Mark Southworth

Platform Engineer / SRE / Lead DevOps Engineer
GitHub | LinkedIn | Medium

Personal Statement

Senior-level Platform Engineer and SRE with DevOps leadership experience with 9+ years of experience leading platform architecture, reliability engineering, CI/CD, and scalable infrastructure. Passionate about automation, mentoring, and designing scalable, cost-efficient systems. Currently driving platform reliability, Kubernetes operations, and AWS-based infrastructure at scale for a global gaming platform. Contributor to the DevOps community through writing, open source, and freelance work.

Core Skills – Platform Engineering & SRE Focus

• Cloud: AWS (EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, VPC, Route53, IAM, CloudFront, more).
• Infra as Code: Terraform, Packer, Serverless Framework.
• Containers & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm.
• CI/CD: AWS CodeBuild/AWS CodePipeline, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, Groovy, GitOps.
• Scripting: Bash, Python, Groovy.
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch.
• Security: Secrets Manager, Trufflehog, IAM policies, PCI-compliant environments.
• Leadership: Mentoring, technical planning, stakeholder collaboration.

Recent Experience

PokerStars (Flutter International) · Senior DevOps Engineer

Dec 2021 – Present

• Leading AWS migration: lifting & shifting legacy apps from on-prem to containerized workloads on EKS.
• Built and maintain reusable Terraform modules for scalable cloud infrastructure (VPCs, RDS, EKS, etc.).
• Wrote Helm charts for automated deployments of Java, Node.js, and Python services.
• Introduced serverless architectures (Lambda, API Gateway) to modernize workloads.
• Established cost visibility and alerting using native AWS tools.
• Acted as unofficial team lead: mentoring juniors and influencing platform direction.

Key Achievements:

• Designed and implemented cloud-native infra for 30+ apps now running in production.
• Cut release friction via automated pipelines and GitOps deployment model.
• Reduced incident response times via improved observability tooling.
• Onboarded two Junior DevOps Engineers and helped them to become productive.

Blinx Solutions · Senior DevOps Engineer

Feb 2021 – Dec 2021

• Sole DevOps engineer: built AWS infra using Terraform and Serverless for multiple client platforms.
• Led CI/CD setup with GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline.
• Migrated legacy stacks to modern infra; enabled clients to self-manage via strong documentation.
• Drove introduction of Docker and internal DevOps onboarding process.
• Reported directly to the CTO; effectively functioned as Head of DevOps.

Previous Roles (Summarized)

• Electroneum – Senior DevOps Engineer (EKS, AWS Infra, Release Management).
• Game Theory Ltd – Senior DevOps Engineer (Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD – sole engineer).
• Barclays Bank – DevOps & UNIX Engineering (OpenShift, Chef, Jenkins, AppDynamics).
• Rentalcars.com – DevOps Engineer/Security Engineer (AWS onboarding, Puppet, hardening).
• Early Career: Infrastructure Engineer → Cloud & Virtualization at Barclays Bank.

Current Certifications

• AWS Certified AI Practitioner (2025).
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – Professional (2024).
• Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (2023).

Expired Certifications

• HashiCorp Terraform Associate (2023).
• MTA Networking, Security, Windows Server (2016).

Community, Open Source & Side Projects

• Freelance DevOps Engineering (Upwork) – Setup AWS orgs, infra as code, CI/CD, cloud security.
• Medium / GitHub – Sharing automation tooling, tutorials, and experiments.