--- title: Luke Blaney BSc (Hons) --- Email: Location: London, England LinkedIn: [linkedin.com/in/lukeblaney](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeblaney/) GitHub: [github.com/lucas42](https://github.com/lucas42) Website: [lukeblaney.co.uk](https://lukeblaney.co.uk/) # Employment ## Cyber Security Director ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: February 2023 - March 2025 ::: Set strategic direction for cyber security at the FT. - Defined the vision and set the strategy for IT Risk and Cyber Security. - Senior stakeholder management - acting as a bridge between business colleagues and engineers. - Introduced and oversaw a new process for renewing and refreshing technical policies across the organisation, increasing discoverability of policies and improving adherence. - Led security incident management and contributed to a new company-wide crisis management team. - Spent 3 months on secondment to the FT's parent company, Nikkei, in Tokyo. Assisted their product security function and strengthened ties between the two companies. - Throughout this period, also held the unbackfilled Principal Engineer responsibilities for Cyber Security, providing the technical direction that role usually requires while delegating day-to-day team management to senior engineers on the team. ## Interim VP of Cyber Security ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: April 2022 - January 2023 ::: Led the company's cyber security function through a period of organisational change. - Built a new centralised cyber security function, bringing together people, process and budgets from across the organisation. This reduced barriers in communication and led to better-aligned security outcomes. - Line managed a mixed-discipline team of a dozen people, including Engineers, Risk Analysts and IT governance roles. - Steered the direction of Security work across the technology department, and the organisation as a whole. - Worked with a third party consultancy to build a strategic roadmap and help prioritise security initiatives. - Involved in recruitment of a permanent VP of Cyber Security. - Continued the Principal Engineer technical-direction responsibilities for Cyber Security throughout this period, as the PE position had not been backfilled when I moved up. ## Principal Engineer - Observability, Edge Delivery & Cyber Security ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: September 2021 - March 2022 ::: Working on the strategic direction in three key areas across the FT's technology department. - Responsible for line management of 2 in-house engineering teams, plus the relationship with an off-shore 3rd party engineering team. - Worked on vendor management of key suppliers within relevant domains and set the direction of the FT's relationships with them. - Steered changes to the department's approach to tracking security risk with an aim to make it more outcome-focused. - Analysis of how observability and security tooling is being used across the company and putting in place strategic plans for these, including end-of-life roadmaps for tools which give minimal value. - Recruited engineers for vacancies within our teams, including both internal & external candidates. Aimed to keep diversity and equity at forefront of hiring decisions, including actively modifying our recruitment process following feedback from neurodiverse candidates. ## Principal Engineer - Cyber Security ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: September 2020 - September 2021 ::: Leading the engineering function of the FT's cyber security team. - Acted as tech lead and line manager for engineers in the cyber security team - Rolled out a new company-wide security incident management process and took the lead on managing security incidents. - Took responsibility for shaping the team's roadmap and seeing projects through to completion. - Contributed to group-wide strategy, ensuring security was well represented. - Led the strategy and implementation of democratisation of security data: enabling engineering teams to make better decisions around their own risks. - Advised on security related concerns across all the FT's engineering teams. - Took over responsibility for the company-wide migration of Single Sign-On platform, which had been behind schedule and lacking direction. Delivered it on time and on budget. ## Principal Engineer - Reliability Engineering ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: February 2018 - August 2020 ::: Running a new team, set up to improve reliability of systems and reduce duplication of effort across technology teams at the FT. - Formed a brand new team whose members had backgrounds in a variety of different domains. - Jointly led the team, taking on line management responsibilities for half its members. - Supported engineers from other teams joining us on three-month secondments. - Actively involved in the full recruitment process for new members of the team. - Was a department rep for the move of our company headquarters. In collaboration with reps from across the business, I worked representing the 300+ people in our area, ensuring they could make the move seamlessly. - Oversaw the delivery of several core technical tools, now used extensively across the company, including a monitoring aggregation platform, tech migration tracker and change management system. - Worked with engineering teams throughout the department to build a clearer understanding of our estate (including bespoke software, enterprise systems and SaaS solutions) - Successfully led and completed the company-wide migration of several engineering tools from on-premise software to Software-as-a-Service alternatives, including Code Hosting and Issue Tracking platforms. As part of this, I did the vendor management, led technical migration strategy and project managed the end-to-end moves. ## Architect - Content ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: October 2016 - February 2018 ::: Worked on our Universal Publishing Platform, which delivers Content & Metadata from a range of editorial tools to our websites, apps and third-party B2B clients. - Responsible for architectural decisions across a whole programme of work: 6 development teams across 2 countries, building a platform of 100+ microservices. - Worked on an event-driven architecture using Apache Kafka to move content and metadata across editorial systems, web/app delivery, and B2B clients. Made architectural decisions about event flows and data contracts; configuration and operations were owned by engineers on the platform. - Architected the move to Kubernetes for 5 engineering squads in a business-critical area, simplifying operations and reducing technical risk. - Pivoted the architect role from a decision bottleneck to a more consultative one, giving engineering squads more autonomy for day-to-day decisions. - Designed a suite of new APIs to power an in-house metadata management tool for the newsroom. - Worked closely with stakeholders from Editorial, B2B and Technology departments. - Successfully repositioned our relationship with an existing supplier so they'd take on operational responsibility for the software they were building. - Planned and co-ordinated a multi-team, multi-year programme to replace a suite of legacy on-premise business-critical software with a mix of SaaS solutions and cloud-hosted bespoke microservices. - Devised a framework for tracking progress on the legacy decommissioning, in a way that made sense to both delivery managers and engineers. - Took on line management responsibilities for 2 integration engineers. I think my proudest accomplishment here was transforming a team heavily reliant on having an architect to one where engineers felt empowered to make their own architectural decisions. ## Platform Architect - Operational Intelligence ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: December 2015 - October 2016 ::: Technical lead on a team responsible for observability tools used across the department (covering monitoring, metrics & log aggregation). We also replaced the organisation's CMDB with a new system for tracking the FT's technical estate, which provided automated runbook creation, monitoring management, and bridged the gap between Engineering and Operations teams. My role included: - System design, development and backlog prioritisation - Upskilling a team from disparate backgrounds and recruitment of junior developers - Collaborating with delivery to move the team to a kanban agile workflow - Working with teams across the FT and third-party suppliers ## Integration Engineer - Strategic Products ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: January 2015 - November 2015 ::: Led the migration of the FT's mobile apps to cloud-based infrastructure (primarily AWS) to facilitate the switch-off of physical kit in our datacentres. This involved: - Adapted existing workloads to run on cloud - Recruitment of a contractor to assist with the project - Architected & development of a cloud-native zero-downtime deployment pipeline ## Labs Developer - FT Labs ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: December 2011 - December 2014 ::: In this role, I gained experience with the full stack of web development technologies, from using bleeding-edge browser features in the FT's HTML5 Web App, through to server management and configuration using tools like Puppet, Varnish and Apache. - Worked on the original incarnation of FastFT, a real-time news service. This included a customer-facing frontend, an API and bespoke CMS for editorial users. - Led FT Labs' internal tooling workstream, which focused on infrastructure improvements and developer experience (including deployment, live error collection and monitoring aggregation). My role involved engineering, architectural decisions and co-ordinating the work of others in this area. - Following a cyber attack in 2013, I architected, helped engineer and co-ordinated roll-out of a tool to put multifactor authentication in front of all of the FT's staff-facing tools. ## Web Developer ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Assanka: November 2010 - December 2011 ::: Worked on various web projects for a range of clients, doing both backend and frontend work. Backends included Wordpress, an in-house framework and vanilla PHP. Frontend javascript varied from simple jQuery-based interfaces, to large object-orientated systems which utilised many HTML5 features. Assanka was acquired by the Financial Times at the end of 2011 and was later rebranded "FT Labs". # Talks & Panels {#talks-panels .unnumbered} - **Panel: Building security into your engineering workflow \| LeadDev 2021** Moderated an online panel about improving cyber security across engineering organisations. - **Panel: Observability Strategies for Distributed Systems \| InfoQ Live 2020**\ Discussed approaches for observability when using microservices at this one-day online conference. - **Monitoring All the Things: Keeping Track of a Mixed Estate \| QCon London 2020; Continuous Lifecycle 2020**\ Spoke about effectively monitoring the tech estate of a company which uses a variety of different technologies and monitoring approaches. - **Panel: Microservices: Are they still worth it? \| QCon London 2020**\ Discussed the ongoing value of microservices architecture in a panel at the same event. - **Panel: Standardisation and autonomy in our tech choices \| Engine Room, London 2019**\ Discussed the value of consistency versus local optimisation in our technical approaches at the FT's internal tech conference. - **Panel: Do we only measure things that are easy to measure? \| Engine Room, London 2017**\ Chaired a panel discussing the use of metrics in tech and product decisions at the FT's internal tech conference. - **Creating a multi-factor authentication solution \| Varnish Summit & Awards, Los Angeles 2016**\ Spoke about how the FT used varnish to protect our estate with MFA and tackle phishing attacks. Also collected the Varnish Innovation Award at the same event. - **Panel: Page Load Performance \| Edgeconf, London 2014** \ Discussed performance best practices when using cutting edge web technologies. - **One VCL to rule all our environments \| Varnish User Group, Berlin 2013**\ Spoke about the consolidation of our caching and routing logic across environments using puppet. For a full list of Talks & Panels I've done, see # Education ## BSc (Hons) Computer Science and Physics ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Edinburgh University: 2006 - 2010 ::: A joint degree, with an emphasis on Computer Science, covering specialist areas such as Distributed Systems, Multi-Agent Semantic Web Systems, Computer Security and Communication & Networking. My Honours project used Semantic Web technologies to provide data for a Semi-Automatic Guesstimation system. ## A-levels and GCSEs ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Lagan College, Belfast: 1999 - 2006 ::: - **A-levels**: Maths (A), Irish (A), Physics (B), Chemistry (C) - **GCSEs**: Maths (A\*), Science (A\*A\*), Irish (A\*) + 1 A, 4 Bs and 1 C. # Publications *A Single-Significant-Digit Calculus for Semi-Automated Guesstimation* Jonathan Abourbih, **Luke Blaney**, Alan Bundy and Fiona McNeill, IJCAR 2010 # Earlier Career {#earlier-career .unnumbered} - Edinburgh University Students Association, Entertainments Crew - **Lighting Technician**: 2007 - 2010 - BBC Irish Language department - **One week's Work Placement**: Summer 2009 - J Sainsbury plc - **Customer Services Assistant**: May 2005 - Dec 2005 - Andor Technology Ltd. - **One week's Work Placement**: February 2005 - Queen's University Belfast Media Services - **One week's Work Placement**: June 2003. # Positions of Responsibility {#positions-of-responsibility .unnumbered} - London Revolution Cheer - **Secretary**: 2013 - 2014. - PHP London (including PHP UK conference 2012) - **Treasurer**: 2011 - 2012 - Edinburgh University Theatre Company - **Webmaster**: 2009 - 2010 - Edinburgh University Cheerleading Society - **Publicity Manager/Webmaster**: 2008 - 2010 - Edinburgh University Juggling Society (including 2009 Scottish Juggling convention) - **Secretary**: 2007 - 2008 - **President**: 2008 - 2009 - **Treasurer**: 2009 - 2010 - Edinburgh University Footlights - **Webmaster**: 2009 - 2010