Sam Hopwell

Backgound

• I am an experienced technology leader with 10 years' experience. I have a strong background in highly available solutions for both small to enterprise, strongly regulated brands and companies. I have done solution architecture, technology strategy and built multiple highly complex cloud native solutions. I’ve also worked with C level and senior stakeholders throughout the whole business and form strong relationships to ensure successful delivery of all projects. I am forward thinking and decisive with hands on experience with AWS, Azure and traditional on premise/colocation data centres.

• Skills overview

• • Multiple years hands on experience with AWS (EC2, Lambda, Step Functions, ELB, RDS, API Gateway, EKS, ECS, S3, DynamoDB, CloudFormation etc.)
• • Experienced in automation and process building using Python, .NET Core, PowerShell and bash
• • Managing large Windows and Linux estates
• • Strong understanding in network principles and design for both traditional networks as well cloud native
• • Leading Infrastructure architecture, design, implementation and support
• • Running modernisation programs
• • Coaching and mentoring team members and leaders across the wider business
• • Leading a globally distributed team
• • Relationship building
• • General implementation in AWS and Azure
• • Automation process building for highly reliant and highly available solutions
• • Cost optimisation

Experience

Cloud Operations Manager

April 2019 – Present

Ideagen PLC

Leading a global team of SRE’s working with both AWS and Azure. Responsible for the daily operation and availability for all of Ideagen’s SaaS and hosted products. The hosted and SaaS products range from single tenant hosted machines to very large SaaS applications used by some of the world’s best known highly regulated global enterprises. I’ve built solutions to improve monitoring and visibility to allow the team to be more proactive resulting in a greater experience for our customers with stable and robust platforms. I’ve ran multiple migration projects from legacy data centres into a cloud-based solution to allow for high scale deployments and a more stable platform which allow for continue growth without limits. As part of this role I inherited a team who were largely working in silos and transformed them into a high function, highly collaborating team. We’ve transitioned to working in sprint style iterations with a complete backlog allow for greater visibility and understanding of the work at hand allow me to easily report to the Ideagen Senior Leadership team for all aspects of the team. We’ve also transitioned the team to manging everything in code which has allowed for predictable deployments and changes requiring ‘code reviews’ before changes are made, this has resulted in the team being able to push changes easier with more confidence. Notable recent projects are a large cost analysis projects to reduce cost by 20% while delivering a more robust solutions and architecting a completely new solution built of Kubernetes on EKS to allow for rapid growth and to be highly scalable.

Group Implementations Manager

November 2017 – March 2019

Ideagen PLC

Managing the team that is responsible for all the installations, upgrades and deployments of Ideagen’s software for both and on premise and hosted solutions. The Implementations Team was my own creation after witnessing all of the different way’s software was deployed across the group. I formulated the team at the end of 2017 to add a coherent approach to way the group managed installations, upgrades and deployments. The team was a formulation of both internal hires/promotions as well as bringing on two apprentices. From a customer perspective this team is the first derivable from Ideagen so our need and desire to ensure a good experience is exceptionally high.

Service Delivery Manager

November 2016 – October 2017

Ideagen PLC

Similar to previous role but with the added responsibility of being accountable for the team and manging day to day operations.

Team Lead – Service Delivery

May 2016 – October 2016

Ideagen PLC

Helping to manage a small team that are responsible for the professional services work for Ideagen’s healthcare software. This includes installing/upgrade, configuration, training and helping to gather requirements from both the customer and from project managers. As part of this role I also helped with some pre-sales work to understand what problem a customer was trying to solve and how our software was able to help them achieve their goal effectively.

Senior Application Consultant

November 2015 – October 2016

Ideagen PLC

Similar to the previous role but working with key accounts and working to help refine requirements earlier in the project. Most of these projects where in the medical record space helping our customers to digitise their paper records and implement solutions to reduce the need for paper in the future.

Application Consultant

January 2013 – October 2015

Ideagen PLC

During this role I was responsible for working with our customers to help achieve their goal with the help of our software. I would install, upgrade and deploy software, work with the customers to configure the whole solution end to end to meet their requirements (both on site and remotely) and to provide training to the end users.

Software Support Engineer

March 2011 – January 2013

Plumtree Group

I begin this role as an apprentice with very little experience. The role gave me the grounding which I still use today. I was exposed to server architecture, backend technology (IIS and SQL Server for example) as well as software development. My key role was to provide telephone support to our customers for both issues they may have encountered but to also help them in getting the best out of our software.