I’m Ben Bolton, an engineering leader based in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, with 15 years of experience across public sector, gambling, and entertainment industries. My background is in cloud infrastructure, CI/CD platform engineering, and DevOps — with a growing focus on technical leadership and building high-performing teams.
I’m currently a Senior DevOps Engineer at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), working at departmental scale on CI/CD platform engineering, artefact management, and AWS cloud infrastructure. Alongside the hands-on technical work, I’ve taken on informal team lead responsibilities — mentoring engineers, coordinating incident response, and bridging engineering teams with stakeholder expectations.
Before that, I spent over six years at Sky Betting and Gaming as an Infrastructure Engineer, where I led projects across on-premises and cloud environments (AWS and GCP). Highlights included migrating squad monitoring onto a containerised Prometheus stack and leading a multi-domain networking solution across the Flutter Group.
Cloud, infrastructure, and automation are my bread and butter — primarily AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes. I’ve also worked extensively with HashiCorp Vault and Consul, Prometheus and Grafana, and written a fair amount of Bash and Python along the way.
I came up through apprenticeships, earning Distinctions at both Level 3 and Level 4, and hold certifications including ITIL V3, CCNA, and VMware VCP-DCV. I’m a firm believer in learning by doing — this blog is part of that.
Rock climbing (bouldering, sport, and trad), ski mountaineering, running, and cycling. I also run a home lab — recent projects include custom PC builds, cloud-hosted VMs, and working through new certifications.