Resume

Summary

I’m an experienced engineering leader and data platform professional. I lead a global team of highly skilled DBA and DBRE at Docusign. I drive change, love automation and I have a passion for helping people maximise their own careers.

Experience

I work with some of the world’s biggest and busiest OLTP systems, with experience managing on-premises infrastructure as well as deep experience in public cloud across AWS, Azure and GCP. My team manages complex, heavily accessed SQL Servers with Availability Groups, as well as PaaS solutions and we have just completed a migration of Several VLDB AGs from on premises into Azure cloud.

• Managed the cloud migration of multi-TB databases from on premises to Azure
• Drive cost optimisation in public cloud
• Led initiative to implement new monitoring provider across SQL and Postgres estate, in multi year deal
• Lead a team of expert data engineers and DBAs, managing Docusign’s data platform for the core eSign, CLM and IAM products
• Coach team members on career growth and professional development
• Deliver high impact automation projects, eliminating toil and minimising unnecessary KTLO work
• Supervise cloud infrastructure build out using Terraform
• Ensure a high level of availability, DR and performance across SQL Server on premises, SQL on Azure VMs, Hyperscale and Managed Instance
• Act as incident commander, owner and responder, including root cause analysis
• Hiring responsibilities including interviewing, training and development
• Collaborate with Microsoft and other vendors on root cause analysis work and private previews

• Principal database administrator responsible for site reliability
• Team lead responsible for coaching, training and delegation of tasks
• Led daily stand-ups to keep objectives on track, and weekly one-to-ones on career development
• Managed the health, availability and performance of our SQL instances, failover clusters and RDS instances
• Incident management, response and root cause analysis
• Automated repetitive tasks using PowerShell, C# and T-SQL
• Migrated a VLDB from Oracle to SQL Server for a US Government client, streamlining the process to reduce transfer time from 20 hours to 1
• Managed Azure SQL Database (PaaS) and AWS data platform products including RDS, Aurora and Athena
• Reviewed resources and utilisation regularly to ensure value for money
• Audit preparation and delivery, process improvement design and data platform design advice
• Mentoring and development, sharing knowledge through presentations, documentation and side by side working

Worked with multiple clients as a principal DBA and consultant.

City Facilities, Glasgow

• Performance tuning and optimisation. Reviewed indexes and expensive queries across the main customer product and implemented several fixes, stabilising performance and eliminating downtime events. Further enhancements allowed the customer to scale down SQL Server to a cheaper VM, saving thousands in compute and SQL Enterprise licence costs. Rewrote stored procedures and views, replaced complex Entity Framework queries with efficient stored procedures, ran load tests to evidence the improvements, and worked with developers on better index design.
• Cost optimisation. Key contributor to a cost optimisation project, with personal contributions amounting to £400k annual savings. Automated start/stop of non-production VMs out of hours, deleted millions of unneeded files from blob storage using PowerShell and runbooks, right sized SQL databases and migrated to serverless where suitable, and recommended reserved instances for production.
• SQL Server IaaS on Azure. Removed a tempdb bottleneck by relocating the files to ephemeral storage, which I blogged about. Performed storage migration to premium disks with minimal downtime by working on a secondary replica and failing over. Implemented the SQL Server Agent Extension to automate backups and patching, and set up Availability Groups with automatic failover and read only routing.
• Automation. Introduced the dbatools PowerShell module, and wrote a PowerShell process for cross subscription data warehouse restores on Synapse Analytics that reduced the restore from almost a day to 1 hour. Configured backup archival in blob storage using lifecycle management.
• Cloud migration proof of concept. Migrated SQL Server VMs to Managed Instance using DMS. Mentored and trained DBA team members to carry the changes on after my contract, including bespoke video content and documented processes.

Optiseller

• Analysed usage to help right size PaaS resources, providing large savings
• Showed the client how to use benefits such as read only replicas
• Provided a regular SQL database health check with actionable items, and helped the team implement improvements
• Participated in troubleshooting events and provided solutions

Earlier career RBS, British Gas, T-Mobile/EE August 1997 – October 2012

Various roles including customer service, mortgage adviser, sales and retention, ending as a team manager.

Technical skills

SQL Server

• Administration, performance tuning and troubleshooting
• Very high volume OLTP and VLDB workloads
• Availability Groups, failover clusters, backups and disaster recovery
• T-SQL

Cloud

• Azure – SQL Server on Azure VMs, Hyperscale, Managed Instance, Azure SQL Database, Synapse Analytics
• AWS – RDS, Aurora, Athena
• Cloud migration and cost optimisation

Automation and tooling

• PowerShell and python
• Terraform
• Claude Code
• Azure DevOps
• Google Apps scripts

Leadership

• Leading and growing global engineering teams
• Hiring, coaching and professional development
• Incident command and site reliability

Community

I enjoy helping the data community by sharing what I know through blogs, videos and speaking at conferences, as well as contributing code to the dbatools open source PowerShell project. My live sessions are listed on my Sessionize speaker profile.

Outside work I have a keen interest in science, particularly planetary science and astrophysics.

Education

• BSc (Hons) Computing, First Class – University of the West of Scotland, 2008 – 2012
• Court medal for academic excellence, 2008 and 2012

Certifications

• MCSE: Data Management and Analytics – Charter Member
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Database Administrator Associate
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900)
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
• Databricks Accredited Lakehouse Fundamentals

• LinkedIn
• Sessionize
• GitHub
• Bluesky
• Blog