×
Alex Thorne

Alex Thorne

IT Operations Manager
https://alexthorne.site
English, German, Czech

Background

About

About

For the last ten years I’ve committed myself to leading my Product line’s IT Operations to success. I’m a process specialist with a continued record of establishing efficient, sustainable process areas and highly performant teams. I’m an experienced leader adept at cultivating effective team dynamics and healthy organizations. I’m a seasoned communications expert with experience in developing and conveying strategy. I’m committed to service excellence and delivering phenomenal customer care. And I’m a dedicated team member with a strong sense of ownership.

Work Experience

Work Experience

  • Head of Section: M7 Gas & Observability, 

    Jun, 2024 - Present

    Section lead heading two new products: M7 Gas, a next-gen trading platform for EU’s primary Gas market and M7 Observability, an in-house PaaS offering for scalable observability services. Formed a platform engineering team to provide the supporting infrastructure platform leveraging GCP’s GKE.

    • Led R&D and Business Development of the M7 Observability Product

    • Led Cloud Migration project from AWS and on-prem hosting to GCP

    • Launched our division’s first Products to reach fully compliant status (KRITIS) running material workloads on Google Cloud Platform

    • Led the transition to a GitOps approach for Continuous Delivery of infrastructure and software

  • Head of Operations: Energy IT, 

    Jan, 2017 - Present

    Head of Operations for the M7 product line, Europe's premier power-spot trading platforms delivering highly performant, highly reliable services 24/7. Responsible for defining operational strategies and service design and leading teams of highly skilled DevOps engineers and service management specialists committed to ensuring our Products’ continued service excellence.

    • Lead migration to build up an in-house Operations department from previous insourced and outsourced services.

    • Co-led the shift from a waterfall-driven to a product-based Agile organization, utilizing LeSS, Scrum, and SRE/DevOps principles to create a series of products managed by cross-functional, highly autonomous delivery teams.

    • Expanded my team from 6 to 27 direct reports from 2017 to 2023, amidst a 10x surge in daily market activity, while maintaining system performance and improving availability from under 99.8% to a consistent 99.99% annually.

    • Refactored customer agreements and Release Management processes to achieve continuous delivery of our software production.

    • Developed a scalable, lean service management process by harmonizing service agreements, consolidating input streams and introducing the role of 'Business Operations' to manage service delivery.

    • Served as the asset owner for the infrastructure fleet and all third-party vendor services, managing a corresponding $5 million budget.

Skills

Skills

  • Ansible
  • Terraform
  • Linux administration
  • Python
  • GCP
  • Jira administration
  • Confluence administration
Education

Education

  • Spatial Arts, Bachelor, San Jose State University

    Sep, 2005 - May, 2009

Volunteer Work

Volunteer Work

  • Educator, The Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union Germany

    Jan, 2010 - Jan, 2011

    Voluntary Ecological Year (FÖJ). Worked as part of NABU to maintain a center for environmental education in Landau-Mörzheim, Pfalz, Germany. Led guided nature tours and workshops for school classes of all ages and other groups. Worked to maintain a series of organic vineyards and orchards owned by the NABU organization.

Interests

Interests

  • Long distance running, cycling, music, board games.