I am an ambitious technologist, with several years experience in various specialties. I pride myself in being a quick learner and have gone from being a software tester to a devops engineer in a relative short time-span. I strive to become a "specialist-generalist", which can be defined as someone who has deep knowledge of many relevant technologies. For this reason, I resent conformity and always seek out new ways of achieving a particular goal.

Developer Support Engineer @ The role of a DSE involves helping clients utilise the Rackspace cloud API SDK (primarily in PHP and Python) tools as well as solution reviews, architecture and engineering. We also assist customers with automation and configuration management, helping them get set up with Chef, Ansible and looking at different way to use tools such as Jenkins and Github to automate integration and deployment. Further to this, we work on internal development projects, writing tools and automation to aid the day-to-day support. Whether this is simple Ansible roles, or full Chef stacks, we hand off to our support teams so that they are empowered to help our customers. It's a technologist role, focusing on the research and development of new technologies that we can implement within the business. From July 2014 to Present (1 year 6 months) Linux System Administrator L2 @ As an L2, I deal more as a customer advisory with new set ups and configurations. I also take escalations from the L1 technicians as well promote team behaviour and training. From November 2013 to July 2014 (9 months) Linux System Administrator @ Working as a Linux System Administrator in the SMB Hybrid team, supporting thousands of dedicated and cloud customers with their day-to-day Linux (and somtimes Windows) issues. Main responsibilities fall within: configuring and tuning the LAMP stack; troubleshooting application and server issues (performance, bugs, application errors); managing server security; looking after the client's infrastructure with regards to cloud databases, load balancers and networks and more. I also aid customers in setting up a tailored infrastructure for their particular application. This involves recommending high-availability servers, adequate scaling, segregation of services, recommending caching technologies and so forth. From September 2012 to November 2013 (1 year 3 months) Internet Operations Engineer @ I was a part of a small specialist team who managed the entire digital publication side of the business. We managed the day-to-day administration of the entire infrastructure, which supported 50+ websites, such as Whatcar.com, Stuff.tv, Whathifi.com and Brandrepublic.com. The environment was very varied, consisting of Linux, Windows and several different web application technologies. The high availability environment and required round-the-clock administration, in the form of patching, network troubleshooting, and general server administration. In addition to this, we handled all code deployments to the production environment. This included using a variety of tools to meet the needs of the different applications. For example, ant, shell scripts, direct file copies, msdeploy, and more. From October 2010 to September 2012 (2 years) Release Analyst @ Worked under the release manager to aid with software deployments on a multitude of platforms. This required constant coordination between multiple development teams to plan, stage and deploy many applications. This role slowly evolved more and more into a systems management role. From August 2009 to October 2010 (1 year 3 months) Quality Assurance Engineer @ I was the sole Quality Assurance of one of Europe's busiest stock information and data providers. My responsibilities included finding, analysing and documenting code issues, continuous regression testing of our main application, managing and liaising with developers regarding release cycles and changes, and ensuring that all issues were prioritised for the developers to rectify. I also did some minor development work (PHP) to fix minor issues when all other development resources were unavailable. From November 2007 to August 2009 (1 year 10 months) Test Engineer @ During my university gap year, I managed to obtain a one-year contract working as a software tester for Symbian Software (now owned wholly by Nokia). My responsibilities included testing in-house applications and making sure that they met our high quality standards. During my year there, I was part of a new team to rescue and deliver a long overrunning project. I extended my contract by 3 months in order to see the project to the end, which we then successfully delivered well within budget and time requirements. From June 2005 to August 2006 (1 year 3 months)

Bachelor of Science (BSc), Computer Science, 1st Class Honours @ University of Westminster From 2003 to 2007 Sia Gholami is skilled in: Linux, Apache, Cloud Computing, PHP, Software Deployment, Configuration Management, MySQL, Chef, Shell Scripting, Python, OpenStack, Ansible, Databases, Linux System Administration, LAMP