Ben Tasker Dip.pc rep S.A.C Cert

Conversant is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) provider, with a customer base primarily located in South East Asia.

I was promoted to Operations Architect in March 2018. This is a senior position reporting to, and regularly working with the CEO and other senior stakeholders within an extremely fast paced environment.

The role has a broad scope of responsibility, involving overseeing architectural aspects of the network’s growth, as well as

• Identifying and resolve potential issues in already deployed software
• Help drive product direction and priorities
• Perform acceptance testing on the various engineering team’s output (ranging from Ansible playbook submissions to entirely new software stacks, products and appliance types)
• Run beta tests of new features with selected customers
• Schedule and plan rollout of major releases
• Act as Subject Matter Expert (SME) for the DNS Routing System and CDN Technical authority
• Work with partners & suppliers to improve network peering relationships
• Act as escalation point for the operational support team

In particular, I’ve worked with engineering to design, develop and deploy

• Next generation Command & Control Infrastructure
• Distributed File Storage appliances
• Next Generation Delivery Infrastructure
• HTTP/2, SNI and TLS 1.3 Support
• An “Infrastructure as Code” approach to managing the network as a whole

When requests for particularly specialised work are received, they’re passed to me to gauge viability when measured against a variety of both business and technical concerns. Depending on the result of that assessment, I may also be responsible for rapidly prototyping the requested functionality.

Such requests have ranged from developing specialised mid-tier solutions to requests for extremely complex media protection mechanisms, using various languages including BASH, C, LUA, PHP & Python.

I was tasked with rapidly prototyping and building a solution in order to serve video traffic for a well known social network. Ultimately, the result of this work was that we were able to outperform the incumbent (and industry leader) in multiple important countries.

Although customer satisfaction was obviously my primary concern, my aim in operating as a sole trader was always to allow me to develop/maintain skills which might otherwise be neglected in my employed role (also ensuring that conflicts of interest were avoided).

As a result, the type of work I completed as a Sole Trader was very varied, however, below are examples of some of the work I completed

• Security audits/Penetration Testing
• Bespoke software development
• Server administration and maintenance
• Creating various RESTful APIs
• System/Software specific training
• Performance optimisation of Joomla! sites
• Post-compromise analysis

In August 2018 I wound down my Sole Trade operations in order to free up more time to spend with family.

Velocix was a world leading provider of Digital Media Delivery Platforms, building and providing Linux based Content Delivery Networks to Internet Service Providers worldwide.

My role was to provide first and second level support on all Velocix products and services, including monitoring, managing and configuring the worldwide Content Delivery Network. The core role being to ensure that both internal and external customers are provided with maximum service availability

Core responsibilities

• 24/7 network surveillance, proactively responding to issue that are detected or reported, including analysing all available data and identifying trends
• General System Administration tasks on all elements of the CDN and also of the company network
• Identify areas of concern, whether due to potential service impact or directly affecting customer satisfaction

Whilst maintaining an understanding of the product range and it’s functioning, I also

• Reverse engineered a customer provided flash player to identify the cause of the reported delivery issue, identifying a bug in a 3rd party library they were using.
• Identified (and, where possible, provided patches for) issues within the product
• Managed various internal projects
• Identified and reported security concerns within the product and infrastructure
• Created various VXPL (similar in principle to serverless products such as AWS Lambda) scripts
• Created and extended various HTTP APIs

My role at Virya primarily involved

• managing customers' servers (primarily Linux based infrastructure but also Windows)
• developing software (primarily web-based applications in PHP, including extensions for the Joomla! CMS)
• Managing the company's Hosting infrastructure (Shared, Virtual and dedicated servers)
• Conducting security audits (including penetration testing)
• providing emergency server support where requested by a customer (including post-compromise forensic analysis)

The role required an intimate understanding of networking protocols, system (and database) administration and agile development techniques. I was also the lead software developer, and worked to help develop a DevOps culture within the business. I also migrated elements of the businesses infrastructure onto AWS as well as developing tooling, utilities and bespoke customer products.

Being a small business, my responsibilities stretched beyond those within my job description, and additional roles included marketing the business, providing quotes for work and management of the business in the Director's absence.

I initially contracted for this role, becoming a full-time employee in February 2012.

I trained as a Processor System Administrator, Local Security Officer and Authorised Demander for the systems utilised by both the unit and it’s dependant squadrons, including personnel deployed on operations and exercises.

The systems I administered consisted of a mix of AIX (hosting Oracle databases, amongst other applications) and Windows (XP, Server 2003 and Server 2000), running various bespoke military applications in addition to a standard range of productivity tools.