andy-barber.co.uk

~andy-barber.co.uk

senior sre · platform · applied ai

Andy Barber

andy@andy-barber.co.uk

name
Andy Barber
role
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
uptime
20 yrs in infrastructure
azure
10 yrs, AKS · Terraform · landing zones
ai
RAG · vector search · computer vision · document intelligence
status
open to new work

I design and operate Kubernetes platforms that stay up, and ship applied AI into production — most recently cutting Azure spend and automating away out-of-hours database callouts.

>experience 5 roles >download cv pdf

1about

infrastructure · reliability · applied ai

I’m a senior platform and reliability engineer with 20+ years in infrastructure and more than a decade on Microsoft Azure — now building applied AI on the same platform. My work sits where infrastructure, reliability and applied AI meet: AKS, Terraform, observability and SRE practice, alongside production AI systems.

I care about systems that are boring in the best sense — observable, reproducible, and easy to hand to the next person — and about replacing risky manual processes with self-service automation. The goal is always a platform the team can run without me.

2skills

6 domains · 43 tools

43 shown

cloud/

Microsoft AzureAzure Landing ZonesAKSAzure PaaSAzure SQLStorageNetworkingEntra ID

platform/containers/

KubernetesDockerHelmKEDAGitOpsAzure DevOpsGitHub Actions

infrastructure-as-code/

TerraformBicepARMPackerCI/CDBlue/green & canary

reliability/operations/

SREObservabilityDatadogAzure MonitorGrafanaPrometheusKQLFinOps

development/

PowerShellPythonGoC#BashREST / GraphQL

applied-ai/

Azure AI ServicesRetrieval-Augmented GenerationVector searchComputer Vision / OCRPrompt engineeringOllama / llama.cppWhispern8n

3experience

5 roles · most recent first

Sorted Group Senior Site Reliability Engineer Dec 2025 – Aug 2026
  • Built a Slack-driven self-service SQL change platform (PowerShell Durable Functions, durable timers, automated recovery and firewall cleanup) that removed out-of-hours database callouts entirely.
  • Authored reusable Terraform modules adopted as the standard Azure deployment pattern across 12 subscriptions.
  • Embedded DevSecOps scanning and automation; FinOps leading to significant reduction in Azure spend.
Extrinsica Global Cloud Solution Engineer Jun 2024 – Dec 2025
  • Designed a production Azure computer-vision / OCR pipeline processing several hundred thousand documents for PII classification, governed with Purview.
  • Built a retrieval-augmented documentation assistant as a Microsoft Word add-in — RAG applied to a real authoring workflow.
  • Architected a self-service image pipeline that cut customer AVD image builds from weeks to hours (Packer, Docker, Vue.js + C#, Azure Compute Gallery).
CluedIn Implementation / Infrastructure & SRE Engineer Aug 2022 – Jun 2024
  • Deployed the CluedIn MDM platform on AKS for enterprise customers including Bayer, Microsoft and Svevia.
  • Led KEDA event-driven autoscaling with custom Helm charts, cutting thousands per month from Kubernetes compute spend.
  • Standardised design and deployment artefacts (Helm, ARM/Bicep) improving installation consistency and supportability.
Microsoft Support Engineer, Azure Monitor (EMEA) Oct 2021 – Aug 2022
  • Supported enterprise customers implementing Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Log Analytics.
  • Analysed telemetry and logs to isolate performance bottlenecks and improve availability for large-scale platforms.
WANdisco / Cirata Customer Success Engineer Mar 2020 – Oct 2021
  • Contributed to a published migration of 500TB across 8.6M files from a live 800-node Hadoop cluster to AWS S3 with zero business disruption.
  • Built Logstash ingest pipelines and Kibana dashboards correlating tens of thousands of log lines into a repeatable diagnostic capability.

4certifications

10 credentials

Credential Issuer Status
Microsoft Certified Expert badge Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert microsoft ● active
Microsoft Certified Associate badge Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate microsoft ● active
Terraform Associate certification mark HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate hashicorp ● active
Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) microsoft ● active
Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) microsoft ● active
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) microsoft ● active
Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900) microsoft ● active
GitHub Foundations github ● active
GitHub Actions github ● active
GitHub Administration github ● active

5work

5 selected

Herb Hub 365

full-stack platform
Herb Hub 365 system blueprint — Raspberry Pi sensors, RabbitMQ event bus, LLM content pipeline, video generation and Azure hosting

A self-hosted, largely autonomous greenhouse platform. Raspberry Pi sensors and cameras feed an event-driven pipeline of Go microservices that turn telemetry into daily AI-written posts, audio narration and timelapse videos — and drive automated watering.

  • Event-driven Go microservices on a RabbitMQ backbone (sensor snapshots, watering, video).
  • Local-first AI: Ollama with a Gemini fallback, Kokoro TTS narration, MuseTalk avatar video.
  • Terraform-managed Azure hosting, with Prometheus + Grafana observability.

gorabbitmqdockerterraformazurelocal llm / tts

source live

MPWrap

developer tooling
MPWrap.nvim logo

A Neovim plugin with an interactive side panel for working with MicroPython devices via mpremote — filesystem browser, live REPL and one-key device actions.

  • Three-pane side panel: action menu, filesystem browser and live MicroPython REPL.
  • Non-blocking mpremote operations with upload, download and exact-mirror directory sync.
  • Keyboard-first workflow with a `:checkhealth` provider for diagnostics.

luaneovimmicropython

source

Azure Platform & Landing Zones

azure / platform engineering

Design and operation of Azure landing zones, AKS platforms, Infrastructure as Code and production operations.

AI Documentation Assistant

applied ai

A retrieval-augmented documentation assistant delivered as a Microsoft Word add-in — grounded, cited answers inside the authoring workflow.

Computer Vision / OCR Pipeline

applied ai

A production Azure AI Services pipeline processing several hundred thousand documents for OCR and PII classification, governed with Microsoft Purview.

6contact

open to new work

Open to interesting platform, reliability and applied-AI problems. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

$ mail andy@andy-barber.co.uk press c to copy $ open linkedin.com/in/andy-barber-uk/ linkedin $ open github.com/barbera01/ github $ curl -O /assets/files/Andy-Barber-CV.pdf download cv