William Lay

I'm Terraform and Ansible SME across multiple programmes at QinetiQ, and have automated 99% of development and production deployments through idempotent provisioning. The evaluation environment for the ARCD AI Cyber Range, a platform measuring how effectively AI defends networks against adversarial attack, builds from nothing in a single run, letting the test and evaluation team rebuild clean environments on demand rather than waiting on someone to do it by hand.

As Senior DevOps (CI/CD) Engineer I was brought into an existing development team to protect delivery against a fixed contract timescale, building the CI pipeline and infrastructure-as-code that took manual build and deployment steps out of the critical path.

As DevOps Lead on a COTS software-defined radio programme at Roke I cut build and deploy time by 60% by parallelising the pipeline and optimising runner usage, and added linting, pre-commit gating and hardware-in-the-loop testing so failures surfaced before they reached a bench.

Advent of Code is my December habit and a low-stakes sandbox for trying this tooling on something disposable: CI pipelines, pre-commit formatting and static analysis, with attempts public in GitLab and GitHub.

The same instinct runs my home server: an UnRAID box built on a traditional expandable array with dual parity. It survives two simultaneous drive failures and, unlike a ZFS pool, is easy to grow one drive at a time. A ZFS cache pool sits alongside it, since a fixed-size cache is exactly where ZFS's integrity guarantees earn their keep without its awkward expansion story getting in the way. Docker workloads run mostly from the LinuxServer.io image set, with offsite backups via Duplicati.

When the dashboard and every container's web UI went dark one week, with the box still answering to ping, the root cause turned out to be a long-abandoned VPN peer configuration that had silently rebound the web GUI's nginx to a tunnel interface instead of the LAN on every boot. Diagnosed with ss -tlnp, docker ps, free -m and a grep through syslog, since there's no systemd journal on this box and that's the only trail there is. Fixed for good by clearing out the stale VPN config so the GUI regenerates bound to the right interface on every reboot.