Ben Townsend
3 Month Notice
I'm a hands-on technology leader with more than a decade in software and cloud infrastructure. My formal titles have been engineering roles, but I've often been the person setting direction, making the call and staying accountable for the running service. I've built and run the technology behind publishing brands and delivered infrastructure for AI and security-focused clients. I'm looking for a role where that responsibility is part of the job.
Career highlights
- Built complete infrastructure and automation stacks in days rather than weeks. I use AI to speed up implementation while keeping the technical decisions and checks with me.
- Built the infrastructure for Immediate Media's digital publishing platform as part of a small team, maintained its Jenkins CI/CD pipeline and supported brand migrations without downtime.
- Delivered self-service infrastructure across AWS, Azure and GCP for a security-focused B2B client, and supported ISO 27001 audit evidence.
- Covered for the Engineering Manager during paternity leave, checking in regularly with colleagues, supporting their wellbeing and handling issues they raised.
- Line-manage contractors and regularly take the technical lead on projects.
Leadership
- Setting a technical direction and turning it into work a team can deliver.
- Explaining technical choices in terms of cost, risk, time and user impact.
- Line management for contractors, with mentoring and day-to-day support for colleagues.
- Software delivery, cloud platforms, security and operational reliability.
- Finding useful places for AI in delivery and operations, with a person checking the result.
Technologies
AWS
Azure
Azure DevOps
CI/CD
Convex BaaS
Cloudflare
CSS
DataDog
Docker
ECS
Fastly
GCP
Github Actions
Grafana
HTML
JavaScript
Jenkins
Linux
Markdown
MySQL
Netlify
New Relic
Next.js
NGINX
OCI
React
REST APIs
Shell scripting
SQL
Terraform/Tofu
TypeScript
YAML
Certification
- AWS Solutions Architect Associate
hedgehog lab
Senior Agentic Cloud Engineer
• Jan 2025 - Present (Employee of the month Dec 2025)
- Built self-service infrastructure across AWS, Azure and GCP for a security-focused B2B client that advises large corporations on security standards.
- Make infrastructure decisions under time pressure for a globally used AI teaching platform.
- Moved networking and container workloads from AWS to Azure.
- Revived and deployed a tourist-board project on OCI without prior OCI experience.
- Covered for the Engineering Manager during paternity leave, checking in regularly with colleagues, supporting their wellbeing and handling issues they raised.
- Line-manage contractors in the team.
- Hardened a meeting-platform client's infrastructure against NHS security requirements within hours, enabling the client to offer its services.
- Supported a client with ISO 27001 audit evidence and was commended for the quick turnaround.
- Spoke at DevOps North East about lazy-loading containers with SOCI on ECS.
Immediate Media
DevOps Engineer
• Apr 2023 - Jan 2024
- Built a service mesh so the new native app platform could use backend APIs with more consistent response times.
- Changed Docker image tagging and retention to cut storage use.
- Led the investigation into lower-cost application monitoring, comparing the options with the team.
- Managed access with IAM and security groups.
New Scientist
Senior DevOps Engineer
• Dec 2020 - Aug 2022
- Owned day-to-day DevOps as principal engineer for the product team.
- Led the AWS account migration after Daily Mail General Trust acquired the business.
- Redesigned application networking around least privilege.
- Reworked Fastly VCL for edge authentication and faster routing.
- Rebuilt Jenkins on Docker and ECS, and unified developer environments on Docker ahead of Apple Silicon.
Immediate Media
DevOps Engineer
• May 2018 - Dec 2020
- Maintained the Jenkins CI/CD pipeline and, as part of a small team, built the infrastructure for the digital publishing platform used by BBC Good Food, RadioTimes, Gardeners' World and Olive, using infrastructure as code.
- Owned the systems handling requests into and between services across Immediate Media's brands, supporting brand migrations and data processing without downtime.
- Built a redirect-handling service that improved response times and SEO, and introduced containers and serverless functions to the business.
- Introduced AWS Transit Gateway to connect systems more securely and at lower cost.