Engineering Services Manager at Betfair
London, United Kingdom
- Current
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- Engineering Services Manager at Betfair
- Past
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- Deputy Head of Performance and Capacity at Betfair
- Systems Administration Manager at Claranet
- Systems Architect at Claranet
- Systems Administrator at Claranet
- Developer at XCalibre Communications Ltd
- Education
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- Eton College
- Recommended
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7 people have recommended Oliver - Connections
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239
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Oliver Cook’s Summary
A keen technologist specialising in the development, provision, operation and on-going improvement of high-availability, high-throughput online products and services. Skilled in both technical and technical leadership roles, and capable of integrating closely at all levels of business, I favour roles that offer wide-reaching opportunities and responsibilities.
Oliver Cook’s Specialties:
distributed systems, performance tuning (Linux, Solaris, Oracle &c.), root-cause analysis, preventative maintenance
Oliver Cook’s Experience
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Engineering Services Manager
Betfair
(Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Gambling & Casinos industry)
October 2008 — Present (10 months)
Betfair writes world-class software that supports a highly successful online betting business. The Engineering Services team is charged with developing, maintaining and improving the internal systems that our engineers use in their day-to-day work in order to maximise productivity.
Performance Services, a group within Engineering Services, ensure that the performance and capacity of all production systems is maintained, protected and enhanced in order to support Betfair's growing user base. -
Deputy Head of Performance and Capacity
Betfair
(Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Gambling & Casinos industry)
November 2005 — October 2008 (3 years)
The Performance & Capacity department is charged with safeguarding and improving the system performance of Betfair’s product portfolio, in order to offer a constantly world-class user experience and to deliver confidence to the Board that further growth can be accommodated without risk.
The team is comprised of highly specialised technical experts providing targeted testing, analysis, and proof-of-concept enhancements. It is the department’s responsibility to act as a gatekeeper that ensures software released to production offers the best possible performance and scalability characteristics.
Pre-production testing confirms the performance traits of hardware and software components, while the analysis of production traffic facilitates long-range capacity projections. -
Systems Administration Manager
Claranet
(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)
January 2005 — November 2005 (11 months)
In this role I was accountable for the performance and man-management of a department of up to ten systems administrators. The department was responsible for the operation and maintenance of all Claranet shared services.
The core technical challenges were: ensuring effective service operation 24x7, encouraging proactive identification and resolution of potential operational issues, coordinating projects with regards to service growth and/or convergence, and assisting with innovation and testing of new systems and services.
The role involved control of the departmental budget, covering tasks such as the preparation of capital expenditure projections, reviewing regular operational expenses, and calculating service profitability.
There was significant scope in the role for innovation both in terms of internal departmental processes and also interaction with other departments in order to work more effectively together. -
Systems Architect
Claranet
(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)
August 2004 — January 2005 (6 months)
This role, in a newly created department, focused on long-term technical strategy and design considerations for the company’s internal and external service delivery systems.
The emphasis was on designing and documenting secure and scaleable systems.
Through its growth-through-acquisition strategy, Claranet inherited a number of similar shared hosting systems (e.g. web or email hosting). A complimentary aspect of the Systems Architecture role was to identify the features of each of the systems that the company operated, and to design a new hosting system encompassing the superset of those features, for onward migration.
Projects that I completed in this role were: high-density shared UNIX web hosting, high-density shared email hosting, and distributed network and service monitoring. -
Systems Administrator
Claranet
(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)
February 2001 — August 2004 (3 years 7 months)
My responsibilities in this role included design, installation, maintenance and monitoring of ISP services (such as shared email, web, and DNS hosting) used by both residential and business customers.
Core network engineering issues were also within the team's remit, such as capacity and redundancy planning.
Working as part of this small team I learned to work effectively and efficiently under pressure and to deadlines. -
Developer
XCalibre Communications Ltd
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
1999 — 1999 (less than a year)
This Summer internship for a growing Scottish hosting company taught me a good many skills which set me off on my career in the UK IT industry.
Whilst at XCalibre I created a web-based control panel which the company's customers were able to use to manage their shared web and email hosting accounts.
Oliver Cook’s Education
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Eton College
Physics, Double Maths, Computer Science 1998 — 2002
Additional Information
Oliver Cook’s Websites:
Oliver Cook’s Interests:
distributed systems, high-volume transaction processing, SCUBA diving, skiing, travel
Oliver Cook’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- new ventures
- job inquiries
- expertise requests
- business deals
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
