Jens Skott

Platform Engineering | DevOps | Software Engineering

thoughtgears.co.uk

About Me

With over 15 years in the trenches, progressing from Linux sysadmin to Head of Engineering, I don't just lead technical teams, I build the environments where they can thrive.

My passion is to eliminate friction and empower developers. I achieve this by architecting sophisticated solutions to support engineers to focus on what they do best: generating business value through code, not spending cognitive load on operating systems and platforms. I’ve guided companies through critical technology shifts, including a full platform migration from AWS to GCP, on-prem to AWS, helped companies scale up by building secure, scalable cloud environments from the ground up.

Beyond the technology, I've scaled entire engineering departments, designing hiring strategies to attract top talent, structuring new teams, and mentoring them to become high-performing and self-sufficient.

While my passion lies in strategic leadership and building resilient teams, I remain a hands-on engineer at heart. You'll still find me diving into code, primarily in Golang, Typescript and Python to solve complex problems or terraform and other IaC and Devops tools to automate and optimize processes, so I can stay close to the technology that drives business success.

Core Competencies

Cloud Technologies

AWS GCP Firebase Cloud Run Cloud Functions Kinesis Pub/Sub Cloudflare Lambda API Gateway Kong Istio Apigee CloudSQL BigQuery BigTable Cloud Spanner Cloud Storage S3 RDS DynamoDB Firestore VPC Networking Load Balancing CDN Cloudflare Workers Cloudflare Pages Cloudflare Zero Trust Cloud Armor Cloud Identity

DevOps & CI/CD

Docker Kubernetes Terraform Pulumi Spacelift Terraform Cloud GitOps GitHub Actions ArgoCD Helm Cloud Build Jenkins Ansible Chef Packer Vagrant Backstage Slack JIRA

Programming

Go Python TypeScript JavaScript Node.js TDD Bash SQL REST gRPC React Astro Hugo Next.js Hono Express.js Fastify Tailwind CSS Bootstrap K6 Pact

SRE & Observability

Prometheus Grafana Datadog ELK Stack PagerDuty Sentry New Relic OpenTelemetry Incident.io Google Operations Suite Logz.io Nagios Honeycomb

AI and Data

AI Ethics AI Agents Vertex AI BigQuery Dataflow Looker DBT Prompt Engineering Confluent

Leadership

Mentoring Team Building Agile Methodologies Scrum Kanban Stakeholder Management Strategic Planning Process Improvement Change Management