrastructure for web content handling, increasing requests per second from around 200 to more than 12,000
- Acted as release gatekeeper, reviewing changes and preventing bad commits from reaching production
- Improved CI/CD and enabled vulnerability scanners to notify and automatically deploy fixes to critical infrastructure
- ezyVet
Auckland, New Zealand • 2018 • Software Developer
As a Software Developer I worked closely with customers to resolve issues in the ezyVet software, as well as implementing new features. I also assisted in onboarding several new large clients, helping ensure they had a smooth "go live" experience.
Key Contributions
- Reduced memory impact on client workstations by over 80%, allowing clients to keep ezyVet open for longer
- Implemented supporting modules for X-rays to automate importing patient records into ezyVet
- Validated X-ray import modules by designing and integrating PHP unit tests into the CI/CD pipeline
Contact Me
You made it! If you'd like to get in touch, here's what you need to know.
Email: <your name> [at] theom <dot> nz
Phone: +64 27 525 8549
Phone: +64 27 525 8549