--- 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/) # Summary Senior technology leader with 15 years of experience spanning software engineering, architecture and cyber security, most recently as Cyber Security Director at the Financial Times. Comfortable across hands-on technical work, system architecture, and team leadership; particular strengths in mission-critical systems, large-scale technical migrations, and bridging engineering with the rest of the business. Currently exploring next-role options after a planned career break. # Career Break & Current Focus ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} March 2025 – present ::: Took a career break to travel around the world. Now back in London full-time and getting hands-on experience with generative AI tools. Designed and built a multi-persona LLM agent fleet which runs the operational software development lifecycle for a personal software estate, including agents for code review, security review, SRE, architecture, UX and coordination. The work has focused on agentic coding agents and establishing guardrails which balance the value they can deliver against the inherent risks they pose. # Skills **Technical leadership**: Architecture & system design, technical strategy, mentorship, technical documentation & standards, stakeholder management **Programming & systems**: Python, JavaScript / Node.js, Golang, PHP, Unix/Linux **Engineering practice**: Agile, Scrum, TDD, CI/CD, microservices, large-scale technical migrations, mission-critical systems **Cloud & platform**: AWS, Docker, observability, monitoring, site reliability engineering, incident management **Cyber security**: Security strategy, security incident response, identity & SSO, application security, risk management **Generative AI**: Agentic coding agents, LLM agent orchestration, agent guardrails, MCP (Model Context Protocol) # 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. - 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 - Reliability Engineering, Cyber Security, Observability & Edge Delivery ::: {custom-style="EmployerDate"} Financial Times: February 2018 - March 2022 ::: Ran a selection of engineering teams throughout this period, including building a new one from scratch. Led the company-wide strategic direction in these areas, as well as managing the delivery of initiatives within the relevant teams. - Technical leadership for 3 engineering teams, with line management of 2 in-house teams plus the relationship with a 3rd off-shore team. - 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, Issue Tracking and Single Sign-On. Took over the SSO migration when it had been behind schedule and lacking direction, and delivered it on time and on budget. - Oversaw the delivery of several core technical tools used extensively across the company, including a monitoring aggregation platform, tech migration tracker and change management system. - Led the strategy and implementation of democratisation of security data: enabling engineering teams to make better decisions around their own risks. - Rolled out a new company-wide security incident management process and took the lead on managing security incidents. - Recruited engineers for vacancies within our teams, with diversity and equity at the forefront of hiring decisions, including actively modifying our recruitment process following feedback from neurodiverse candidates. ## 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. - 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. ## 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 # Earlier Career {#earlier-career .unnumbered} - FT Labs - **Labs Developer**: December 2011 - December 2014 - Assanka - **Web Developer**: November 2010 - December 2011 # 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. - **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. 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. # Publications *A Single-Significant-Digit Calculus for Semi-Automated Guesstimation* Jonathan Abourbih, **Luke Blaney**, Alan Bundy and Fiona McNeill, IJCAR 2010