Brazil’s first phone-app direct insurer
15% year-on-year growth over a decade — bridging traditional systems and cloud to open a new revenue channel.
RSA Firstgen · Services Company
Show me a technical problem everyone’s been quietly living with — and I’ll show you a way to solve it.
RSA Firstgen is the Services Company of Alex Trull, technologist and engineer. I challenge and change culture in IT — working comfortably at every level, from CEO to desktop support — eliminating repetitive processes and growing working proofs of concept into the foundations of sound architecture.
- Experience
- 2000–present · infrastructure to MLOps
- Base
- Spain (CET) · remote-first
- Sectors
- AdTech · finance · government · telecoms · insurance
- Cleared
- DBS · BPSS
Selected clients & employers WPP · McKinsey · Dell · Western Union · Ministry of Justice · Ministry of Defence · Vodafone · Lloyds Bank · Medidata · Dye & Durham · Clear Channel · Chef
01 — Highlights
War stories, not marketing copy
A selection of real outcomes from twenty-five years of infrastructure — every one traceable to a named client or engagement.
Algorithms into APIs
Turned a key advertising algorithm into a production FastAPI service — ML from proof of concept to production, with hugely improved feedback and deploy cycles.
Advertising that survived Black Friday
Kept Dell’s ads serving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday — hundreds of millions of impressions when the client needed them most.
ISP recovered from total outage
The longest day onsite. DNS is safer when distributed.
“Impossible” migration, delivered
Migrated the MoJ’s Atlassian system to AWS. Leadership called it impossible with vendor lock-in — the risk paid off.
DNS leaks closed
Warned the MoD to stop allowing AXFR in DNS. Too much information was being shared — it got fixed.
Observability as code, four global regions
Datadog and Prometheus with anomaly detection, SLO alerting and synthetic checks — replaced reactive firefighting with proactive monitoring.
First global Cassandra cluster
Fully automated, in all regions. It began as a proof of concept — the latency was off the charts.
A clinical trial in hostile territory
Automated a clinical trial hosted in AWS China — a low-trust environment where keys are best kept away from data.
Saved as tickets went on sale
Sysadmins blamed the load balancer. The cause was the backend — the site stayed up through the rush.
100+ AWS accounts, orchestrated
Thirty products across AWS, Azure and GCP — far too many moving pieces, so it had to be automated.
02 — Expertise
Deep, and broad on purpose
Comfortable from the metal to the meeting room — the capability map behind the highlights above.
Cloud & Automation
Architecture and automation across every major cloud — and the on-prem worlds behind them.
- AWS
- GCP
- Azure
- OpenStack
- Terraform
- Terragrunt
- CloudFormation
- ARM
Containers & GitOps
Distributed Kubernetes tuned for variable daily global loads and retail peaks.
- Kubernetes · EKS/AKS/GKE
- ECS
- Docker
- Flux2
- ArgoCD
- Kustomize
- KEDA
Networking & DNS
The layers everyone depends on and nobody watches — built, fixed and secured at scale.
- BGP/OSPF
- IPv4/IPv6
- WAF · VPN · VPC · TGW
- DNS at scale
- Cisco · Juniper · Cloudflare
Security & Secrets
PKI, identity and secrets management — proven in low-trust environments.
- X509 · PKI
- TLS · mTLS
- OAuth · OIDC
- HashiCorp Vault
- DevSecOps
- IDS
Observability
Monitoring platforms built as code — proactive, not reactive.
- Datadog
- Prometheus · Grafana LGTM
- OpenTelemetry
- CloudWatch
- SLOs · anomaly detection
Data & MLOps
Algorithms into APIs; datasets into production pipelines for major DSPs.
- SQL · NoSQL · Graph
- Kafka
- BigQuery
- Vertex
- FastAPI
- PyPI
Systems & Config
Administration and configuration management across the common OS families.
- Linux · Unix · BSD · Windows
- Chef
- Ansible
- Puppet
- Salt
- Packer
Leadership & Mentoring
Teams of twelve; engineers coached into senior and leadership roles.
- Tech lead
- Hiring & interviewing
- Mentoring
- Strategy → execution
03 — Career
Twenty-five years, seventeen organisations
From the first engineer at a Qualcomm startup to tech lead for global AdTech platforms.
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Nov 2024 – present
Tech Lead & Lead Platform Engineer · Choreograph (WPP)
AdTech platforms across 5+ global regions: Flux2/ArgoCD GitOps with KEDA autoscaling for EU/US morning rushes and Black Friday; Kafka and service mesh on GKE; Terraform/Terragrunt across AlloyDB, BigQuery and Cloud Run; AWS→GCP migration. MLOps — algorithms into APIs (FastAPI, CI/CD, PyPI). Leadership of teams of 12.
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2021 – 2024
DevOps Engineer / Architect · Dye & Durham International
Built the business’s first DevOps pipeline. Automated 100 cloud accounts and 30 products across AWS, Azure and GCP — Vault, WAF/Cloudflare, AWS Identity Centre, centralised IPAM and finops environment scheduling, all Terraform + GitOps.
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2018 – 2021
Lead DevOps Engineer / Architect · Clear Channel International
DevOps capacity for a leading out-of-home advertising group, reporting to the CTO: cloud platforms plus 10K+ nodes of street-advertising hardware. Standards for security, CI, testing and deployments; cross-cloud HashiCorp Vault; introduced 12-factor.
-
2017 – 2018
Senior Engineer · Automation Logic, embedded at Lloyds Bank
Strong automation standards on the bank’s critical public cloud project — Chef, Packer, Terraform; multi-environment, multi-cloud infrastructure built fully dynamically, with a focus on testing and compliance (inspec, rspec, chefspec).
-
2017
Embedded Automation Engineer · Agilesphere, HMCTS/MOJ
Infrastructure-as-code on the Common Platform. Delivered the Atlassian suite in Azure, recovering it from near-disaster, and built a strong framework around the document redaction system.
-
2015 – 2017
Lead DevOps Architect · McKinsey, Digital Labs
Workflow and infrastructure-as-code practices for global clients. Prototyped banking mainframe release management and encryption at rest in “unfriendly territory”.
-
2014 – 2015
DevOps / Infrastructure Consulting Engineer · DevOpsGuys
External assessments of government-department projects at various stages — troubleshooting and salvaging at-risk projects, boosting success in planning.
-
2014
Automation Consultant · Chef (Opscode/Progress)
Trained customers to map their processes to Chef — from fundamentals to advanced cookbook and infrastructure testing.
-
2012 – 2014
DevOps / Cloud Engineer · Medidata Solutions
Lead “Convergence” engineer responsible for 90% of the software the company deployed — Rails/Tomcat on EC2 with Chef configuration management.
-
2010 – 2011
Lead Architect / Release Engineering · Truvo (Yellow Pages · BE/IE/PT/ZA)
The “DevOps” bridge between developers and external sysadmins. Built the lab environment (Kickstart/Puppet/PXE), automated deployments and enforced standards.
-
2010
Infrastructure Architect / Security Engineer · Encore Tickets
Re-architected the client’s network to pass PCI-DSS — new network, firewall and systems configuration.
-
2007 – 2009
Technical Consultant · S2S, NG Bailey Group
Systems, security and network expert in a Cisco reseller & professional services firm. Banking, brokerage, investment, legal and retail projects; Nagios and Opsware.
-
2006 – 2007
Lead Systems Engineer · Cable & Wireless Access
Data operations for all Bulldog internet services — mail, DNS, sign-on authentication (RADIUS, LDAP) and Juniper routers.
-
2005 – 2006
Services Support Engineer · Easynet
All of Easynet UK’s customer-facing Unix & Windows services and their back ends — Oracle, MySQL, LDAP, RADIUS — plus SANs.
-
2002 – 2004
Systems & Network Administrator · Hybyte Solutions
Infrastructure for an SMS aggregator with secure connections to large provider gateways.
-
2001 – 2002
Internet Consultant & Systems Administrator · Unity Design (Saatchi & Saatchi)
Managed hosting for clients including the MoD, the Royal Navy and Xerox.
-
2000 – 2001
Open Source Researcher & Engineer · Trigenix (Qualcomm)
The startup’s first engineer — WAP/SMS gateway (Alligata, Kannel-based) and Red Hat builds.
04 — Projects
Open source & side projects
What I build when nobody’s paying me to — monitoring, DNS, motorsport data and a manifesto.
Quismon
A monitoring platform built on my own ideas — because sometimes the right tool means writing it.
- Go
- Rust
Link G4X Power Predictor
Predicting engine power curves from ECU data — motorsport meets statistics.
- Python
Joker DNS provider
Upstream contribution — a Joker provider for dnscontrol, because DNS should be managed as code.
- Go
- DNSControl
Overbuilt Getmyip
A deliberately over-engineered Terraform module — an argument, in code, about doing things properly.
- Terraform
declarativeaccess.net
A manifesto: “IAC4IAM” — identity and access management, declared and versioned like the rest of the estate.
- IaC
- IAM
05 — About
The person behind the practice
I challenge and change culture in IT.
I work comfortably at every level, from CEO to desktop support — sometimes as a leader, sometimes as a specialist — with deep experience in automation, cloud, security and SDLC: eliminating repetitive processes and growing working proofs of concept into the foundations of sound architecture.
How I work
- Develop engineering talent — coaching colleagues to reach their milestones.
- Foster innovation — while knowing when to change direction.
- Guide non-technical domain experts — including using AI, on tradeoffs and getting their work safely to production.
- Translate strategy into execution — connecting big-picture thinking into the details.
06 — Contact
Got a problem everyone’s quietly living with?
Send a message through the form, or reach me directly on the channels alongside — for anything sensitive, use the PGP key.
- GitHubgithub.com/atrull
- GitLabgitlab.com/atrull
- LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/atrull
- Keybasekeybase.io/atrull
PGP
4104 BB9C A39E 1250 8BF2 28E5 7B2E 26EB F796 C534