Joshua Ham - DevOps Engineer

Ham Tech Automation

DEVOPS - AI - SRE - AUTOMATION

Senior DevOps · SRE Engineer  ·  Contact for availability

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ABOUT

Senior DevOps Engineer | 10 Years Experience | BSc (Hons) Computing

I build infrastructure that doesn't wake you up at 2am. 10 years across high-traffic e-commerce and UK government systems — with deep AWS, AI, and SRE chops.

Led teams of 3-15 engineers, owned 24/7 on-call, and cut critical incidents by 90% on the platforms I've run. AI in production isn't a sales line — it's day-job work: Bedrock pipelines, LLM-driven automation, smarter monitoring that actually reduces alert noise.

Beyond client work, I build and run my own products — including TradeTrackHQ, a multi-tenant SaaS shipped solo end-to-end. Same engineering rigour for clients as I apply to my own systems.

TECHNOLOGY STACK

Cutting-edge tools and technologies I use to deliver exceptional results

AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Terraform
Terraform
Python
Node.js
Git
GitHub
Jenkins
Linux
Databases
Security
Monitoring
Cloud Native
CI/CD
Infrastructure
Security Hub
Slack
Atlassian
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
AWS Bedrock
AWS Bedrock
Claude
Claude
OpenAI
ChatGPT
Gemini
Gemini

EXPERIENCE

Senior DevOps Engineer
Beauty Pie Ltd (E-commerce) | March 2021 - Present

Led the migration of Beauty Pie's infrastructure from outsourced hosting onto an in-house AWS event-driven platform — a state-of-the-art e-commerce stack with comprehensive monitoring and incident response built from the ground up. Lead a team of 3 engineers managing 50+ Docker APIs, multiple databases, and hundreds of Lambda functions on a high-traffic global e-commerce platform.

  • Leadership: Lead and mentor a team of 3 DevOps engineers, collaborating across 6+ cross-functional teams to deliver integrated solutions
  • Event-Driven Platform: Built Beauty Pie's first AWS event-driven architecture — replacing legacy outsourced hosting with auto-scaling services across multiple AWS regions, supported by regular load testing and capacity planning
  • Architecture & Design Leadership: Lead architecture for new platform initiatives — producing high-level and low-level designs, running design reviews and trade-off discussions, and delivering fast, cost-effective, scalable systems the team can maintain long after launch
  • Site Reliability: Built 24/7 on-call system reducing critical incidents by 90% through proactive monitoring, blameless post-mortems, and SRE practices
  • CI/CD: Engineered modern pipelines with integrated security scanning, reducing deployment times by 65%
  • Operational Excellence: Drove incident volume down further by introducing self-service jobs (engineers triggering common fixes without paging DevOps), comprehensive runbooks, structured training programmes, and intelligent Datadog monitoring tuned to cut alert noise
  • AI Leadership: Spearheaded AI adoption across multiple teams — automated PR creation for security/dependency updates, Bedrock-powered personalised recommendations, AI customer-service bots, and a product recommendation quiz combining user data with reviews (see AI section below)
DevOps Engineer
Wowcher (E-commerce) | December 2017 - March 2021

Worked in a DevOps engineering team responsible for infrastructure, site reliability, 24/7 on-call, and partnering with development teams to ship new features on a high-traffic UK e-commerce platform. Owned the modernisation push that migrated legacy applications to Docker and rolled out monitoring that cut both incident frequency and infrastructure cost.

  • Containerisation & Cost: Migrated legacy Java applications from EC2 to Docker on ECS — reducing infrastructure spend by ~40% through right-sizing and improved utilisation while accelerating deploy velocity
  • Monitoring & Alerting: Designed monitoring and alerting strategy that reduced production outages and cut alert noise, letting on-call engineers focus on real incidents rather than chasing false positives
  • Infrastructure-as-Code: Delivered full Terraform implementation automating daily environment provisioning across dev, staging, and production
  • CI/CD: Established Jenkins-based pipelines for automated testing and deployments — raising deploy frequency and removing manual release overhead
  • Centralised Logging: Rolled out Splunk log aggregation across distributed services, enabling rapid root-cause analysis during incidents
  • Cross-team Collaboration: Partnered with development teams to release new features safely, embedding DevOps practices into the product delivery cadence
  • 24/7 Operations: Shared on-call rotation supporting revenue-critical systems with structured incident response and post-mortem culture
SysAdmin/DevOps Engineer
Home Office (via QA Consulting) | January 2016 - December 2017

Held SC clearance while delivering AWS cloud migration for UK government — modernising legacy on-premise systems onto a cloud-native stack of hundreds of services across EC2, Docker, and Lambda. Progressed from systems support into building production Terraform infrastructure, then onto the Tiger Team — a specialised group designing and testing the department's new big-data platform from the ground up.

  • SC-Cleared Government Delivery: Held SC (Security Cleared) clearance throughout the engagement, delivering the Home Office's launch of AWS-hosted workloads — one of the first UK government departments to migrate to AWS, contributing to the broader cloud-first modernisation of government
  • Cloud Modernisation at Scale: Migrated hundreds of legacy services onto AWS — replacing on-premise infrastructure with elastic, event-driven cloud-native services running across EC2, Docker, and Lambda
  • Agile in Government: Spearheaded agile ways of working within the department, helping shift a traditionally waterfall-driven engineering culture toward iterative delivery, CI/CD, and faster feedback loops
  • Infrastructure-as-Code: Built and maintained production Terraform infrastructure with Packer-baked images and Puppet config management — replacing manual provisioning with reproducible, auditable code
  • Tiger Team — Big Data Platform: Joined the Tiger Team to design, build, and test the department's new big-data system, including Hadoop cluster architecture and custom Zabbix monitoring templates
  • Career Progression: Moved from systems support → Terraform infrastructure engineering → specialised Tiger Team within ~2 years — consistently expanding scope and trust
KEY ACHIEVEMENTS
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DevOps Experience

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Reduction in Critical Incidents

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Faster Deployment Times

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Requests Handled Per Day

AI & AUTOMATION

Spearheading AI adoption across engineering, marketing, and customer service teams — shipping production AI features that move business metrics, not just demos.

AI Initiative Leadership

Drove early AI adoption across multiple teams at Beauty Pie — moving from proof-of-concept conversations into shipping features in production. Mentored engineers on prompt engineering, LLM integration patterns, and cost-aware AI design.

Automated PR Creation

Built AI-driven automation that opens pull requests for security patches and package updates across our repos. Reduced manual dependency management overhead and shortened time-to-patch for CVEs.

AWS Bedrock
Personalised Marketing — Bedrock

Implemented AWS Bedrock for personalised product recommendations driven by user behaviour data. Built the pipeline end-to-end: data ingestion, model selection, prompt design, and the production serving layer.

AI Customer Service Bots

Built smarter customer service automation using LLMs — handling routine queries with context-aware responses, escalating intelligently, and learning from outcomes. Cut response times and freed up human agents for high-value work.

AI Product Recommendation Quiz

Designed and built an AI-powered product recommendation quiz combining structured product data with user reviews. Smarter, more accurate recommendations than collaborative filtering alone — captured customer intent at the moment of consideration.

Data Analysis & Auditing

Trained AI on internal datasets and wired the output into QuickSight dashboards — letting non-technical teams self-serve metrics they couldn't access before. Also use AI heavily for audit work, anomaly detection, and data analysis.

AI TOOLS & PLATFORMS
Claude
Claude
OpenAI
ChatGPT
Gemini
Gemini
AWS Bedrock
Bedrock

Daily working tools across code generation, content automation, research, and analysis workflows — plus Grok for real-time data tasks.

In production: AWS Bedrock for image scanning, data retrieval, and recommendation pipelines — including the image classification system powering TradeTrackHQ.

PROJECTS

Outside of client work, I build and run my own products — applying the same engineering rigour I bring to consulting engagements.

Northpath

AI-powered services for UK tradespeople

Done-for-you online presence, automated review collection, and missed-call SMS automation for plumbers, electricians, and builders. From £79/month.

Stack: AWS Lambda, Twilio, GPT-4o, Claude, multi-tenant from day one.

Visit Northpath
TradeTrackHQ

Multi-tenant SaaS for UK trades

Job tracking platform for UK tradespeople. Web app, iOS app, Stripe billing, end-to-end automated deploys. Built and operated solo.

Stack: Lambda + DynamoDB + Cognito + SES + Stripe + Bedrock (image scanning & data retrieval). Terraform-first, 92%+ test coverage.

Visit TradeTrackHQ

SERVICES

Hover a node to power it up · click for full capability detail

New division · Northpath is now HamTech

Productised AI setup services for UK trade businesses — websites that rank, back-office automation, and fixed-price trade packs from £250. Built by the team behind TradeTrackHQ.

Explore Trade Services →

CERTIFICATIONS & SKILLS

Professional qualifications and expertise areas

Education
BSc (Hons) Computing, 2:1

Leeds Beckett University | 2015

Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate

Amazon Web Services | 2026

Core Competencies
AWS Cloud Architecture Container Orchestration CI/CD Pipelines Security & Compliance Database Management Monitoring & Observability Team Leadership Infrastructure as Code Linux Administration Automation
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CONTACT


Email
josh.ham@hamtechautomation.com

LinkedIn
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