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About

Platform Operations Engineer, AI tinkerer, and builder of things that occasionally work.

Hi, I'm Billy

I'm a Platform Operations Engineer at dotdigital and a chronic tinkerer with ADHD-fuelled curiosity. I build things with Python, LLMs, and whatever framework caught my attention this week. Some of them even work.

When I'm not managing Kubernetes clusters or deploying RAG applications at work, I'm usually fine-tuning small language models, self-hosting everything, or building full-stack apps that solve problems nobody else has.

What I Do

  • Fine-tune and deploy language models for practical tasks
  • Build full-stack applications (React + FastAPI is my comfort zone)
  • Manage cloud infrastructure on Azure and a fleet of self-hosted VPS
  • Create tools and automations that save time (mine and other people's)
  • Write about what I learn along the way

Experience

Platform Operations Engineer at Dotdigital (Aug 2023 - Present)

Building production RAG applications, managing Azure AI Studio infrastructure, optimizing AKS clusters (20% cost reduction), deploying observability stacks, and automating everything I can get my hands on.

IT Infrastructure Engineer at Capita / LanguageLine UK (Jul 2022 - Jul 2023)

Managed multi-cloud environments (Azure/AWS), led a 200+ device migration, saved £24k/year through cloud cost optimization, delivered a hybrid VM solution with 6x performance improvement.

Bioinformatics Technician at Yourgene Health (Apr 2019 - Apr 2022)

Built Flask applications for NGS data pipelines, created multilingual reporting systems, automated analysis with Python/R/Bash/Docker. Managed terabytes of genomic data.

QC Technician at Yourgene Health (Oct 2016 - Apr 2019)

Quality control testing on CE-IVD medical devices using Next Generation Sequencing. Where I first learned to code.

Certification

Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) - June 2022

Education

BSc Hons Biomedical Science (2:1) - Manchester Metropolitan University (2012 - 2016)

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