Andrew Newdigate's CV

Phone: +27 63 669 3695
Email: linkedin@newdigate.me
Location: Cape Town, ZA
GitHub: andrewnewdigate

Summary

Experienced engineering leader with 20+ years of experience delivering large-scale software projects. Currently focused on leading the engineering effort for GitLab Dedicated, a new isolated SAAS product for Enterprise and Federal customers. As an engineering leader, I believe my job is to help my team build consensus while avoiding groupthink, encourage pragmatism, to facilitate the definition of standards and processes, while avoiding cargo-cult programming, to mediate conflicts, and to foresee productivity blockers and remove them before they become a problem. I believe in establishing a long-term technical vision for a product, shared by the team, and achieved through hundreds of small incremental releases: in other words: Always Be Shipping. I believe the vision should be slowly, but constantly evolving — driven from the experience the team gleans from delivering the product, not from transient trends in the software industry.

Education

University of Cape Town, B.Sc in Computer Science

Jan 1996 – Jan 2000

Experience

Senior Distinguished Engineer, Infrastructure, GitLab -- Remote

Aug 2023 – present

Designed end-to-end automation from AWS Account and GCP Project creation through provisioning and configuration, with automated upgrades and day-two maintenance operations
Designed for resilience as a geographically distributed product over multiple cloud provider regions
Developed a comprehensive SLI/SLO monitoring solution based on the same monitoring used for GitLab.com
Built as a multi-cloud solution with a single control-plane shared across GCP and AWS, using Workload Identity Federation to avoid long-lived secret tokens
Implemented using Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Helm Charts, with Jsonnet used extensively for tenant configuration and rendering of configuration
Control-plane runs as jobs in Kubernetes clusters running in GKE and EKS, with a customer-facing Rails frontend, Switchboard

Distinguished Engineer, Infrastructure, GitLab -- Cape Town Area, South Africa

May 2019 – Aug 2023

Directly helped technical bootstrap of the Scalability and Dedicated teams, and set the technical direction for the Platforms sub-department
Drove Pre-IPO preparations to ensure stability of GitLab.com
Created labkit and labkit-ruby, resolving the long-running problem around log structure in the application and production, and added tracing capabilities
Created Tamland, a way to monitor and predict long-term trends to aid capacity planning
Designed and drove the implementation of Service Catalog for GitLab.com services
Drove the design of a single metrics catalog utilized by GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated for greater efficiency between the two SaaS platforms
Regular point of contact in engagements with self-managed customers during the rapid growth phase of GitLab.com (2019-2021), including demos and pre-sales discussions for some of the largest customers

Staff Engineer, Infrastructure, GitLab -- Working Remotely from London

June 2018 – May 2019

Identified and documented single-points-of-failure, scaling, reliability and performance issues in the GitLab.com fleet
Worked with the monitoring, production and application development teams to improve observability of the application and reduce mean-time-to-detection on infrastructure issues
Proposed infrastructure changes to GitLab.com to address availability, performance and observability issues
Worked with engineering teams to identify and prioritise application changes that would improve availability, scalability and performance of GitLab.com
Built a roadmap with stakeholders within the infrastructure group, across engineering, product and finance
Documented the existing infrastructure of GitLab.com
Communicated about infrastructure and roadmap within the company and externally through blog posts

Interim Director of Infrastructure and Google Cloud Platform Migration Project Lead, GitLab -- Working Remotely from London

Jan 2018 – June 2018

Worked with multiple engineering teams across the company to ensure the transition of GitLab.com from Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform
Sourced, hired and managed three infrastructure teams (Production, Gitaly, Database)
Measured and improved the happiness and productivity of the team
Defined the agile development and continuous delivery process
Drove quarterly OKRs (Objectives, Key-Results)
Worked across sub-departments within engineering
Responsible for the quality, security, availability, reliability and performance of GitLab.com

Git Infrastructure (Gitaly) Lead, GitLab -- Working Remotely from London

Jan 2017 – June 2018

Defined the roadmap for Gitaly, tracked and published progress against the roadmap
Established and iterated on an agile process for the new team
Established quality assurance and testing procedures, rolled out feature flags for gradually ramping Gitaly usage up in the production environment
Focused on tracking down performance, scaling and availability issues with the new service
Worked with the team to establish an architecture for the product
Recruitment for the team
As part of GitLab's acquisition of Gitter, also led the effort to open-source the Gitter code-base

Co-founder, CTO, Gitter -- London, United Kingdom

Oct 2012 – Jan 2017

Led the technology roadmap of the company
Led and implemented the architecture of application software, cloud infrastructure and client applications
Led the engineering and devops teams
Capacity planning and dealing with anything holding back team productivity (intra-personal conflicts, process problems, technical debt)
Built a modern cloud-based app on universal/isomorphic JavaScript using node.js, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, Neo4j, Marionette, lodash, Backbone, ReactJS, with hybrid applications for desktop, iOS and Android
Automated provisioning, deployment and reliability operations using Ansible, Jenkins, monit, Datadog, PagerDuty, Nomad and Consul
Only a handful of self-inflicted outages over four years; mitigated each problem to prevent recurrence
At last check, platform had over 1.2M registered users and 800K monthly uniques
Maintained a hands-on approach: writing and reviewing code, profiling and correcting production performance issues, working alongside the devops engineer to build out the EC2-based infrastructure, and dealing with PagerDuty alerts

Senior Software Engineer, Barclays Wealth -- London, United Kingdom

Oct 2011 – Oct 2012

Java + Spring Framework + Spring MVC
ExtJS front-end
SOAP

Senior Software Engineer, Daiwa Capital Markets Europe Ltd -- City of London, United Kingdom

Feb 2011 – Sept 2011

Writing Java code, plus some Scala
Ensuring the correct execution of overnight batch processing
Integrating new data-sources
Collecting requirements from risk analysts in the risk team and ensuring their implementation
Built using Java, Scala, Servlets, Apache CXF for REST, Apache Camel for integration, Oracle 11g, MS SQL Server 2008, and Elasticsearch for text indexing

Career Break: Round the World Trip, Time Off For Travel -- South Asia, South East Asia, Australia/NZ, Pacific, South America

Oct 2009 – Jan 2011

Senior Developer, Client Solutions Business, iShares.com | Barclays Global Investors (now BlackRock) -- City of London, London

June 2006 – Oct 2009

Java, J2EE, Hibernate
Spring Framework
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and ExtGWT
Clustered MapReduce processing using Oracle Coherence
Member of company-wide technology steering committee
Led a company-wide developer forum, organising social events and inviting external and internal speakers on engineering topics

Owner, Datatribe Software Ltd -- London, United Kingdom

Nov 2003 – Aug 2007

Implemented using Server-Side JavaScript with Active Server Pages, Microsoft COM+ Transactions, Microsoft Message Queue, Microsoft SMTP server, and Microsoft SQL Server
Built specifically for one client, iHotDesk, while retaining ownership of the software
Allowed the client to scale from monitoring a few dozen servers to many hundreds of servers, while alerting on more problems than would otherwise be detected

Senior Developer, Barclays Capital -- London, United Kingdom

July 2005 – June 2006

J2EE
Spring Framework
Hibernate
Client-side JavaScript
AJAX

Principal Consultant, 7irene -- London, United Kingdom

May 2004 – May 2005

Clients included The General Medical Council (UK), Dixons Store Group, and Moliere

Senior Developer (Contract), GlaxoSmithKline -- Essex, United Kingdom

May 2002 – Dec 2003

Delphi development of Microsoft COM, MTS and COM+ components
Oracle Database development
Integration with a large variety of industrial automation machinery for performing the HTC process

Senior Developer (Contract), Linc Communications -- Cape Town, South Africa

Dec 2000 – Apr 2002

Lead Developer, Tradesuite -- Cape Town, South Africa

Jan 1998 – Jan 2000

Senior Developer - Internet Solutions, Dimension Data -- Cape Town, South Africa

Apr 1998 – Oct 1998

Software Developer, UUNET -- Cape Town, South Africa

Apr 1996 – Mar 1998

Perl / mod_perl
HTML and JavaScript
C
mSQL and MySQL
Oracle
VB6

Projects

labkit and labkit-ruby

Created libraries that resolved a long-running problem around log structure in the GitLab application and production, and added tracing capabilities.

Tamland

Tool for monitoring and predicting long-term trends to aid capacity planning for GitLab.com.

Service Catalog

Designed and drove the implementation of Service Catalog for GitLab.com services.

Metrics Catalog

Drove the design of a single metrics catalog utilised by both GitLab.com and GitLab Dedicated, allowing for greater efficiency between the two SaaS platforms.

Gitaly

Led the Git Infrastructure team at GitLab from inception, building the Gitaly Git RPC service to handle thousands of Git operations per second across the GitLab.com fleet.

ServerMetrics

Nov 2003

Server monitoring tool designed for monitoring offsite servers running behind client firewalls. Built for iHotDesk, allowing the client to scale from monitoring a few dozen servers to many hundreds of servers.