Samuel Whitford

Background

About

A hardworking and creative cloud professional with almost two decades of industry experience. Passionate about technology and innovation. A team player who is friendly, approachable, loves a challenge and always jumps at the opportunity to learn something new.

Work Experience

Cloud Engineer, Stan
Mar, 2023 - Present
Cloud Architect, LayerCake
Mar, 2022 - Mar, 20231 year
Working directly the founders of Layercake to assist small to medium businesses realise their full potential
- Completed numerous full cloud account reviews and provided actionable insights for small to medium businesses
- Generation of a cloud review framework to ensure the best outcomes for all Layercake customers
- Exploration of cutting edge cloud-based virtual studio creation solutions
Engineering Manager - Platform Automation, Squiz
Mar, 2021 - Mar, 20221 year
Continuing the work achieved as Principal Cloud Architect the next stage was to lead a team of engineers with a focus on ramping up the developer experience by reducing toil through the identification, and standardisation, of common operating patterns and combining these with industry best practices. Our goal was to build and deliver an internal developer platform to empower development teams to self-service their own infrastructure confident in the knowledge that they were operating in a secure and compliant manner through the use of built-in guardrails
- Managing a globally diverse team of 7 highly talented and passionate engineers
- Effecting meaningful change within the company resulting a more cohesive and collaborative environment between traditionally siloed teams
- Championing the Platform-as-a-Product paradigm
Principal Cloud Architect, Squiz
Oct, 2019 - Mar, 20211 year 5 months
Working directly with the CTO, CPO and Director of Product Engineering, responsible for leading the Squiz Cloud transformation project across the business; repositioning Squiz as PaaS/SaaS and adopting public cloud for the first time
- Successfully migrated 6x products (old and new) onto AWS
- Coached 6x development teams through adoption of public cloud and the use of IaC
- Assisted in the adoption of cloud-native and serverless architecture patterns and technologies
- Created and ran Squiz's first internal Cloud and DevOps guilds
AWS Architect, Isentia
Oct, 2018 - Oct, 20191 year
Consulting the CTO and Director of Infrastructure and Operations, conducted an end-to-end cloud cost optimisation review and ran the business' key architectural optimisation project.
- Ran a whole of operation cost optimisation project netting a 25% reduction in cloud spend
- Rearchitected both IaC and CI/CD practices within the business introducing many industry best practices and reducing developer toil
Cloud Solutions Architect, Seven West Media
Jan, 2017 - Oct, 20181 year 9 months
Reporting directly into the Head of Digital Development, and dotted line reporting to the Chief Digital Officer of Seven West Media. Built a greenfield CI/CD pipeline and hosting environment culminating in the businesses’ largest ever online back to back summer of sports (Australian Open, Winter Olympics, Commonwealth Games), launched during the business’ most significant revenue period
- Highly resilient and scaleable infrastructure that resulted in a zero failure outcome for all streamed sporting events
- c. 430 million minutes of content streamed by millions of Australians
- Featured interview for the AWS series 'This is my Architecture'
Lead Engineer, Bulletproof Group Limited
Oct, 2015 - Jan, 20171 year 3 months
A trusted advisor to many high profile Australian businesses ensuring quality experience while navigating the public cloud landscape
- Promoted to Lead Engineer within 6 months of joining
- Converted a disgruntled client into a vocal advocate within 3 months of taking on the account
- Navigated multiple clients through intense traffic periods without incident
Broadcast IT Support Engineer, Network Ten
Jan, 2011 - Oct, 20154 years 9 months
Reporting directly into the Head of Infrastructure. Worked closely with both the digital media and broadcast business units
- Developed a new system to streamline the delivery of information from reporters to on-air graphics systems resulting in a 60% efficiency gain
- Infrastructure technical lead on delivering the new Tenplay digital streaming platform
System Engineer, Editure
Nov, 2007 - Jan, 20113 years 2 months
Tier 2 Unix Operator, Hostworks
Dec, 2004 - Dec, 20062 years

Skills

Cloud Platforms
AWS

GCP

VMWare
Cloud Architecture
Designing

Building

Documenting

Training
Operating Systems
Linux

Windows
Databases
MySQL

PostgreSQL

MS SQL
Programming Languages
PHP

Bash

Perl

Python

Javascript

Golang
Platform Engineering
DevOps

CI/CD

Artifact Management

Pipeline Design

Self Service

Platform-as-a-Product

Cloud Native

Kubernetes

Serverless
Infrastructure as code (IaC)
Cloudformation

CDK

CfnDsl

Crossplane
Web Servers
Apache

Nginx

IIS
Methodologies
ITIL

Agile

Scrum

Education

Multimedia, Diploma of Multimedia, TAFE NSW
Dec, 2003 - Dec, 2005

Interests

AR/VR/MR/XR
Photography
Creative Coding
AI/ML
3D Animation
Open Source

References

Joe Hardy
I worked with Sam on the delivery of Seven West Media’s live sport platforms and products, an environment that had many unique attributes - massively scaled audiences in short, limited bursts on a complex set of services that required no interruptions.

Sam gets the ethos as well as the execution of cloud architecture. He lives and breathes automation, IaC and immutable infrastructure principles, delivers rapidly and continuously, and his work was proven in the exceptional success of the events which presented over 430 million minutes of streaming content to Australian audiences.

Having Sam’s insight and ability to predict trouble spots and potential failures ahead of time was necessary in a real-time operational environment. He meshed really well in a cross-functional team and provided excellent visibility on his work. Oh, he’s a boss at documentation as well.

Sam’s got an ability to translate high level requirements into execution and his ability to work from broad brushstrokes to all of the nuanced details is an asset to any team wanting confidence in operational reliability
Denis T. Khoshaba
Sam is an exceptionally talented and likable person. I worked closely with Sam during Seven West Media's huge summer of sports offerings, where his principal role was to build and automate the entire infrastructure across all our platforms from the ground up. Impressively, Sam accomplished all of the technical requirements (and much more) within strict timelines—all whilst maintaining world-class standards and best practices. Our products drew some of the largest audiences in Seven's streaming history, and built atop of Sam's infrastructure meant they were delivered with 100% availability—a remarkable result which speaks for itself.
During my time working with Sam, he was always approachable and open to discussion, and his genuine humility was infectious across the team. Sam was always willing to help others and myself with our technical questions and concerns—regardless of whether they were within the scope of his role.
I've been fortunate to have worked with Sam and I wouldn't hesitate to follow an opportunity to work alongside him again.
Padraig O'Donovan
I have worked with Samuel for a number of years. In this time, Samuel has shown extensive technical knowledge and the ability to build, deliver and maintain business critical infrastructure. Samuel played a leading role in the building of tenplay, Ten's digital platform. Samuel is key to achieving the Ten digital media strategy.
Steve Pollard
Sam was my 'right hand man', taking on any challenge that was set for him with a positive 'can do' attitude, his technical skills blossomed whilst working on many high profile Australian websites and no doubt is now a force to be reckoned with.

He has a charismatic personality and is a great person to work along side.

I would be happy to have Sam return one day, or work with him on other projects and suggest hiring him if the opportunity arises.

Steve Pollard (Senior Service Manager - Hostworks Ltd)