Cariad Eccleston

Hello! 👋 I'm Cariad!

I'm a contract Amazon Web Services architect, infrastructure deployer and backend software engineer with commercial experience with Python and C#.NET on Linux, Windows and macOS.

I'm on GitHub at /cariad and LinkedIn at /in/cariad.

I have a BSc (Hons) Computer Science from The University of Salford, my pronouns are she / her, and -- I hear ya -- it's pronounced carry-add.

Download my CV as a PDF from cariad.earth/cariad-eccleston.pdf.

Employment

Contract DevOps Engineer

Freyda • freyda.io

2020 - present

Freyda is a Google-backed FinTech startup implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide insight into unstructured financial data.

I joined Freyda during the platform's early development to lead the design and deployment of architecture in Amazon Web Services.

I take personal responsibility for:

Designing secure, resilient and cost-effective platform architecture
Developing secure, resilient and highly-tested infrastructure-as-code via CloudFormation, Python and Bash
Developing secure, resilient and highly-tested Lambda functions and Fargate services with Python and Docker
Deploying and developing queries for RDS Aurora PostgreSQL clusters
Deploying and managing the availability of GitLab CI/CD pipelines
Performing security reviews, as well as making security-related decisions and educating the team about threats and best-practices
Publishing technical documentation and hosting live knowledge-sharing sessions in person and via online conferencing

Beyond infrastructure, my most significant deliveries include:

The platform's internal SDK
A command-line interface to the platform's API
Automated document imports from third-party SFTP and other providers
OAuth 2.0 / Single Sign-On
API user permission model
Development of our "FreydOps" bot that keeps the internal team and external data annotators apprised of relevant alerts

Contract Software Engineer

NHS Digital • digital.nhs.uk

2020

NHS Digital designs, develops and operate national IT and data services that support clinicians at work.

Successfully migrated a life-critical C# .NET SOAP service to C# .NET Core.

Delivered on-time with regularly communicated updates to leadership.

Took personal responsibility for building a new end-to-end test suite to add confidence to the delivery.

Software Team Lead

Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting • tax.thomsonreuters.co.uk

2005 - 2019

Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting develops integrated software products for tax and accounting professionals.

Contributed to the design, development, test and support of a SaaS platform made up of C#, JavaScript and Golang microservices on Windows and Linux.

Led the DevOps team that successfully migrated the platform from on-premises hardware into Amazon Web Services on-time.

Led a global DevOps team to develop disaster recovery strategies, security practices and Python tooling for business-wide teams.

Projects

I maintain a number of Python packages on GitHub at github.com/cariad.

Some of my favourites include:

cline is a framework for building highly-testable command line applications and asking allows scripts to interactively prompt users for input. I've used both of these packages to build command-line applications for Freyda.
greas3 uploads files to Amazon Web Services S3, using checksums to determine if a file is already up-to-date to prevent unnecessary work.
lackadaisical identifies slow code during unit testing. I use this for performance testing at Freyda.
rolumns manipulates data into rows and columns and recompose transforms lists and dictionaries according to schemas. Both of these packages are used for data manipulation and export at Freyda.
slash3 builds and navigates Amazon Web Services S3 URIs, much like the Path class does for building and navigating file system paths.
wev runs shell commands with environment variables determined at runtime. I use this tool on an almost-daily basis at Freyda to inject Amazon Web Services CodeArtifact authentication tokens into Pipenv and to perform multi-factor authentication for the AWS command line.

In 2021, I earned a Mars 2020 Contributor badge for my contributions to Boto3, which was using during NASA's Ingenuity helicopter mission on Mars.

In 2022, I released wa11y.co to help Wordle players share screen reader-friendly results on social media. The app was used 31.1k times per month at its peak and earned mentions on The Verge and Slate.

Talks

PRISM Exeter

prismexeter.com

PRISM (Pride and Representation in STEMM Matters) Exeter provides a network for professionals and students working and studying within the local STEMM sector.

I was invited to pitch a talk about Internet security for LGBTQ+ journalists and communities online, and it was a privilege to discuss how Tor's encryption and onion routing can help to protect Internet users on unsafe networks.

TechExeter

techexeter.uk

TechExeter is a community group for technologists in and around Exeter.

I do not consider TechExeter or any other group run by this staff to be a safe space for transgender people, and their inclusion in my CV is not an endorsement of them.

I hosted a talk about managing KMS customer keys in Amazon Web Services, some best practices for their IAM policies, and how to use those keys with Secrets Manager to manage credentials for RDS databases.

London Docklands AWS User Group

Nottingham AWS User Group

I was invited by colleagues at Thomson Reuters to talk at their local Amazon Web Services user groups about the challenges and our strategies for migrating our SaaS platform from on-premises hardware into Amazon Web Services.

Out & Equal Workplace Summit

outandequal.org

Out & Equal is a non-profit working exclusively on LGBTQ+ workplace equity, inclusion and belonging.

I was invited to join Thomson Reuters' LGBTQ+ leadership at the Out & Equal Workplace Summit to share our story about running our global LGBTQ+ employee group as an online community.

Cariad Eccleston

Employment

Projects

Talks

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