Mert Senel

Mert Senel

Principal Cloud DevOps Engineer - Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator & DevOps Expert

I’m an IT Professional who lives in Melbourne Australia since 2013 and been working in the industry since 2009.

I had performed various roles throughout my career mostly related to infrastructure side of Information Technology.

Some of titles I had owned in the past were:

  • IT Officer
  • Systems & Networks Administrator
  • Infrastructure Engineer
  • and lately I’ve been known as a Cloud DevOps Engineer starting from 2016.

Since 2013, I have been working for technology companies who have been creating, releasing, hosting and monitoring in-house built software applications.

During my career I was able to see the transition of Cloud technologies and DevOps practices that complements Agile project management style and how valuable it is to the businesses and engineers to migrate and adopt to these methodologies to improve the Software Development Lifecycle.

Long story short, I’m a former Server System Engineer gradually evolved into a Cloud DevOps Engineer since 2016 and Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud platform I have used. Since then I have been achieved to become a Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator and DevOps Expert. It’s safe to say that; my main area of expertise, is Microsoft Azure Cloud platform and other relevant SaaS, PaaS and IaaS technologies.

My other technology interests are public cloud platforms, Infrastructure as Code, scripting, automation and emerging virtualization technologies such as Docker containers and Kubernetes.

My Current Azure Badges

Interests

  • Microsoft Azure Cloud
  • DevOps
  • Agile Software Development
  • Infrastructure as Code
  • CI/CD Automation
  • PowerShell
  • Cloud Computing
  • Serverless, PaaS & IaaS Cloud Computing
  • Containers, Docker

Education

  • MSc in Network Systems, 2014

    Swinburne University of Technology - AUSTRALIA

  • BSc in Computer Engineering, 2012

    Middle East Technical University - TURKEY

Systems & Networks Engineering

Primarily in Microsoft Stack since 2009

Cloud DevOps

Cloud DevOps Engineer since 2016
Microsoft Certified Azure Administrator and DevOps Expert

CI/CD Automation

Continuous Integration and Delivery
Azure DevOps

Scripting

Infrastructure as Code, PowerShell

Agile Software Development

Working in/with
Software Development Teams since 2013

Production Operations

Enterprise Level Security and Compliance Practices
in all phases of Software Development Lifecycle

Experience

My Professional Journey

 
 
 
 
 

Principal Cloud DevOps Engineer

Bunnings

Jul 2022 – Present Melbourne / Australia

Working inside the Digital Team of Bunnings, as part of the DevOps Practice with 20+ member supporting up to 60 Software Engineers in a Software Delivery group with 160+ members, which includes Product Managers, Business Analyst, Quality Engineers, Service Operations. As an engineering tribe our main areas of responsibilities were to support software delivery operations and production operations of major customer facing systems for Bunnings’s Retail and Trade customers.

  • Australia & New Zealand Websites for Retail Customers
  • Australia & New Zealand Websites for Trade Customers
  • Mobile Application for Retail Customers (Bunnings ProductFinder)
  • Mobile Application for Trade Customers (Bunnings PowerPass)

Collection of above services are amongst the highest traffic and transaction occurring e-commerce platforms in Australia and New Zealand.

My main responsibilities were to act as technical lead for delivery of epic level initiatives, mentoring and coaching junior team members, providing expertise on domains such as Azure Cloud, Azure DevOps, Cloud Solution Design, Networking and DevOps methodologies.

Major Projects I have worked on:

  • Multi Geo, Highly Available Containerized Workload Platform Design and Build

    • Fully Private Enterprise Networking with Hub and Spoke Network Topology providing 4+ Layers of firewall capability
    • Azure Kubernetes Services at core for compute needs
    • Azure PaaS services for supporting resources for data persistency or event driven applications
    • Repeatable patterns via templated Azure DevOps pipelines, Terraform Modules and NodeJS and Dotnet microservice project templates
    • Fully Automated via Infrastructure as Code, Pipeline as Code and desired state tooling such as kustomize and helm charts for application packaging.
    • DNS based Load Balancing for supporting Hot-Hot, Hot-Cold/Warm redundant topologies, making Disaster Recovery a “by design” feature for each workload.
    • Geo Redundant CI/CD Tooling with Azure DevOps and self-hosted, custom imaged by and scalable agent pooling capability that allowed for a HA/DR operation.
  • Sitecore 10 CMS Implementation on Windows Containers on Azure Kubernetes Service

    • Utilizing Platform Capabilities, implemented CI/CD functionality for software delivery of Sitecore 10 Scaled XP1 Architecture.
    • Windows Server NodePools in Azure Kubernetes Service for hosting Windows Containers
 
 
 
 
 

Senior Cloud DevOps Engineer

Bunnings

Apr 2020 – Jul 2022 Melbourne / Australia
 
 
 
 
 

Cloud DevOps Engineer

Nintex

Jan 2020 – Apr 2020 Melbourne / Australia

Working in Embeded DevOps model, assigned in Software Development squad working as their dedicated DevOps resource while keeping engagement with “General DevOps Practice” for overall company OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).

Responsibilities include:

  • Nintex Hawkeye/Analytics Services - Embbeded DevOps Engineer for Nintex’s Big Data Analytics Solution for the Nintex Product Suite
  • Nintex Production Operations- Maintain Enterprise Level Operations Security & SOC2 Compliance
  • Nintex DevOps Practice Initative- Nintex DevOps Graduate Programme Mentorship
 
 
 
 
 

Cloud DevOps Engineer

QSR International

Feb 2019 – Jan 2020 Melbourne / Australia

QSR is a technology company that provides software solutions for various forms of data analysis. Their product range varies from Windows and Mac OS Desktop products to SaaS modelled online web applications.

Responsibilities:

  • Reporting to DevOps Team Lead, participate in day to day DevOps activities such as: - Managing CI/CD Pipelines - GitHub Repository Management
  • Design, Implement and maintain necessary QA and DevOps infrastructure hosted on-premise and cloud.
  • Deploy and Monitor cloud PaaS and IaaS components used for Production and lower environments.
  • Provide consultation and proof of concept environment deployments needed for customer support cases or adoption of new tools for other technology teams.
  • Participate in software releases as the assigned DevOps Engineer, preparing needed documentation, coordinating the deployment and post QA and customer communication tasks.

Major Projects:

  • Network Hardening in Azure hosted Solutions with PaaS Infrastructure
  • TFS to GitHub Migration of legacy repositories
  • Transforming Jenkins Build Agents to Windows Containers (Docker Enterprise & Windows Server 2019)
  • Design and Implementation of Datawarehouse Infrastructure solution (Azure DataFactory & Azure SQL)
  • Automation of Virtual Windows Desktop Systems for QA Purposes (Terraform & AWS EC2 Instances)
  • Automation of Virtual Windows Server Systems for QA Purposes (Terraform, Packer & AWS EC2 Instances)
  • Training Virtual Desktop Environment Automation for QSR’s Desktop Application (AWS Workspaces)
  • Kubernetes Cluster Implementation for hosting backend API of technology partner software (Azure Kubernetes Services with Linux nodes)
 
 
 
 
 

Infrastructure & DevOps Lead

Stargate Group

Apr 2016 – Feb 2019 Melbourne / Australia
  • Taking part in Analysis/Development sprints and collaborate with other team leads (Business Analysis, Software Development, Quality Assurance) to coordinate infrastructure and technology stack can meet all stages of Software development and Production operations.
  • System Administration for Office 365, Azure and Azure DevOps (Formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services) environments for multiple tenancies inside the group companies.
  • Managing Azure DevOps CI/CD Pipelines.
  • Liaising with industry partners for maintaining Azure Enterprise Agreement for Azure Cloud and Office 365 CSP and other Reseller programs. Making sure company is using most advantageous offers
  • Managing other various procurement channels (domain registrations, SSL certificates. IT equipment etc.)
  • Acting as appointed security officer inside the company to make sure all systems and operations are complying with Australian laws (Australian Privacy Act, Notifiable Data Breaches Scheme)
 
 
 
 
 

Computer Network & Systems Engineer

Stargate Group

Aug 2013 – Apr 2016 Melbourne / Australia

Stargategroup is a software development company which provides web based application solutions to mortgage industry. I was responsible of maintaining and administrating Production, Development, UAT and Test environments alongside with the Corporate environments.

The variety of systems I’ve been maintaining includes but not limited to Webservers(Microsoft IIS), SQL Database Servers, Mail Gateways, Mail Servers, BizTalk Servers, VOIP servers, and Fileservers. The scale of the environments in total makes 4 Active Directory domains consists of over 100 Virtual Servers and over 10 physical servers.

I was also responsible from providing Desktop Support to 60 internal employees of Stargategroup.

Other tasks I’ve been undertaking is to liaise with other parties in order to fulfil relevant IT housekeeping duties such as warranty extensions, hardware and software procurement.

 
 
 
 
 

Junior Networks & Systems Administrator

Grand Casino Club (Merit Casinos)

Sep 2009 – Jun 2011 Cyprus
Grand Casino Club is a casino and hotels group consists of 2 hotels and 3 casinos. As IT team we were responsible to provide IT support to 3000 employees and over 4000 guests. The duties I’ve overtake during my employment was providing IT support for internal staff and guests on 3 different sites, network administration , application support, data backups and active directory administration.

Contact Me

For professional inquiries please contact me via Linkedin