Principal Engineer — Platform & DevSecOps
London, UK · hello@markbrady.net
Profile
Full-stack software engineer with deep platform and cloud expertise, specialising in infrastructure as code, CI/CD and deployments on Azure and AWS. Comfortable across the whole stack (frontend, backend and database), but happiest building the platforms, pipelines and tooling that let teams ship quickly and safely, with a strong focus on application security.
Core skills: C#, .NET, SQL, Terraform, Azure, AWS, Cloudflare, Docker, CI/CD, automated testing, web application security, mentoring
Experience
The Access Group (formerly Raising IT), London
May 2018 to Present
Principal Engineer (2026 to present)
- Took on platform work across the Not-for-Profit and Education divisions (roughly 10 teams) with widely varying infrastructure maturity, ranging from teams that could build applications but had no way to deploy them, to others running ageing, hand-rolled setups in need of modernising.
- Built a centralised, multi-provider Terraform repository (Azure, Cloudflare, Microsoft Fabric) with guidelines, linting and approval gates, giving these teams self-service infrastructure and deployments through a governed Azure DevOps pipeline. Live for four product teams, with more being onboarded.
- Integrated new cloud applications with legacy on-prem systems, working alongside Operations teams so modern apps can reach existing on-prem SQL databases.
- Championed adoption of AI engineering tooling across the division, setting usage guidelines and folding it into governed workflows.
Engineering Team Lead (2018 to 2026)
- Led a team building the company's charity SaaS products (fundraising, donor management and a CMS) with React front-ends and .NET Web APIs, partnering with stakeholders to ship features that charities used to grow their online presence.
- Rebuilt my product team's dev and production infrastructure (Europe) in Terraform with no downtime. When the product later expanded to Australia, stood up a complete new production region (App Services, Functions, caching, Cloudflare) in a single day through variable changes alone, work that would otherwise have taken weeks by hand.
- Later helped a different product team rebuild their buggy, hand-rolled Azure setup (inherited through an acquisition) as versioned, self-service Terraform in the company's main tenant, bringing test and production into line so their developers could change infrastructure confidently, where previously everyone was wary of touching it.
- Owned the annual penetration-test remediation cycle across two products. Personally reproduced complex findings (injection, IDOR and access-control issues) that the team could not, using Burp Suite, then coached the team to find and fix them, lifting their overall security capability. Ran an OWASP Juice Shop workshop and regular internal security talks.
- Helped drive the shift from infrequent, risky releases to confident continuous delivery, introducing automated test suites and spreading backward-compatibility discipline so the team could merge and release small changes safely throughout the day.
- Modernised Azure hosting, replacing virtual machines with App Services and Azure Functions.
- Line-managed five engineers: weekly one-to-ones, quarterly goal-setting, and a career-progression framework adopted as a development guide. Gave regular lightning talks and ran workshops on technical and soft skills.
StepStone Group UK (formerly Totaljobs Group), London
October 2015 to May 2018
Principal Developer
- Formed and led a new team that built a shared Docker and AWS ECS platform for other teams to deploy to. Cut deployment from development to production from several days (queued for the operations team) to 25 minutes of self-service. Around five teams were running production workloads on it, with more adopting.
- Worked with the CTO and engineering leadership to shape the engineering roadmap across 20+ development teams, and championed best practices department-wide.
Senior Software Developer
- Delivered infrastructure improvements with nginx, Docker and AWS ECS, enabling traffic routing across virtual machines and beginning the break-up of the monolith into team-owned services.
- Built .NET web applications following TDD, set up CI/CD with TeamCity and Octopus, and used Terraform for infrastructure as code.
- Spent several months embedded with the operations team out of a keen interest in DevOps culture, teaching Terraform and git and automating repetitive work with Python, PowerShell and Bash.
Career break, Hong Kong
June 2013 to October 2015
- Relocated to Hong Kong and travelled across Asia, staying active in the developer community and taking on occasional freelance projects.
CFC Underwriting, London
November 2011 to June 2013
Software Developer
- Built bespoke insurance systems in C# and .NET (WebForms and MVC).
- Resolved a long-standing SQL performance problem that locked the entire system for hours, optimising the query joins to reduce a critical report from hours to seconds.
- Ran technical interviews and helped grow the development team from two to four.
eSight Energy (formerly Hawkesbury Consulting), Cambridge
2008 to 2009 (university work placement), 2010 to 2011
Software Developer
- Built energy-management software in C#, .NET WebForms and SQL Server, and helped the team adopt agile practices. Joined initially via a 12-month university placement and returned after graduating.
Education
Sheffield Hallam University
2006 to 2010
BSc (Honours) Software Engineering (2:1)
Links
- Blog: inkyvoxel.com
- GitHub