I’m Alex Moss

Platform Engineer Cloud Architect Father

Contact Me

Alex

Moss

About Me

Hi, I’m Alex Moss. 👋 I currently work as a Platform Engineering Lead for the John Lewis Partnership - a large retailer in the UK - having previously been their first Cloud Architect and led the move of johnlewis.com into the Cloud.

Now I’m the Lead Engineer for two teams that work to evolve the developer experience for the many teams building on top of that bespoke Cloud Platform - and balancing that with the need to help teams achieve strong operability and enhance our security.

EXPERIENCE

Engineering Lead, Platforms
johnlewis.com 2019-present
Lead two teams which build and operate the award-winning Digital Platform on which johnlewis.com runs. This involves …
Cloud Architect
John Lewis Partnership 2017-2019
JLP’s first Cloud Architect. Led the team that took the first parts of johnlewis.com into the Cloud. Evolved that into a Cloud Strategy for the whole company
Infrastructure Architect
John Lewis IT 2015-2017
Part of JLP’s Infrastructure Architecture team, with responsibilities for Platforms & Hardware
Infrastructure Developer
Partnership Services 2004-2015
A technical lead within the ‘Middleware’ Team - looking after technologies such as WebSphere Application Server & MQ and then ESB - adapting to JLP’s needs

SKILLS

Kubernetes 85%

Google Cloud Platform 90%

Cloud Architecture 98%

Continuous Delivery 80%

Reliability Engineering 70%

Infrastructure as Code 75%

Professional Skills

Cloud Platforms

Kubernetes & Containers

Observability & Reliability

Technical Leadership

Solution Design

Engineering Governance

‘DevOps’ & CI/CD

Python & Go

Terraform & IaC

Engineering Lead

I’m inspired by working with modern technology and love to combine a hands-on role with championing technologies and techniques to others.

I’m the Engineering Lead and domain specialist for the Digital Platform for a large UK retailer, and love solving complex problems using cutting edge tech that has broad application across many services and engineers.

As an engineer, I love:

Docker & Kubernetes - it was the platform I wish I’d had sooner; finding a perfect sweet spot between software agility and operational control.
Cloud Platforms - I’m most familiar with Google Cloud, and I think it is awesome.
Automation & Continuous Delivery. Technologies that struggle with this are not something I like.

Cloud Architect

I’m a strong advocate of modern approaches such as microservice architecture, well-versed in the modernisation of legacy technologies, and capable of leading the technical design for a solution’s infrastructure build & deployment.

As an architect, I have:

Cultivated a reputation as an expert in Cloud technologies. I’m approached across my employer for my thought-leadership in this area.
Championed Continuous Delivery & Automation. I am a firm believer in “you build it, you run it”, including giving teams powerful tools to make this a reality.
Considerable experience designing for resilience and security, including through evolutionary design & experimentation. I believe that to be a good architect you must know the real capabilities of the technologies you’re driving - not just what it says on the tin.

I’ve also played a significant role in setting infrastructure strategy - technical design, patterns and governance - particularly for Cloud.

Education

I was fortunate enough to study Chemistry at St Edmund Hall College, Oxford - where I achieved a 1st Class Honours degree. I spent my final year producing a thesis in Computational Chemistry - where I developed a Neural Network in Java (Java 1.4 at the time!) to analyse and predict the contents of oil spills based on spectrographic data.

It was while there that it became clear that a career in IT was the path I wanted to take. It start whilst serving as my college’s ‘IT Officer’ - a role that involved creating the college’s student website and being a generally helping hand in fixing the variety of computer-related problems!

Since leaving education, I’ve chosen not to build up a long list of formal qualifications. Instead I strongly favour learning through hands-on experience & experimentation, as well as building insight through conferences & meetups.

Interests

Father

I’m the proud father of an 18 month year old (at time of writing!). He takes a lot of my free time as you can imagine, but it is absolutely worth it and he’s most amazing thing I have ever experienced."

DIY Enthusiast

My interest in building things extends out into the real world too - and I usually have some sort of task on the go around the house to keep me busy and using more practical skills.