Ryan Brooks

Goodbase build bespoke case management tooling for charities and local authorities. I was brought in to mature their seucrity posture, introduce an Information Security Management System (ISMS) aligned to ISO/IEC 27001, and to lead the infrastructure changes needed to meet the new standards.

• Introduced infrastructure as code (IaC), retrofitting it across operational systems and adopting it as the default for new deployments.
• Hardened Google Workspace, AWS, GitHub and Slack against the new ISMS controls.

Engaged to lead a research engagement with a central government department exploring techniques for understanding extremely large codebases in restricted environments.

• Led the technical research aspect of the engagement end-to-end, working with the client and Public Group's internal research teams to iterate on the problem and candidate solutions.
• Produced the final written report covering the engagement, the challenge, and our recommendations to the client.

Role expansion when Hackney's Head of Engineering left and the Council's security function scaled up ahead of a large external audit.

• Led a team of 4 early-career cyber security analysts, providing structured training, mentoring and line management.

Brought in to assess and improve Hackney's security posture for modern engineering projects. Worked closely with engineers and senior stakeholders to identify opportunities for change, getting buy-in from the wider business and enthusiasm from teams.

• Led an initiative to map Hackney's attack surface and existing systems after discovering ICT wasn't aware of all the services it operated, with many small systems being built by agencies, deployed within AWS, and forgotten. Brokered agreement about ownership and maintenance with the engineering and cloud platform teams.
• Introduced disaster recovery testing after discovering a lack of backups and testing across the estate. Raised awareness with senior leadership to agree priorities and introduced a way to assess system criticality which was adopted into the wider Council's business impact analysis processes. Tackled slow team response by creating lightweight templates and a runbook, and running in-person sessions covering theory and mob-recovery on problem systems. The work led to improvements in the central backup platform and processes, as well as upgrades to out-of-date systems to enable recovery.
• Revived Hackney's engineering community of practice. Heavy apprentice/early-career representation and high turnover had left the Slack and CoP languishing. Led by example with talks on security and engineering practices, workshops to build skills, and lightweight decision records as a way to foster discussion. The shift was away from informal decision making to a more collaborative, consensus-driven model — and most engineers became comfortable asking for help.

Brought in to introduce modern software development delivery practices, improving focus, transparency and velocity.

• Introduced the role of Engineering Manager and modern delivery practices. Feedback in the new retrospectives was unanimously positive.
• Enabled engineering to rapidly identify and fix significant technical debt, including unsupported Ruby, Rails and Postgres services, and created a strategy to iteratively improve the codebase.
• Introduced and trained the team on infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), increasing confidence in safe infrastructure change and enabling the replacement of the 6-year-old production Kubernetes cluster.

Established new teams to maintain and develop GOV.UK's publishing platform, building an API-first strategy to modernise and secure an extensive suite of legacy Ruby applications in preparation for GOV.UK's classification as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).

• Coached leadership and product management through a domain-driven design approach to publishing team formation and sizing. Shaped the long-lived teams that own, run and build the GOV.UK publishing platform, with a focus on clear boundaries and responsibilities. Instigated a controversial shift away from a globally-shared developer support rota.
• Prevented a proposed rewrite of GOV.UK publishing. Helped senior leadership and the teams embrace iterative improvement with smaller, scoped rewrites where necessary. Commissioned an internal accessibility audit which enabled sweeping accessibility improvements. By focusing on team capabilities, freed teams from paralysis and empowered developers to make quick, meaningful improvements that benefitted users.
• Built an API-first strategy to modernise and secure an extensive suite of legacy Ruby applications ahead of GOV.UK's classification as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).
• Promoted a GOV.UK-wide shift to application/service ownership; started a book club to provide space to explore approaches such as Team Topologies.
• Introduced C4 modelling to the architecture community, modelling the publishing space and using diagrams to demonstrate the legacy complexities and foster conversation around architectural solutions.
• Recruited technical positions at all levels (permanent and contract), including sifting and creating fair and inclusive interview questions.
• Mentored technical leadership on the introduction of Kubernetes and approaches to ensure resilience and upskill developers as we progressed a lagging multi-year project to migrate from legacy virtual machines.

Hands-on technical architect leading several software and infrastructure engineering teams, working with product owners, developers and non-technical stakeholders to define strategy, set priorities, and build technical systems.

• Instigated and delivered the migration of the in-cell prisoner content hub from on-premise servers to a secure, cloud-based Kubernetes platform, refactoring the application architecture to enable the service to scale to all public prisons while remaining secure.
• Led the prisoner content hub development team, coaching developers on best practice, introducing the test pyramid and CI/CD, and working closely with product and content teams to prioritise features, fixes and technical debt.
• Responsible for the hosting and infrastructure for critical offender management, risk and operational reporting systems for HM Prison and Probation Service. Introduced continuous delivery to the legacy hosting team, building and deploying infrastructure with Terraform, Ansible and Packer. Set a vision for the operations team to escape their inherited technical debt and rebuild morale and delivery velocity.
• Onboarded prisoner transfer suppliers integrating with a new Rails API we built to book a secure move, establishing channels for communication, common language, documentation and resources.
• Identified £750k annual savings in legacy VM deployments due to redundancy or overprovisioning.
• Brokered an agreement between senior technical leaders in HMPPS and Central Digital on contentious cloud infrastructure issues.
• Assessed projects against the Government Digital Service Standard, coaching teams to make sustainable, pragmatic technical choices.
• Introduced a regular hack day to encourage developers to investigate new tools and approaches and to learn new things.
• Investigated and resolved complex performance issues in a microservice environment.
• Fostered communication between siloed groups in MoJ by giving talks for Central Digital, interviewing candidates for the Cloud Platform team, and sharing ideas outside of Prison & Probation.

My consultancy vehicle for interim CTO and project-based contract development work, with a focus on software quality, testing, and empowering developers. Clients included the Department for Education, University of Oxford, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, Bookwhen, Nimble Approach and Press Association.

• For the Department for Education, was the Technical Architect in a cross-functional team developing Find & Explore NPD Data Alpha & Beta. Defined the technical architecture with stakeholders and led a small engineering team developing a Rails 5 application using TDD, RSpec and PostgreSQL. Built CI/CD pipelines to continuously ship changes using blue/green deployments on DfE's Azure platform.
• For the Press Association, designed and built an authoring tool for mass-localisation of journalism, bringing together and managing a team of contract developers for the initial build. Subsequently contracted to provide hosting and ongoing maintenance for the service.
• For Bookwhen, migrated their production Rails service from a single Linode server to managed Postgres, Redis and Kubernetes services in Google Cloud Platform, introducing a CI/CD pipeline. Increased application performance and resilience, reduced manual patching/maintenance, and allowed the service to scale.
• For the Bodleian Library, designed and ran a 5-day Rails bootcamp, cross-training Python developers on Ruby/Rails fundamentals, testing, and RabbitMQ. The team felt comfortable maintaining the system they'd inherited.
• Heavily involved in a public-sector transformation bid worth £2.5m which the team won — wrote bid responses, reviewed contributors' responses, and presented and responded to technical questions.

Recruited and led a team of 5–6 engineers, taking a Ruby/Padrino proof-of-concept site and iteratively developing it into a stable, scalable product, expanding into two complementary product lines.

• Led and managed a team of developers, recruiting and mentoring to reduce reliance on contractors.
• Introduced Scrum with mechanisms for urgent customer support requests.
• Coached and mentored the development and management teams, promoting sustainable pace and long-term quality.
• Led the development of a UI overhaul, migrating parts of the site to Angular, and led the re-engineering of internal statistical modelling to improve performance.
• Introduced pair-programming, code review and DevOps principles to grow the team.
• Introduced a modular SCSS-based style guide with reusable components that reduced development and design time, and brought consistency to fonts, whitespace, and colour across the site.
• Contributed hands-on development, leading the creation of a high-performance data ingestion system, managing production and staging infrastructure, and migrating development to Docker to enable testing of complex system interactions.

Collaboratively developed open-source metadata-registry tools for modelling patient treatment and outcomes within the NHS.

• Introduced the team to Scrum, TDD, functional testing, CI and Puppet.

Responsible for the strategic development of systems and processes to support growth and operational activities, as well as the security and integrity of NMi UK's computing resources and data under ISO/IEC 17025.

• Managed a team of 3 developers and promoted team development through coaching, training, TDD and pair-programming.
• Strategically developed systems, policies, procedures and training to allow the business to grow from 3 to 30 people.
• Ran critical, short-term projects from inception to completion; visited clients across Europe providing gambling compliance testing services, on-site auditing and consultancy.
• Designed and built a report delivery system on AWS to make project progress transparent and add auditability to delivered reports.
• Introduced an OpenStack private cloud to improve upgrade testing procedures and provide development/staging environments.