Jens Skott
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Jens Skott

Platform Engineering | DevOps | Software Engineering

thoughtgears.co.uk

Professional Summary

Independent platform and infrastructure consultant with over 15 years bridging complex systems and business goals, now running my own practice — Thoughtgears — alongside a track record of senior engineering leadership. I specialise in the intractable problems no one else wants to touch: taking MVPs to enterprise-scale architecture, cutting deployment times and incident hours, and driving developer velocity. From managing £15M budgets and teams of 20+ to architecting systems handling 1M+ requests/second, I build high-performing engineering cultures and the environments they need to thrive.

Key Highlights

  • ▸ Led platform migrations (AWS → GCP, on-prem → cloud) with zero downtime
  • ▸ Reduced infrastructure incidents by 75% through incident management process implementation
  • ▸ Architected new systems and platforms in GCP and AWS handling 1M+ requests/second
  • ▸ Helped startups build cloud-native platforms from the ground up
  • ▸ Designed and implemented MVP systems for rapid market testing and iteration
  • ▸ Expert in building resilient, scalable, and secure cloud architectures
  • ▸ Built and scaled engineering teams from 5 to 20+ engineers
  • ▸ Deep expertise in GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, and GitOps workflows

Professional Experience

Owner & Technology Consultant

2015 – Present

Thoughtgears

  • ▸ Accelerated Delivery: Reduced deployment times by 75% (2 hours to 30 minutes) and eliminated local testing wait times by implementing Docker Compose and Firebase emulator workflows, enabling teams to shift from 3–4 releases per week to daily deployments.
  • ▸ Enterprise Architecture: For a major insurance client, achieved a 60% reduction in CI/CD runtime and enabled on-demand releases by decoupling dependencies and re-engineering the release process.
  • ▸ Strategic Migration: Led the migration of MVP infrastructure to a resilient, enterprise-scale architecture using factory-pattern Terraform for strict immutability.
  • ▸ MVP to Platform Architecture: Transformed a startup's MVP into a scalable application using modern technologies, Google Cloud Platform and tooling to support teams and automate processes and toil.
  • ▸ Built MVP for Startup: Designed and implemented an MVP application for a company in Next.js, leveraging serverless technologies to enable rapid development and iteration for market testing.

Infrastructure Team Lead

August 2025 – February 2026

Fresha

  • ▸ SDLC Transformation: Restructured the team's delivery process by transitioning to a Kanban-style workflow, reducing context switching and improving team efficiency and morale through focused, high-value work prioritisation.
  • ▸ Platform Strategy: Designed and proposed a 3-year platform roadmap focused on developer experience, aiming to build a 'Heroku-lite' abstraction layer that simplifies the complex tooling landscape for engineers.
  • ▸ AI Adoption Initiative: Led the exploration of AI integration in infrastructure workflows, aggregating context from multiple sources with minimal overhead to target end-to-end AI-assisted ticket resolution.

Head of Engineering & Principal Engineer

February 2021 – March 2025

Checkatrade

  • ▸ Operational Excellence: Reduced infrastructure-related incident hours by 75% (40h/month to 10h/month) by architecting a new event-driven platform on GCP and implementing rigorous Correction of Error frameworks.
  • ▸ Leadership & Strategy: Managed a £15M annual budget and a headcount of 20, executing a 5-year strategic reorganisation that shifted the engineering culture from reactive operations to continuous innovation.
  • ▸ Security Maturity: Uplifted security posture to approximately 80% ISO 27001 alignment and NIST v2 standards; implemented AppSec, SCIM provisioning, and OIDC to establish a Single Source of Truth for identity management.
  • ▸ Platform Modernisation: Spearheaded the migration from AWS to a logical separation architecture in Google Cloud, supporting a new event-driven platform.
  • ▸ Tools and Automation: Introduced GitOps workflows with Terraform and ArgoCD, reducing deployment times by 60% and minimizing human error through automated infrastructure management.
  • ▸ Automation: Build internal tools for CI/CD and management of platform, reducing manual intervention and increasing deployment frequency.

DevOps Lead Engineer

April 2020 – January 2021

Loveholidays

  • ▸ Incident Response: Engineered ChatOps tools that reduced Mean Time To Acknowledge (MTTA) by 50% and Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) by 10%, significantly improving system availability.
  • ▸ High-Scale Infrastructure: Upgraded GKE ingress using ALB and optimised internal routing to handle massive synchronous traffic loads, ensuring low-latency user responses during peak travel demand.
  • ▸ Culture of Automation: Mentored development teams to achieve operational self-sufficiency, pioneering the adoption of Terraform and Kubernetes for automated infrastructure deployment.

DevOps Manager

February 2018 – April 2020

Deltatre OTT

  • ▸ High-Performance Engineering: Personally developed a Golang API router capable of scaling from 5k req/sec to spikes of 1 million req/sec using horizontal pod scaling and traffic stickiness.
  • ▸ Velocity Increase: Led the migration to AWS EKS, resulting in a 50% increase in deployment speed and a 20% boost in developer productivity through standardised Docker workflows.
  • ▸ Team Transformation: Built the Platform/DevOps function from the ground up, introducing KPI-driven collaboration and enabling advanced deployment strategies like Blue/Green and A/B testing.

DevOps Engineer

June 2016 – February 2018

Accedo TV

  • ▸ Cloud Infrastructure: Designed and managed scalable AWS infrastructure using Terraform, Chef, and Elastic Container Service (ECS) to support the company's transition towards a microservices-oriented platform.
  • ▸ Backend Development: Contributed to backend development using Golang and supported the decomposition of legacy monolithic applications, bridging the gap between infrastructure and development.

DevOps Engineer & IT Manager

2009 – 2016

Schibsted Media Group

  • ▸ DevOps Transformation: Pioneered the company's DevOps transformation by establishing foundational development-to-production processes and implementing the Atlassian suite for SDLC management.
  • ▸ Early IDP Innovation: Built an Internal Developer Platform for VMware in 2011, accelerating deployments for application owners and developers before such platforms became industry standard.
  • ▸ Automation & Tooling: Automated workflows with Ruby and Chef, significantly reducing manual intervention and improving deployment consistency across the organisation.
  • ▸ IT Strategy: Took on IT management responsibilities, defining client platform strategies and implementing robust authentication and IT service management solutions.

DevOps Engineer

2015

Gears of Leo

  • ▸ Cloud Environment: Established a fully automated cloud environment on Rackspace Cloud with configuration management using Chef and CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins.
  • ▸ Container Innovation: Researched and experimented with early containerisation technologies including Docker, Kubernetes, and Rancher, laying groundwork for modern deployment practices.

DevOps Engineer

2014

King AB

  • ▸ Private Cloud Automation: Automated a large-scale datacenter environment using OpenStack and Chef, enabling rapid provisioning across the gaming infrastructure.
  • ▸ Development Modernisation: Led the migration of the development environment from physical servers to automated virtualised setups using Vagrant, improving developer onboarding and consistency.
  • ▸ Deployment Tooling: Developed a custom deployment tracking tool in Ruby to provide visibility into release processes across multiple game titles.

DevOps Engineer

2012

Klarna

  • ▸ Cloud Migration Pioneer: Spearheaded an experimental migration to a cloud-based development environment, moving all development resources and deployments to OpenShift.
  • ▸ Process Automation: Automated development workflows and deployment processes, establishing patterns that would later become standard DevOps practices.

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 & 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